In 2012, Seattle graphic artist, longtime The Stranger contributor and Cornish instructor Ellen Forney brought out Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, and Me, her acclaimed memoir-in-comics of being diagnosed with bipolar disorder and its impact on her creativity. Her new follow-up, Rock Steady: Brilliant Advice From My Bipolar Life (Fantagraphics, $19.99, out May 15) is a sort of companion, packed with nuts-and-bolts coping strategies for those in a similar situation.

On Monday, April 30, at the downtown branch of the Seattle Public Library, longtime friend and collaborator David Schmader will talk with Forney, helping her launch a tour for Rock Steady that will take her down the West Coast and over to NYC and Philadelphia; in Los Angeles she’ll appear with comedian Maria Bamford, who herself has spoken eloquently about her mood disorders and built work on the topic.

Here’s an excerpt of a phone chat I had earlier this week with Forney: 

GB: I wanted to ask first about the origin of the book, which you kind of answer in the book, but maybe we could follow up on this a little more: I was wondering what your impetus was to put all this information you had gathered out there. At one point you call yourself a “storyteller”—is it just that simple? Is that kind of how you deal with stuff, to turn it into a story, into art?

EF: So the impetus came from a few different places. I guess one of the biggest ways was after Marbles came out, I got a lot of e-mail from readers—people who were thankful for the company and my own story, and then also for the information. A number of people told me that they used it like a manual, and I thought, you know, I could do a better manual, and I felt like I still had a lot that I thought readers might find useful, and I was interested in gathering all that together. 

I’ve done how-to comics for years for The Stranger, and I’m a teacher [at Cornish College of the Arts], so I like explaining things, I like sharing things that I think are interesting. So that has been a challenge and a puzzle—to use the medium and the language of comics to make [information] engaging. I figured that I would basically make the book that I wished that I could have had. And actually, I talk about this in the introduction—I’ve wound up using the book myself, I got to give it a test run. There’s a lot that I still have to deal with. Like I say, stability is never a done deal—stability is an action, something you have to keep working at, just like insomnia is something that I have to grapple with still. So it was really great for me to learn a lot of new tools. 

It’s kind of like your collected notes from all the study you did. It’s all neatly organized and presented and clarified. It must have come in very handy.

It’s in some ways similar to how satisfying it was to map things out and make sense of things in Marbles. Mapping things out and organizing things and making things make sense for Rock Steady was really helpful for me. Here’s a list of different things that are good to focus on for your health—sleep, and take your meds, and exercise, and your support system—and then getting into more detail about that. A lot about taking care of your health is so big and kind of nebulous and interwoven, so it’s not so easy to parse.

Another thing that I really wanted to be able to do: Most of the self-help guides out there are written by therapists or doctors. And Rock Steady, coming from someone who has a disorder, talking from a personal standpoint—it has a very different impact and a very different kind of intimacy and trust.

That totally comes across.

Some of the important things that I hope my readers take away is that it’s hard, and I know it’s hard, and that I say that it’s hard, and that you’re gonna mess up, and that’s OK. And that’s why I have personal stories in there of different times that I messed up and got back up and got back on. We’re human, and things don’t go in a straight line, and things get thrown out of whack, and it’s OK, and there’s a certain flexibility there. So it’s not just a collection of articles of “wisdom and advice,” but putting it into real life—sharing what those things have meant in my own life also, just to give it personal perspective . . . 

Also, I was a psychology major in college, and it’s been really interesting to me to loop back—researching, studies and statistics, doing analysis, weighing the relative credibility of different articles and sources. My psychology degree was something that I thought I had flouted, kind of, when I decided to become an artist . . . Part of this feeling of looping back is now I feel that I’ve done my thesis, in two volumes. Honestly, it really feels that way—coming back to something that I had found fascinating, and bringing in comics and art and storytelling and all of these things that I’ve been focusing on in the meanwhile, and bringing them together in a way that I think is effective and suits me in a way that’s really satisfying. I’m really proud of both of them. They make me feel really purposeful. 

Ellen Forney discusses Rock Steady: Brilliant Advice From My Bipolar Life. Seattle Public Library, 1400 Fourth Ave., downtown, spl.org. Monday, April 30. 7 p.m. Free.