If coloring books are soothing, and if laughter makes a person feel happy, then imagine what a funny coloring book might do. Better than a massage! Better than acupuncture! Better than a double whiskey on the rocks!
Julie Schumacher, the St. Paul writer who won the Thurber Prize for American Humor two years ago for her wry novel about academia, has now created a wry coloring book about academia. Paired with Chicago illustrator Lauren Nassef, she has produced "Doodling for Academics: A Coloring and Activity Book."
It's university satire, but you don't have to teach to get the jokes. Even the copyright page is funny. ("No part of this book — no matter how darkly cynical and therefore alluring — may be used or reproduced in any matter," it reads.)
The idea came from an editor at the University of Chicago Press. "She said all these presses are doing coloring books and Chicago has been considering an academic satire coloring book," Schumacher said recently. "I didn't answer for a couple of days because I thought, Really? I don't color. I don't draw. I don't have any artistic ability at all."
But she decided to say yes, because "Why say no when something goofy falls in your lap?"
She also liked the idea of telling her colleagues at the University of Minnesota that she had a publication credit with the prestigious University of Chicago Press. (But how to hide the fact that the publication credit was for a coloring book?)
Schumacher, who teaches in the MFA program at the U of M, is the author of the novel "Dear Committee Members," which won the Thurber Prize, as well as other novels for adults and young adults.
She had figured a coloring book was something she could knock out fairly quickly. It is, after all, mostly pictures. She was wrong.
"It took months," she said. "This wasn't just about my coming up with a bunch of captions and mailing them off and a few of them coming back. They all came back. Multiple times."
The book is structured, roughly, as a day in the life of an academic — or, as Schumacher puts it, "an anonymous, put-upon academician, from waking up at the beginning of the day to going to bed at night somehow defeated."
One page asks readers to color the parts of a student's brain that are firing — weekend booze run? Missing family dog? Snapchat? Or possibly that little tiny lobe called "assignment"?
Another invites the reader to color the humanities building (cracked facade, broken windows), while a few pages on you can color the new football stadium (which was subsidized at the expense of the library).
How does all of this poking fun at the world of academia — her employer, after all — sit with her colleagues?
"When I got the Thurber Award, the dean had a party for me," Schumacher said. And with the new book, "my department chair is having a coloring party for me. We're going to have a coloring day."
There is not another coloring book in Schumacher's immediate future. There is, however, another book. "I'm working on a novel," she said. "Summer is when I do a lot of my writing, because I'm not teaching. So I'm going to unplug the phone about May 20 and try to get a manuscript finished by September."
Laurie Hertzel • 612-673-7302 • @StribBooks
