Meet Tava, a twenty-four-year-old medical student in a deep depression. Alice, her friend and housemate, is trying to figure out how to support her. Time unravels, leaving both women bewildered at the emotional landscapes that have opened before them.

Eyes Too Dry started out as a series of private conversations between the authors by way of a comic-in-correspondence. Their decision to make this work public was fuelled by their struggle to find stories and artwork that spoke to their experiences of encountering depression, suicidal ideation and emotional weight. In a world that tells us to “keep calm and carry on” they are offering a narrative that is vulnerable, honest and uncertain. They hope to add new ways to talk about, visualise and relate to these complex emotions.

Alice Chipkin is a writer, artist and educator currently living on Wurundjeri country in Melbourne. Her nonfiction and poetry has been published widely, including in The Lifted Brow, Archer Magazine, Cordite Poetry Review and South African publications Carapace Poetry and Tiny Press.

She is passionate about the medium of visual storytelling as a tool for processing the hard stuff. In 2015 she was awarded the Dwight Prize for English from the University of Melbourne for her thesis on comics and queer autobiography.

Alice works as an educator, running creative writing and drawing workshops for teenagers. She has been a teaching artist with the Stella Prize for Girls Write Up festivals around the country, LitFest 2444, Melbourne Writers Festival and the Emerging Writers’ Festival. Until recently, she was the Schools Program Producer at Express Media and has since begun her training as a secondary school teacher.
In her spare time she draws things, enjoys taking film photographs (mostly of faces and trees) and has a penchant for power tools.

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Jessica Tavassoli is a final year medical student with a passion for facilitating public conversations, values based education and mental health. She has been drawing and writing (mostly in private) for the past few years with Eyes Too Dry being her first major work.

As an educator, Jessica co-ordinated the Hands on Health and IMMUNITY programs at Monash University as well as working as a youth leader in both urban and remote settings. She is a big believer in the power of experiential group learning as a platform for self discovery and growth.

Jessica is also an advocate for radical compassion and the dismantling of hierarchies in the medical world. She wonders how the practice of modern medicine may change if the body and mind where not perceived as distinct. It is likely that Jessica will explore this in her next comic.

Jessica also has a background in eastern philosophy, bread and shoe-making. She tries to meditate daily but doesn’t always get there.

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As an academic in the health sciences field, I have experienced repeated frustration with respect to typical forms of academic currency […] and the fact that they tend to reach only a very limited audience, primarily other academics. While this is important, there are many other stakeholders […] who need to be aware of the lived experience and social context within which mental health and illness is experienced. [Eyes Too Dry] is a prime example of using visual, embodied ways of sharing the very personal experience of mental health issues. Such knowledge translation is powerful and has the great potential to reach a wide variety of audiences. I strongly recommend this novel to the general public and will certainly be ‘talking it up’ in my network as a prime example of arts-based knowledge translation.” – Katherine Boydell (Professor of Mental Health, Black Dog Institute)

“This memoir is so honest and beautiful in its storytelling. Eyes Too Dry isn’t afraid to talk openly about depression, people supporting people with depression and the stigma behind it all. It has fast become one of my favourite graphic novels.” – Vlada Edirippulige (Junky Comics)

“Eyes Too Dry is comics-making as processing. It’s so live and so raw. […] it’s incredibly compelling. I read it powering through the pages. I really recommend this as a chronicle, of these two people, but also as a use of the form. As archaeology; as digging; as naming – naming stuff that is so hard to come to terms with. [The stuff that] exists and obtrudes upon your whole life. I think it’s a remarkable achievement. A remarkable undertaking.” – Bernard Caleo (comics artist, editor, performer) Review on RRR Smart Arts Radio

“As an academic who works across the fields of creative writing, comics, and graphic medicine, I was thrilled and inspired by the two unique voices in this book, which speak to each other not only in words, but in those other lines particular to the medium of comics: the curve of a hand around a cup of soup; the broken edge of a panel border; the balloon of air around speech; the inky blackness of the holes into which we sometimes sink. As a person who grew up with immediate family members suffering through depression and other mental illnesses, this book offers a portrait of tenderness, friendship, caring and love that is expressed not just with honesty and compassion, but with practical, clear and specific ways of navigating complex emotional territory. This book helped me, without telling me that’s what it was doing. I couldn’t be more admiring of the achievement of these two young artists.” – Dr Elizabeth MacFarlane (Professor, University of Melbourne; Publisher, Twelve Panels Press)

“Reading this honest, at times confronting, and intimate story of personal struggle and friendship was particularly special given one of the authors was my student. The insight into her life offered by this memoir is a privilege to witness. It’s a unique, beautiful and heartrending depiction of true love and friendship and the “heaviness of being” that we all encounter at times in our lives. Bravo!” – Associate Professor, Sally Ayoub (Director, Undergraduate Medical Education, School of Clinical Sciences, Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences, Monash University)

“To struggle with the textures of our mental landscape can feel like the most brutalizing, lonely thing. What Chipkin and Tavassoli have gifted us is one-of-a-kind: the lens of kinship. Through their dual perspectives, we eavesdrop on a tender conversation: How can I be there for you? and How can I not push you away? While most media focuses on the so-called failures or successes of mentally ill people to regain normalcy, these artists keep their focus on relationship. We witness questions of health and the realities of illness as traversed through that most precious, private kingdom: homiedom. The depth and nuance of these pages is treasure in the palm.” – Shira Erlichman