This is she:
Fun Facts
- Gretchen Koch was constantly chastened by teachers, as a child, for drawing during class.
- She started gaming practically from birth, and now has a tattoo of her first favorite video game– Adventure, for the Atari 2600 (1980).
- She has, at various points, worked as a drug store clerk, night stocker at Toys R Us, carpenter, scenic artist, receptionist, web site content writer, adjunct lecturer, illustrator, technical writer, and cartoonist.
- She welds as a hobby. Primarily MIG, but hoping to branch out into TIG.
Personal History
Start: Wichita, Kansas
She was born and raised in Wichita, Kansas, and has not only seen The Wizard of Oz many times, but worked on a production of it.
She enjoyed school, particularly art and English classes, where she wrote lots of bad poetry but was nevertheless encouraged by teachers to write more. In high school she developed the combined powers of theatre geek and journalism geek, and wrestled with which one to pursue before theatre finally won out.
Chicago
She moved to Chicago in 1996 to attend DePaul Theatre School, majoring in scenic design– but despite all of that planning, it was not meant to be. She loved learning about the principles of design, but determined that stage plays weren’t the best context in which to develop those skills (but if it had been possible to major in special effects, she might now be an employee at Wētā Workshop, designing orc masks. Or perhaps not– who knows?).
While considering a new path, she attended a captivating comparative religion class taught by a Catholic priest who could represent every faith as if he were an adherent of it. His ability and willingness to step into the shoes of someone with totally different religious beliefs clinched it: comparative religion was the way to go.
She decided to find out what motivates most people on the planet to believe in something they (usually) can’t see, but consider to be the most important thing in existence– God. Well, gods. And spirits. And ghosts. And so on.
Texas
She transferred to Texas Christian University in Fort Worth to complete her BA degree in religious studies. After that, she moved to Dallas and worked for two years as a receptionist in real estate, with a gig writing for a “Things to Do in Dallas” website, before deciding to do something completely different: move to England and pursue an MA at the University of Manchester.
England
There she learned about Continental and political philosophy, intersectional feminism, the wonders of take-out curry and kebab shops, why one should never rent a flat beneath a student house, and that she actually likes haggis. She worked as a graduate teaching assistant, leading workshops for first year comparative religion students.
Good friends for life were made, and many beers were consumed with them in many pubs. It was all an amazing experience, but she wanted to focus more on how the mind works– specifically, how cognition produces compelling, sustaining religious beliefs. She was trying to determine a way to do that for a PhD within a program emphasizing culture (Man U’s religion faculty at the time), when an opportunity presented itself– a new program for the study of religion and cognition at the University of Aarhus, Denmark, where she relocated in the fall of 2005.
Denmark
Though she failed to attain a proper grasp of Danish, she still managed to teach a course on theory of mind as it relates to religious concepts (you can see the decks for this course on the Academic Writing page). And fortunately, conferences combining Danes, Swedes, Norwegians, and Fins tend to be held in English. She lived in a flat in the city center on the top floor, where the shower was in the basement and a spiral staircase led down to it. From that flat, she recorded her one and only response video on Youtube.
She lived there when the Danish culture editor of the Jyllands-Posten newspaper, Flemming Rose, solicited drawings of Muhammad from various illustrators and published them as a statement about free speech in the face of perceived danger for criticizing Islam. Danish imams and other Muslim leaders protested, petitioning ambassadors from Muslim-majority countries to meet with the prime minister and discuss “smearing” of Islam pervasive in the country. The government refused to meet with the ambassadors, after which they decided to meet with religious and political leaders in the Middle East and present them with a dossier containing the cartoons from the Jyllands-Posten along with more offensive cartoons from another newspaper as well as other inflammatory materials. The result was protests throughout the Middle East in early 2006, which caught the attention of other countries worldwide.
Though she didn’t specialize in any particular religion (cognition being universal), she was fascinated and horrified by the events, which contributed to an enduring interest in the relationships between religion, political power, and free expression.
Texas Again
Having been awarded a PhD degree for her dissertation, “The Cognitive Origins of Soul Belief: Empathy, Responsibility, and Purity” in 2009, she returned to the states to find that… it was 2009. Consequently, the chances of finding a good post doc position approached the negatives. So she began a career as a technical writer for software.
Kansas Again
Needing an outlet to continue commenting on religious and political issues, she started her own blog in 2010.
At this point, she had developed skills in writing for audiences ranging from academics to software users to casual philosophers, but that wasn’t enough.
Despite having established the blog in 2010 and occasionally posting cartoons here, she began political cartooning in earnest in November of 2016, for…reasons.
She decided that perhaps drawing one cartoon that could be shared repeatedly was a better use of everyone’s time than having the same political argument with different people, and learned of the power of the picture superiority effect.
She went viral a few times.
She switched most of her blogging energy to cartooning, when cartooning revealed itself to be an excellent way to express the political angst that had become a daily occurrence. As Dwayne Booth, aka Mr. Fish, remarked, “I start with outrage and then I render what that outrage looks like.”
She joined the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists to fraternize with, and learn from, the greats in a rapidly diminishing art form in this country. After becoming a board member, however, she gained hope from seeing young cartoonists express their political views in alternate venues with no expectation of publishing in print media, nor any concern for doing so.
She also couldn’t stop making multimedia art in “real life,” especially having bought a mitre saw in a fit of ambition during the Covid lockdowns.
She built stuff at home for a while before deciding that the tools unfortunately cost money, and that she was rapidly running out of space, let alone materials. She finally joined a makerspace as Covid restrictions relaxed. She’s now the board secretary for that makerspace.
Meanwhile, she’d somehow managed to achieve a decade of experience in technical writing, and used that to land a more design-oriented and fulfilling role in healthcare software, where she hit the ground running. Still obsessed with art, agency, technology, and gaming, her favorite books read this year are:
- 4,000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, by Oliver Burkeman
- Games: Agency as Art, by C. Thi Nguyen
- The Design of Everyday Things, by Don Norman