Cartoonist and New York Times-bestselling author Maria Scrivan ’93 draws on Clark inspiration for her most memorable character

“I’m Natalie, and I am not an athlete.”
So begins Nat a Chance, a just-released graphic novel by Maria Scrivan ’93. Nat’s middle school best friend is athletic, though, and wants Nat to join her in training for a triathlon. Impossible, Nat thinks—or is it?
Scrivan knows what it’s like to be recruited into an unfamiliar sport. When she arrived on the Clark campus in the fall of 1989, she and her new friends attended the annual student activities fair. Her roommate and another friend signed up for the crew team and encouraged Maria to do the same. She hesitated, but ultimately joined.
“I was a complete klutz,” Scrivan recalls with a laugh.
As proof, she recounts an early morning crew practice on Lake Quinsigamond. While rowing with her team, her oar got caught in the water (“catching the crab,” in rowing parlance). Instead of letting go, she hung on to it.

“The next thing I knew, I was in the water with a bunch of oars coming toward my head,” she says. Someone yelled at her to duck, and her coach pulled her out of the freezing lake.
“That’s my klutzy claim to fame on the crew team,” she says. “At least it’s a good story.”
But it’s not the end of the story.
Despite her initial doubts, she loved the experience of rowing with the Clark team.
“I didn’t think I was an athlete, but being on the crew team made me realize that I am. We would do hill repeats on Airport Drive in Worcester and stair repeats in Jonas Clark Hall. And when I started, I thought it was all impossible. But I did it.”
In that vein, her book “is about the stories we tell ourselves about our limitations, and what happens when we challenge them. What if the stories you’ve been carrying with you aren’t true?”
Scrivan didn’t plan to become an author when she graduated from Clark with a bachelor’s in fine arts, but she did know that from a young age she had wanted to be a cartoonist.
“When I was a kid, I loved the Garfield books,” she says. “I read them all. And not only did I read them, I studied them.” She drew the characters and dreamed of having her own comic appear in the newspaper.

After Clark, Scrivan worked in a small animation studio and then as a graphic designer at a dot-com agency. The internet age was just beginning, and the agency was developing the concept of putting ad banners on web pages. “We told JCPenney they really should put their URL on their printed material,” she says, but in the mid-1990s, there was skepticism about whether anyone would ever buy anything online.
“It was an intense, amazing environment. I did that for a year and realized I couldn’t work in an office.” So, she started her own graphic and web design business, taking on corporate clients and creating greeting cards using her cartooning skills.
“My turning point was in 2008—I decided I couldn’t not be a cartoonist,” she says. “My graphic design client list got smaller and my cartooning client list got bigger.”
She kept drawing, and kept submitting her work to comic strip syndicates. In 2013, cartoonist Hilary Price—creator of the syndicated Rhymes with Orange comic— turned over her strip to five guest cartoonists, and Scrivan was one of them.
“My local papers picked it up. They called and asked if I wanted to be in the paper seven days a week,” Scrivan recalls. “I said, ‘Let me think about it—‘Yes.’ ”
“My 8-year-old brain blew up when I saw my comic in the funny pages for the first time.”
That was the start of Half Full, a daily comic that would eventually be syndicated nationwide. Offering a humorous perspective on the joys and frustrations of everyday life, it ran in newspapers for 10 years (it’s now published online, with new comics three days a week). Many of the single-panel comics have been turned into greeting cards as well.
“My 8-year-old brain blew up when I saw my comic in the funny pages for the first time,” she says. And as a member of the National Cartoonists Society, she met Jim Davis—the creator of Garfield.
“I was on a panel with him. He’s been incredibly helpful as a mentor and he even wrote a blurb for one of my books. It’s incredible.”
Publishing a daily comic was a “creative boot camp,” Scrivan says, since she was required to have at least six weeks of comics completed at a time. “But the material is endless. It’s forced me to look at life through the lens of humor, whether it’s dealing with the self-checkout machine or waiting at the DMV. The most personal situations are universally relatable—they resonate.”
Nat a Chance is the sixth in Scrivan’s series of graphic novels about middle-schooler Nat, but it’s not the first to take inspiration from her own childhood experiences (although she does sometimes exaggerate them for comic effect).
While producing her Half Full comics, she also started writing on the side. “I created silly vignettes of childhood—middle- and elementary-school stories. I thought I would write something in prose, with spot illustrations.”

At a conference, she attended a talk by a graphic novelist, and she realized that was the perfect format for her. “I’ve always been a visual learner and communicator. Comics are the perfect way for me to tell a story.”
Scrivan came up with the idea for the first book, Nat Enough, in 2018. Natalie doesn’t think she’s “enough”—whether it’s talent, athleticism, or style—and then loses her best friend because she’s not “cool enough.” Throughout the book, Nat learns to believe that she’s more than enough, just the way she is.
“I had no idea this would turn into a series,” Scrivan says. “I had one book idea, but I initially got a two-book contract.” (Several publishers actually bid on the book, but Scrivan had decided long before that if she were to write a book, Scholastic would publish it— and they did.)
“I called up one of my friends and said, ‘I have no idea what I’m doing,’” she recalls. “He said, ‘No one does.’ ”
Nat Enough was published on April 7, 2020—as the COVID-19 pandemic was shutting everything down. “I worked my whole life for this, and my debut book came out when no one knew what was going to happen,” Scrivan says. “People said, ‘Well, everyone is home reading,’ but they didn’t know who I was yet.”

They quickly found out. Despite bookstores being closed and Scholastic book fairs temporarily discontinued, Nat Enough managed to land on The New York Times bestseller list for three months.
Scrivan’s second book, Forget Me Nat, was published five months later, based on another relatable situation from the author’s life: asking your crush to the school dance and being rejected.
Late childhood, when we are still unformed and unsteady as people, is her constant source of inspiration. “I got dumped by a best friend. I got bullied. Friendships changing, feeling you don’t fit in—those are evergreen feelings, especially for middle schoolers. It’s not funny at the time, but I wrap humor around it.”
Scrivan often visits schools and libraries to talk about her books, always encouraging kids to share their feelings. “At that age, they’re sure that they are the only person on the planet who has ever felt the way they do,” she says. “I love going on these visits and listening to what they have to say.”
The theme of her fourth book, Nat For Nothing, is self-doubt. The selection of that topic became something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. “I had the hardest time with that book,” she says. “I inked the entire 235-page book then threw it out and did it again. I included an author’s note about how I will always have feelings of self-doubt, but that I’ve learned how to push them away. It’s very easy for those voices to get in our heads and completely stop us.”
It takes Scrivan about a year to complete a book from concept to publication. She always carries a sketchbook with her, drawing or scribbling notes while waiting for an appointment, or recording ideas onto her phone while walking in the woods.
“Writing books is like putting together a jigsaw puzzle without all the pieces, or a road trip where I know where I’m trying to end up, but don’t know what I’m going to see along the way,” Scrivan says.
And when she gets stuck, she keeps moving forward with something, even just a menial ask—a trick she learned from a professor when she studied abroad in France.

“Sometimes it’s going for a run, but sometimes it’s cleaning my sock drawer or gardening,” she says. The point is to keep moving.
Another professor told her that being stuck on a project is a combination of a fear of failure and a fear of success. “That stayed with me, and helped me open my mind to trying different ways of working.”
Her Clark experience helped prepare her for the pressure of meeting deadlines and publishing her work.
“One of my professors did not consider cartooning to be fine art,” she continues. But one day, her assignment was to bring an object to class. “I was running out, and there was a hammer near the door, so I grabbed it. Little did I know that we would be drawing our objects for the entire semester.
“I drew the hammer big. I drew the hammer small. I painted the hammer. I did a collage with it. And I eventually turned it into cartoon characters—three-dimensional characters made from foam. The hammer was flying a kite, going to the beach.”
That project helped her get to the essence of why she loved cartooning. “It was creating characters, setting scenes. And that’s what I do now.”
Scrivan, who, like Nat, worked to overcome her own insecurities to find the best way forward, long ago let go of “klutz” as a self-description. Today she professes a love of exercise and has even competed in two Ironman triathlons. But it’s that Clark crew experience, she insists, that lit the fuse.
“So much of my creativity is grounded in running and riding my bike, and it’s all because the crew team brought me out of my comfort zone,” she says.
“When you surround yourself with a community of people doing seemingly impossible things, you realize that what is possible for them could be possible for you. And once you achieve one ‘impossible thing,’ that opens the door for anything to be possible. That happened to me at Clark.” □