In the bonus discussion, we talk to Iva Cheung about her other life as a cartoonist. We look at how a self-described non-drawer started making comics that editors love to share. We also look at her three self-published books, including a children's book starring an angry jelly donut who really does not want to hear about your podcast.
In the bonus discussion, we talk to Iva Cheung about her other life as a cartoonist. We look at how a self-described non-drawer started making comics that editors love to share. We also look at her three self-published books, including a children's book starring an angry jelly donut who really does not want to hear about your podcast.
Find more from Iva at IvaCheung.com.
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| HOST: Mignon Fogarty
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[Computer-generated transcript]
Mignon Fogarty: This ad-free podcast is part of your Grammarpalooza subscription. Greetings, Grammarpaloozians. I am here with Iva Cheung. In the main episode, we talked about plain language writing. She is an expert in that area. She has a PhD in the topic, and she's been on committees to determine plain language standards in Canada. She teaches at two universities, and she's won multiple Canadian editing awards.
So that was great. If you haven't heard it yet, go listen. But she also has this complete other side where she is a cartoonist who makes cartoons about editing. So we're gonna talk about that. Iva, thank you so much for joining us for the Grammarpalooza bonus segment.
Iva Cheung: Thank you so much for having me, Mignon
Mignon Fogarty: Okay, so I think that I first became aware of you by your cartoons that you post on social media and that editors love to share.
Why don't you, when did you get started as a cartoonist? Have you always drawn?
Iva Cheung: No, I haven't. In fact, it took me a while to get drawing just because I was really intimidated by the idea of trying to sketch something out and draw it. I didn't really have any drawing skills to speak of. I had all of these ideas, where I could share relatable moments that all editors would recognize. And I did wanna make a cartoon, but I didn't really have any drawing skills. And so I didn't for a long time. I didn't start the comic for a long time. But then, you know, I decided if XKCD can create so much meaning with stick figures, then maybe I can give it a shot as well
Mignon Fogarty: That's so funny 'cause I think of you as the XKCD of the editing world. Does your cartoon have a name?
Iva Cheung: It doesn't really. So I compiled the first 10 years of my cartoon into a book a handful of years ago. And I called it an editorial cartoon. So I guess that's its de facto name now.
Mignon Fogarty: If you're listening, we're gonna describe these to you. So I'm gonna share my screen so people who are watching can see them, or I'm going to attempt to at least. Okay, so this is the first one, and the characters they're sort of stick figures, but they're more bubbly. They're sort of roundish stick figures. And this one is called "The Truing Test." It's pretty recent. It's from February 1st, 2026. They go out on the first of every month. Is that right?
Iva Cheung: Usually that's what I aim for.
Mignon Fogarty: Typically. And so this one, you have two characters sitting at a table with a book and a probably cup of tea or coffee in front of one of them the person says, "You're steading all those typos." Steading means saying let them stand, don't change them. Another person says, "I don't want people thinking AI wrote my book." So that is a very timely and relatable thing. You know, you're a working editor. Are people actually telling you that?
Iva Cheung: I do hear that actually that they're having to change the way they write, so that people don't think they are AI. And in some cases, using imperfections, whatever they might be, to convey that, they're a human writing as opposed to a machine.
Mignon Fogarty: Wow. I hear about it a lot too. I hope people aren't doing it too much. It's kinda sad. Here's another one I will share. So this one is called "Triage," and it is from July 2024, and this was also one of my favorites. It's very relatable. The manager appears to be saying, "We're extremely crunched for time, so no making any changes unless you're correcting outright errors, okay? That means no adding serial commas, no changing hyphens or to en dashes. We're leaving parallelism issues." And the editors in the next panel, they seem stunned, and they don't like this. And then they say, finally, "What markup should we use if we don't want you to change something," you know, they're not allowed, "but we want you to know we noticed it?" And, as someone who's recently...I, published, updates to my book, so I was going through, and there's always a point where they tell you, "We don't care what you find. We can't change it anymore." What ones do you hear that people love that you've published?
Iva Cheung: I guess some of my favorites include, the one about APA style. APA style offends so many of my aesthetic sensibilities. I find it cluttered. I find it inconsistent. So, the citation and references, the reference styles have what I consider to be way too much punctuation, and there are inconsistencies in how works should be capitalized.
So in some cases, they use headline or title case versus sentence case, and, to me, it makes no sense. So this is coming from the American Psychological Association, right? And, you know, what standing do they have to be arbiters of the language that we use? But I was thinking about how all of these sort of nonsensical and aesthetically offensive things they have in their style guide must be these longitudinal psychological experiments. So I made a cartoon to that effect
Mignon Fogarty: That's great. Has anyone at the APA seen it, do you know? Have you ever gotten any feedback?
Iva Cheung: I have not heard, no
Mignon Fogarty: Well, they should. I know this is such a cliche question, but where do you get your ideas?
Iva Cheung: My ideas really just come from working as an editor and from being part of the editing community where you'll see people share on social media some very relatable situations that all editors have probably come across.
Like for example, finding a little bit of plagiarism in a manuscript or whatever it might be. But there are some things that I think only editors understand, and I try to turn those into situations. I might, you know, make those very absurd so that they're, you know, not necessarily recognizable to real world events.
But, they still depict something that I think editors or publishing professionals will find, relatable or, some things that will remind them of, some things that they've come across in their work.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. You made me think of one that I love where there's, some schmutz on the monitor, the person thinks it's a comma that shouldn't be there, and they think their keyboard is broken because they can't get rid of this comma, and then someone comes along and wipes off the schmutz for them, and then they fixed it.
I love that one. So the book is called "An Editorial Cartoon," and I think if you know someone who's an editor, they would probably very much appreciate this as a gift because they're gonna go through it too and be like, "Ah, this happened to me. Oh, this happened to me. Oh, I've heard about this." And this isn't the only book you've published.
You have two other books. Why don't you tell us about those?
Iva Cheung: Oh, well, I started, I guess, with Angry Jelly Donut, and that is ostensibly a children's book. And this came about when I was doing Inktober, or actually Bottober, and this is an annual month-long event in October where you get a prompt and you try to draw something to that prompt. And Bottober, was created by Janelle Shane, who was using these sort of generated prompts, that are quite silly and absurd.
And one day the prompt was Angry Jelly Donut, and so I drew what I imagined would be an angry jelly donut and posted it to social media, and Steve Kleinedler saw it and said, "Yes, this needs to be a character in a kid's book."
Mignon Fogarty: Steve Kleinedler, he's a former editor from the American Heritage Dictionary. He's been a guest on the show too.
Iva Cheung: Mm-hmm. And so I laughed and thought-- I didn't really think anything of it. But then the next morning, I found a 12-page manuscript complete of this children's book where Angry Jelly Donut is the main character.
Mignon Fogarty: So Steve was inspired.
Iva Cheung: Steve... Yes, so Steve, sent me this manuscript, and I decided I had to do something with it and illustrated it.
And we self-published it with the goal of raising some money for two charities. So a dollar from each book goes toward The Trevor Project and Indspire, which is an indigenous educational, nonprofit here in Canada.
Mignon Fogarty: Nice. And what is the story of the angry jelly donut?
Iva Cheung: Angry Jelly Donut.
Mignon Fogarty: A nemesis?
Iva Cheung: Yes, Angry Jelly Donut has a foil called Happy Vanilla Cupcake. And Happy Vanilla Cupcake is trying to get Angry Jelly Donut to listen to their podcast. And, Angry Jelly Donut doesn't want to listen to Happy Vanilla Cupcake's podcast. And the more I talk about this, the sillier it sounds.
It doesn't make a lot of sense. But I-- you know what? Toddlers apparently love it. As I said, it's sort of extensively a kids book because I don't necessarily think that when Steve wrote it, he really meant for children to read it. But I know a lot of friends and friends' friends who've gotten a hold of this book, and their toddlers apparently really love it, and it's in their regular rotation.
So I think that's kind of sweet, and I'm sort of imagining a scenario twenty years from now when they're, you know, they're talking to their peers in college about, "Yeah, hey, remember that book about the Angry Jelly Donut?" And their peers have no idea what they're talking about. It's very niche.
Mignon Fogarty: Is it an anti-podcasting screed?
Iva Cheung: It is not. It is not. No, I don't think it's an anti-podcasting screed at all. It is, more about how Angry Jelly Donut doesn't want to put up with Happy Vanilla Cupcake's, relentless positivity.
Mignon Fogarty: The iteration I've seen of Angry Jelly Donut is in color. And most of your cartoons are black and white. So was the original Angry Jelly Donut, also black and white, or was it in color?
Iva Cheung: I drew it with a ballpoint pen on a sheet of paper. So I guess it was, yeah, it was just a monotone creation.
Mignon Fogarty: How do you decide? Cause I know some of yours, others are - they're occasionally in color.
Iva Cheung: Most of my cartoons are just in black and white. But if I need color to make a point, you know, as a device, I will use it. So for example, editors famously use red pens, right? So, if I have to show that they're doing, they're making markup, then it'll typically be in red. But I don't use color all that often
Mignon Fogarty: Okay, so Angry Jelly Donut was special.
Iva Cheung: Oh, and I should mention that, An Editorial Cartoon, also a fundraiser. All of these projects, these self-published books, they're meant to be fundraisers. And, an Editorial Cartoon is, $1 from each copy, goes to the Indigenous Editors Association. And then the third book that I have out, it's called After the Feast.
It's a cookbook to help people use up the turkey leftovers and other leftovers from a big sort of Thanksgiving dinner. So it was sort of my effort to reduce food waste. I used a lot of these recipes and thought maybe putting them together might help some other folks.
And that too is a fundraiser. $2 from each copy sold, goes to, the Qaiyuh Tuvik Community Food Center in Nunavut.
Mignon Fogarty: Nice. and aren't you also, don't you specialize in cookbook editing as well as plain language?
Iva Cheung: Cookbooks are, yeah, one of my favorite things to work on. I tend to index cookbooks more than I do editing. I do do both, but, cookbook indexing is one of my favorite things to do. So you mentioned indexing earlier in the main episode, and, I think for cookbooks, its indexes are sort of essential, and you really have to get into the minds of home cooks to figure out what they might look up and how they might use the index.
So it's always a lot of fun
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. No, I love a good index. When I was writing my first book, I insisted, I was like, "The index has to be really good."
Iva Cheung: Hmm.
Mignon Fogarty: So and you self-published these three books. And did you learn anything about, like, do you have anything to share that you learned about self-publishing along the way?
Iva Cheung: I'm just so grateful that this option exists. And yeah, I think I would have a hard time if I were self-publishing to make a living. I know some people do. But for me, it was really just a way of sharing these books and I was just having some fun and trying to connect with community and not necessarily using self-publishing to, yeah, make money.
And I think that self-publishing can come with some challenges if you are using self-publishing to make money just because as the author, you essentially have to do everything, right? You have to do the marketing. You have to put all of the metadata into your Amazon listing and all of that stuff.
And you know, I've heard of situations where people would lose a lot of money when, a few years ago, people had, would, you know, purchase an e-book through Amazon and then return it within a certain window and get a refund as a result. And so the author wouldn't receive that money, but the person would still have read or listened to the book, right?
Mignon Fogarty: That's terrible. Don't do that.
Iva Cheung: Yeah. There are libraries. Use your library. Yeah.
Mignon Fogarty: And Libby, you know, has so many free e-books.
Iva Cheung: Mm-hmm.
Mignon Fogarty: Are your books only e-books or are they print on demand too?
Iva Cheung: They're print on demand, yeah. You can take your ISBN to your local indie and order a hard copy if you would like. Yeah
Mignon Fogarty: Nice. So after people are done reading Angry Jelly Donut and an editorial cartoon and After the Feast, then what would you recommend? What are your three book recommendations?
Iva Cheung: Okay. So, my first recommendation would be The Elements of Indigenous Style. This is a book written by Gregory Younging, and it is in its second edition, which is edited by Warren Cariou. It is a book that covers a lot of indigenous, terminology that you should and shouldn't use, and most importantly, it gives you context for why.
So you really go into it, you really come out of it understanding the reasons you might choose one term over another. It talks about working relationships between editors, publishers, and indigenous authors. And it... Yes, it gives a lot of this really important context so that we understand the current relationship, between indigenous editors and authors and the traditional publishing industry, I guess.
I, again, rarely speak in absolutes, but for me, this book is a must-read. It is a reference, right? It sort of echoes, you know, the elements of style or whatever. It's The Elements of Indigenous Style. It is a reference, so I will dip in and out if I need to look something up really quickly or confirm something.
But this is also a book that I have read cover to cover. So I would, say that if you work with words in any way, this is a book that you should read
Mignon Fogarty: So not just for editors.
Iva Cheung: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Mignon Fogarty: Interesting. Okay, so, what’s next?
Iva Cheung: My next recommendation, because I love cookbooks so much, are cookbooks. So these are two books that I have indexed, and, the first one is called My Cypriot Table, and it's by Irene Matys, M-A-T-Y-S.
So because it talks about Cypriot cooking, it's got influences from Greek cooking as well as Turkish influences. So it's very Mediterranean. It's got a lot of fresh, bold Mediterranean flavors, but because the author's Canadian, there, she puts a lot of Canadian twists on the recipes as well.
So I'll give you an example. One of the dessert recipes is for a baklava butter tart, and butter tarts are a classic, iconic Canadian dessert. And to pair that with phyllo pastry, it... Just brilliant, right? So I would recommend that book. And then the second cookbook that I would recommend is a book called Mad Love, by author Devon Raj Kumar.
He grew up in a Guyanese Canadian household, so a lot of just really vibrant, flavorful recipes. The book is really colorful and just full of life, and I absolutely love it, so I would recommend, Mad Love for sure.
Mignon Fogarty: Wow. I mean, that doesn't sound like a cookbook title. That sounds like a novel. What's your favorite recipe from that book?
Iva Cheung: My favorite recipe from that book might be, the doubles, which are a kind of flatbread, but they're a very traditional flatbread in Guyana. And so, that's sort of the basis for a lot of different recipes. You sort of eat doubles with a lot of different dishes, so I think it's a basic recipe that you can use to start out to understand Guyanese cooking and, use it as a starting point for the other recipes in the book.
Mignon Fogarty: And kind of build on it.
Iva Cheung: Mm-hmm.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. Well, and the baklava sounds delicious too. Wow, those are great recommendations. Thank you so much.
Iva Cheung: Yeah
Mignon Fogarty: Iva Cheung, where can people find you and your cartoons?
Iva Cheung: You can find me and my cartoons at ivacheng.com. I try to post monthly. and you can also find me on Bluesky at ivacheng.com
Mignon Fogarty: Wonderful. Thank you so much for being here.
Iva Cheung: Thanks for having me.