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Chatter MarksAuthor: Anchorage Museum
Chatter Marks is a podcast of the Anchorage Museum, dedicated to exploring Alaskas identity through the creative and critical thinking of ideaspast, present and future. Featuring interviews with artists, presenters, staff and others associated with the Anchorage Museum and its mission. Language: en Genres: Arts, Society & Culture Contact email: Get it Feed URL: Get it iTunes ID: Get it |
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EP 125 Art and illness with Peter Dunlap‑Shohl
Episode 125
Tuesday, 30 December, 2025
Peter Dunlap‑Shohl's career traces a remarkable arc, from daily newsroom deadlines to personal, long-form storytelling. For 27 years, he worked for the Anchorage Daily News, drawing editorial and political cartoons. He produced thousands of comics focused on, more often than not, the worst things he could find in Alaska politics and in the pages of the newspaper — the biggest screwup, the clearest malfeasance, the loudest troublemaker — and then he’d satirize it by cartooning it. This is how a newspaper cartoonist does their job. But he also worked on the comic strip Muskeg Heights. The strip was about a fictional Anchorage neighborhood, and it allowed him to step out of the editorial page — away from politics — to explore the emotional aspects of living in Alaska. He worked on that for about a decade, until Parkinson’s made it too difficult to keep up with the weekly pace of the work. In more recent years, he’s authored two graphic memoirs: My Degeneration, about his Parkinson’s diagnosis in 2002, and Nuking Alaska, about the nuclear dangers Alaska faced during the Cold War. Both books were something Peter never thought he’d be capable of creating after being diagnosed. But he says that with the help of medication and brain surgery, he’s been able to curb the effects of the disease and accomplish some of the most rewarding and successful work of his life. But he’s careful not to frame the disease as a gift because it’s not. In My Degeneration, he writes that "it’ll take everything from you, everything it has taken you a lifetime to acquire and learn." What is a gift, though, is his reaction to it — the power of medicine, human ingenuity, and perseverance are incredible things. Overall, it’s taught him that he’s not in control, and that on his best days he’s sharing the wheel with Parkinson’s.
