SARAH LEAVITT IS A cartoonist and author of the graphic memoir, Tangles, A Story about Alzheimer’s, My Mother and Me, and the author of the award-winning historical fiction comic, Agnes, Murderess. Sarah is an assistant professor in the School of Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, where she has developed and taught undergraduate and graduate comic classes since 2012. Her new book, a graphic story, is just out from Arsenal Press. The book is titled Something, Not Nothing, A Story of Grief and Love. Welcome, Sarah. Listen in and read along as we answer the question, “What is a graphic memoir?”
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Marion: Welcome, Sarah.
Sarah: Oh, I’m so happy to be here, Marion. Thanks for having me.
Marion: Well, it’s an honor to meet you. And I wanted to do so in no small part because you take on the tough stuff of life. In that 2012 book I described, you published this graphic memoir called Tangles, A Story about Alzheimer’s, My Mother and Me. The Los Angeles Times called it “moving, rigorous, and heartbreaking.” And I absolutely agree.
Sarah: Thank you.
Marion: No, you’re welcome. It’s gorgeous and important. And my first book takes on my mother’s Alzheimer’s disease and I know about the pitfalls of writing into this experience. And you did it beautifully in spare black and white drawings that allow us for an honest exploration into the evolution, I think, that all families go through, from shock and denial to adapting to caregiving, that tangle up a family.
And I love the title. Specifically, it’s multiple meanings because after all the brains of Alzheimer’s patients go into neurofibrillary tangles. So, I made a solemn nod to your double meaning here in your book. And I want to talk about, I mean, we share an experience here. I picked up a notebook and followed my mother through her Alzheimer’s.
And so I have a really strong belief in what that notebook does. But I want to know about you, about how you began this work. Your family’s in crisis and what do you do?
Did you take out a sketchbook? Did you jot down some notes? My audience is writers and they’re looking for permission or conviction or someone to shove them into a place to pick up a notebook. But what was your intent? And just give us a sense of when you started taking notes or drawing or what you did with that.
Marion: Sure. And I’ll just say, I love the word “shove.” I’m going to start using it with my students. I don’t know. They might not already feel that way, but yeah, I was so young. So, my mom, we started realizing that something was going on when I was 29. So, and I wasn’t really thinking of myself as a writer at that time, but I was keeping notes in my journal.
And I was working as an assistant for an editor named Mary Schendlinger who ended up, she’s also a cartoonist and she ended up being a major mentor for me. And she just kept saying, “It’s all material. It’s all material.” Cause I was starting to take writing classes.
And also like really insisting that, you know, there was a good chance that I wouldn’t remember things if I didn’t write them down. And I’ve just, you know, and you might identify with this, but I have always had a horrible memory. And of course, as soon as my mom got diagnosed with dementia, I thought every day I was convinced that I had dementia and that was part of writing things down.
And I made little sketches as well. And it really helped me remember things.
And the first kind of iteration of Tangles, I had started taking writing classes. And I guess, so my mom got diagnosed in the late nineties. And by the early two thousands, I was taking writing classes. And then I ended up in an MFA program. And after my mom died in 2004, I cut pieces of my diary up.
Like, I had a little bit of a breakdown, and I started cutting up and collaging bits of writing and drawing from my diaries. And that turned into this rough zine, like just a folded photocopied booklet that I was starting to get into making comics. And I showed it to one of my instructors and he was like, well, you need to make a graphic novel.
And I’m like, oh, okay. And we just kind of bummed out about because there’s so much work.
Marion: Yes. Yes. So much work, I suspect. I love this teacher saying it’s all material. When facing anything, I take notes, and I tell people all the time to take notes. And I worry now I say it, it’s kind of a signature thing I say to people going through hell or joy.
And I’ve sometimes regretted it because sometimes it’s met with disdain. I’ve had people literally like put their fists on their hips and say, “This is not a time for taking notes on anything.” So, I think everything is a time for taking notes. But what’s your code as a comics artist?
What’s material and what’s not material? Do you have like a, Well, I would never take notes on that. Because I kind of think you don’t.
Sarah: I mean. Yeah. I mean, I think that’s a great question and thing to talk about because I do think that it’s something that, you know, people talk about this as being part of what separates writers, artists, cartoonists from people who are not doing that is that you have this kind of part of you that’s, you know, you’re fully in the experience, you’re grieving, but you often have a part of yourself that’s imagining how you would tell this story to somebody else or you’re like, I better write that down in case I use it later.
I guess I feel like nobody gets hurt by you making notes, right? Like, you know, and so I have piles and piles and piles of notes that nobody’s ever going to see. And I’d rather have them than not have them, especially as somebody with a bad memory. And also, I think for all of us, we remember things one way, and then especially if it’s a time where you’re under extreme stress, it’s pretty likely that you’re going to go back and realize that you didn’t remember it correctly. And you have your notes, or maybe it’s an email that you wrote to somebody at the time or a text that you sent.
You know, I just think those are very, very precious.
And for me, more of the kind of ethical questions come when you decide what you’re going to write about and what you’re going to share.
Marion: Yes. Yes. I don’t think the ethical question begins with taking the notes, but I have had people be deeply offended by the suggestion.
And at first, it really surprised me. I come from a family of writers, next to the phone was a pad that, you know, trying to figure out what conversation my father was having with someone that he left all these notes, or everybody documented everything.
And it’s a, it’s a powerful way to get through life, I think. And I think particularly if we worry about our memories, not for the organic brain disease reason, but just because, you know, if you know, you have a bad memory, you have a bad memory.
Sarah: Yeah, yeah. I think we can do whatever we want with those notes. As you mentioned, my newest book is about my partner dying, and I had to throw out lots of her stuff. And this is perhaps jumping ahead, but we talked about this. And she was like, anything that looks like a diary, I would like you to destroy.
And I did. But I still think it’s important that she kept those notes while she was alive. They were useful for her. They mattered.
Marion: Yeah. Yeah, that’s a lovely distinction. And I think we always go, “You threw it out?” No, it was important while she was alive.
She asked for them to be destroyed, but they had a real purpose in the writing, in the clarification.
I don’t know how I feel about anything until I write it down, truly. And that includes my spouse, my child, my dog. You know, we say things like, “Oh, it was great. It was such a great movie. It was great. Well, you just didn’t learn anything.”
I didn’t even tell you the title of the movie, but that’s how we talk. But we don’t write that way. We don’t write that way. We write about what the movie did for us or how it reminded us of something.
Yeah, I think the act of note taking is deeply important. I want to just get for people who don’t know, because I think everybody’s heard of graphic novels, graphic memoir. You are very clear about, you call your work “comics.” You refer to your work as comics. Is there a difference? Is there a distinction? Is this just you? Just can you set this record?
Sarah: No, it’s not just me.
Marion: For God’s sake, can you set the record straight?
Sarah: Oh, amazing. Imagine if I got credited with setting the record straight. Yeah, I mean, there’s people like, well, if you’re familiar with the work of Marjane Satrapi, who wrote Persepolis, she talks very clearly about not wanting to be called a graphic novelist.
She’s like, I’m a cartoonist, and what I make are comics. And I think for me, it’s partly about clarity. So, you know, basically, a graphic novel is a book length comic. I think for me, where it gets murky is if people are calling memoir, something that’s a memoir or nonfiction, if they’re calling it a graphic novel, it’s like, no, it’s not a novel, because it’s not fiction.
I mean, I do refer to Tangles as a graphic memoir. I think there’s a kind of connotation of like, trying to be highfalutin. Can I use that word? I’m like a thousand years old.
Marion: Only if you can spell it.
Sarah: Okay. Well, we’ll talk about that later. So, I think there is, you know, part of using the term “graphic novel” is trying to get people to take comics more seriously. And I think I more identify with people who are like, I’m making comics.
Sometimes they’re serious. Sometimes they’re not. I don’t have something to prove to you. I think we’re past the point where we have to kind of call comics graphic novels in order for people to feel like they’re literary. Or I don’t know. I don’t know.
I guess some of us feel like that argument’s been won. I think there are places where people are like, what? Comics?
Marion: Yeah, I do too.
Sarah: Yeah. I mean, I think it’s been so many decades since, you know, since Maus was published, work like Persepolis or Thi Bui’s.
Marion: Fun Home.
Sarah: Yeah. The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui. All those books, we know what comics can do. So for me, it’s just simpler to call them comics. And I also, for some reason, when we started offering comics classes at the School of Creative Writing, where I teach, somebody decided to call them “graphic forms classes.”
And for me, that’s just too vague. Like, I don’t know what it means.
Marion: Nope.
Sarah: So I just am like, no, it’s comics class. It’s just comics. And then within that, I mean, comics can do a thousand million things. They can look all these different ways. They can make things clearer.
They can make them more complicated. Yeah, it’s a very powerful form. And I just like the word comics.
Marion: Yeah, good. I think that helps. And I think that that’s just language. Let’s just get it out there and talk about it, you know? So in 2019, you published a graphic work, I’m going to say a graphic form, right? Because I’m just going to smudge it.
Sarah: Oh, you can call it a graphic novel because it’s fiction. Oh, yeah. No, this one’s a novel.
Marion: I was just kind of teasing there. It’s a graphic novel called Agnes, Murderess. And it’s inspired by the legend of a 19th century woman, Agnes McVie, a roadhouse owner, mad and possible serial killer in the Caribou region of British Columbia.
It’s an unverified reputation that you got interested in and for which you created a version. And you put a queer twist on the story to be sure, but your version allows us to peer into the vision that Canada was for settlers. Something I was just reading about in Alice Munro’s short stories.
So let’s explain a bit, if you would, your interest here, and how that is what grabbed you to explore.
Sarah: Sure, yeah. So, the Caribou region of British Columbia is kind of right in the middle of the province. And there was a gold rush there in the 1800s.
And there’s a place where I used to go with my late partner in the summers. And there’s a settlement where they’ve like recreated it to look – it’s not really a settlement, I guess, it’s just like a little place by the road – where it’s like, this is what it used to look like in the 1800s.
It’s like, you know, people follow the gold rush trail as kind of a tourism thing. So they moved the roadhouse actually from its original location to this place at 108 miles. So it’s the 108th mile on the gold rush trail. So I was there visiting it just to do a touristy thing and picked up this photocopied pamphlet that was talking about this murderer.
And I at first thought it was a man because for some reason, they spell the name Agnes with a U. So I was reading it as Angus. And then I realized that it was a woman and then I started reading about her and she was this woman who apparently like owned the roadhouse.
And then when men came through on their way to find gold, or I guess on their way back when they had their gold, she would kill them and then she would bury these big caches of gold. And then she also had sex workers that worked at the roadhouse who she would randomly kill.
And so I was just horrified and haunted by this story. And then the more I looked into it, the more it became clear that it was a made up story that there was this weird kind of, and sorry, I’m getting granular here. There’s this weird kind of self-published book that came out in the 70s about buried gold in British Columbia.
And that’s kind of, that seems like the only source for this legend, which has since appeared on like, you know, it’s on like BC government tourism websites. It’s like “The legend of Agnes McVie.” And so at first I thought, Oh, this is a historical figure who I really want to kind of fictionalize.
And then I was like, no, it’s a fictional figure who I would like to fictionalize. So, I made up this kind of origin story for her and that, you know, she was born and raised on this remote Scottish island and then lived in London for a bit and then came and became a murderer in Canada.
And at the time, I was doing way more research than I needed to do or that I could ever use. But I was reading a lot of accounts by early settlers in Canada and just this whole idea that you could escape the old world and come into the new world. And this lie that there was nobody living in this country.
And if they were living here, they weren’t really doing anything that mattered. So, you could come into this fresh land. And for my character, Agnes, she had this history of violence and haunting that she thinks she can escape by crossing the ocean and coming to Canada.
And so, the more that I worked on the story, the more it felt like this way of talking about what European settlers brought onto this continent with their kind of preconceived ideas and what they thought they could do when they got here. And then I just ended up being influenced by writings by early settlers, especially women.
Marion: I think that’s just a wonderful impetus. I mean, a lot of us wonder what we can do now from here with the real origin tale of this land.
And that’s a great one. And I liked that so much that that was your impetus. And Agnes, Murderess was a Joe Shuster Awards finalist for Best Cartoonist, a Doug Wright Award finalist for Best Book, a Vine Awards winner for Canadian Jewish Literature, and an Alberta Publishing Awards winner for Speculative Fiction.
And that’s a significant series of awards that could buoy a writer, but buoying a writer and preparing her for what life can deliver are not the same thing. And which brings us to your new book.
In April 2020, your partner of 22 years, Donimo, died with medical assistance after years of severe chronic pain and a rapid decline at the end of her life.
And not long after, you started making comics that began as small sketches, but became more abstract, I understand. And I mean, certainly looking at your work, I said, “Oh, yeah, I get that.” And it’s called Something, Not Nothing, A Story of Grief and Love is the collection of these short comics.
And you write in the intro that after her death, you continued living, which surprised you. And that these pieces are written, quote, “as a kind of travel diary, a record of my exploration of the unfamiliar new world I found myself in.” And I stopped and kind of held that idea in my heart: Travel diary. That’s a unique and fascinating place to write from.
Surprising to find in a book that chronicles the aftermath of a death. So, talk to me about positioning yourself there. When and how did that position occur to you?
Sarah: Yeah, it’s funny, because I was actually thinking about this while I was listening to some of the other episodes of your show and thinking about the difference between this collection and something that I might write kind of looking back on what happened.
These are like, this is a collection of comics that I was writing to document what my grief process was like, or my survival process, I guess you’d call it. And so, yeah, in that way, it’s quite different from say, Tangles, that was certainly based on notes that I took while the events were happening, but I wrote it after my mom died.
And this is written after Donimo died, but it’s not really about her. It’s about what happened to me after she died. And a little bit about kind of the lead up to her death, her decision to have an assisted death. So, for me, I didn’t know at the beginning that I was going to collect these.
Donimo was talking to me before she died and she said something about like, she was an artist as well. And she was like, if you ever want to use any of my art, like when you end up writing and making work about this, I’m like, “I’m not doing anything about this. Like, this is too hard, I’m not going to write about it,” or whatever I said, I don’t know. I was somewhat crazy at that point.
And, but she knew that I would do something. And I guess I didn’t for a while. And after she died, about a month later, I took a workshop with a cartoonist named Teresa Wong, who coincidentally also has a book coming out from the same publisher this fall.
She’s a wonderful Canadian cartoonist. And so, my partner died in April, 2020, which is like right at the beginning of the pandemic. And really up until after she died, in some ways didn’t even clue in that there was a pandemic happening.
I mean, I knew, but you know what I mean? Like I was in my own bubble. But Teresa had us do like something like, make a four panel comic of like four things you see around you in this small kind of, we’re all in our little tiny worlds that we’re living in because of COVID.
And it became a kind of way of me, I picked out objects that reminded me of Donimo. So I did a bunch of these kind of list comics, I guess, like four panel comics that were just items that sparked some memory in me of her and everything felt so raw.
And it kind of felt like all I could do. And then as I kept drawing and I started doing weekly art nights with my friend, AJ, which I am still doing. And if it hadn’t been for those, I don’t know if I would have been able to do this collection. We got together every Friday night and worked on our art without talking that much. And I started bringing in more and more abstract imagery. And I started experimenting with watercolors, which I really didn’t know how to use, which kind of forced me into more abstraction.
Marion: The abstraction, I don’t have the art speak. I might not either. That’s perhaps needed. But I think the abstract quality of this book supports the form of the adventure tale, the travel story. You’re coming to something and being abstracted, they’re more like thoughts than they are like opinions.
And I found it very supportive of the form that I’m discovering this along the way, as opposed to “This is what I absolutely know now.” And I loved that. I thought it was so on brand for what you were writing.
Sarah: Yeah, I mean, that’s kind of why I think I reached for colors and shapes and textures, because I didn’t know.
Like so much of this book is about not knowing, like not knowing what’s happening, not knowing who I am after her death, not knowing where I am. I mean, I think you and so many other people will understand like when you go through this kind of loss, it’s so disorienting. And kind of creating different fields of colors seems like a more appropriate response than yes, like you said, drawing something detailed and recognizable.
Marion: Yeah. Yeah, I love that. I love that. You report that Donimo died a medically assisted death. And in the opening pages, you present the time when you made the calls to report on how she might be granted the wish to die via such a death after a series of medical conditions from which she was not going to recover. And you quote yourself as saying, quote, “my beloved partner is in the process of proving that living is worse than dying.”
And I must say that that line presented in a cell, a box, handwritten, drawn by you in this abstract way was far more powerful, I think, than it would have been had I read it in a line of narrative work.
So that confirms for me that this is such a powerful, and for those people who are not familiar with the form, I just want to tempt people to go and look. I want everyone to buy this book and have a look at what we’re talking about, because I think we wrestle with how to support our own arguments.
And for those people who draw and paint, this vulnerability of yours, this transition you were in is best displayed, I think, in these watercolors. And in this non, it’s just not, you know, graphically confined. It’s just sort of, it’s in washes. And I thought that was very important.
My question is though, I had on a children’s book author recently who talked about being paired with an illustrator and how when she saw what the person, because a publisher makes a decision, at least in American publishing, the publisher assigns the illustrator, publisher makes a decision.
When she saw what the illustrator chose to illustrate, she learned so much more about her own writing. So, you’re doing both. So, what’s the difference between the pictures, per se, and the writing in terms of your conveyance, do you think? Where are the strengths and weaknesses of both?
Marion: Yeah, I actually listened to that episode. I can’t remember the writer’s name, but I was listening to it in the car and just saying, “Yes.” I loved how she talked about working with the artist. It’s different at different times. With this book though, it’s almost like I was working with a different parts of my brain.
And I do not know enough about brains to tell you anymore, science words for that, but that things came to me in different ways. Like sometimes I would sit down and so in the book I use different grids. Like so a kind of a classic grid that cartoonists use in comics is the nine panel grid. So, you have like three rows of three panels.
And that’s what I used for Agnes, Murderess. And it’s this very stable kind of composition that allows you to do lots of playing within those panels and between them. But it kind of gives you this consistent layout to hold the stories, kind of like working in like a very fixed form for poetry, I imagine.
With Something Not Nothing, I started making these 12 panel grids. And I didn’t really think about it, a lot of the book is like 12 panel or 16 panel. And those grids feel less stable to me. And sometimes I would sit down and kind of just work with color and I wouldn’t really have a coherent thought or idea in my head with words, but I would fill the panels with color and sort of respond to them in words. So, it was almost like this one part of my brain was working and then the other part was responding. And sometimes I had a more kind of an idea in my head that was more in words, like I want to write about this time when she and I went to an orchid show together, or I want to write about the time when she was in the hospital at the end of her life.
But other times it was more working in a way without words. And when I teach comics, one of the things that’s so exciting is when there are students who aren’t necessarily going to come out of the class and make comics, but they’ve kind of started learning to use the tool of drawing as a way of thinking through stories and as a way of expressing themselves.
And that adds a whole other way of working and a way of kind of accessing feelings and memories. So sometimes I’d be responding to colors or shapes and sometimes just the act of making them would kind of cause memories or ideas or feelings to kind of percolate up and out of my hands in words.
So yeah, it’s a bit of a weird process.
Marion: I love that. No, and that’s just it. I mean, I think that writers, I know writers that Gay Talese, the American non-fiction writer uses his shirt cardboards. These are the pieces of cardboard around which his shirts are folded when he gets them back from the laundry.
Classically, he has used them. He draws out his stories on his shirt cardboards. This graphic aspect of story is not new. It’s just giving it permission, giving anyone writing, provoking them as we talked about before, shoving them as we talked about before.
Okay, so sketch it out. So, write it in words, whatever it takes, right? I’m all for, I do a lot of sketching when I’m writing. It’s gotta go like this, it’s gotta move like this. Suddenly I’ve got a swoop, like the Nike scoop or it’s gotta go like a staircase. It’s gotta go up and over and up and over. It’s got to go up. Marion, get the story to go up, meaning you’ve got to heighten the argument.
And so I think this idea of getting a piece of paper and a pencil is wonderful for everyone. And it might result in comics. It might result in a graphic book. But…
As we have to wrap this up, let’s talk about the idea of vulnerability. The book has so many transcendent moments.
It’s a beautifully done book. Something, Not Nothing, A Story of Grief and Love is a gorgeous piece of work, watching someone after, during, moving from death to something else and has many transcendent moments. But underlying all of it is deep vulnerability. So let’s talk about that and its role in writing. I think you have real authority here on this topic of vulnerability. And I think no memoir writer can work without it in her toolbox. But I also think memoir writers have something to learn about it. So, you’re a teacher. I’m gonna let you teach this one over to you. What’s the value of vulnerability when writing memoir?
Sarah: Yeah, I think that vulnerability is essential. And then I think we have to start in that place. And then there’s different decisions or choices to make along the way.
One thing I’m thinking about is writing memoir from a place of not knowing. So not like I’m going to teach people something about grief. But before that, like what is my experience of grief?
What questions do I have about grief? What do I not know? I feel like there’s this pressure and I’m not sure all the places it comes from, but to have something kind of pithy to say about grief or about survival or about love, I think maybe it’s partly social media.
So, I think if you kind of look at how people market their work or market themselves or how people post on Instagram, say for example, about grief, it will be like, here’s a very short sentence about what grief is, how you should support grievers, what people do that’s right or wrong.
And I feel like that kind of seeps into our culture of writing and there’s lots of other pressures, I think that create this also, but like this idea that we have to have something profound to say about what we’ve been through, which I also feel that pressure.
And it’s hard to kind of stay in a place of like, this is what happened to me. I’m not sure what it means. I’m trying to find out what it means. I’m trying to reorient myself in life and understand what my new life is. And I’m kind of writing and drawing in order to explore this new territory, but not necessarily to come to this grand conclusion or that I’ve finished thinking about it.
Maybe vulnerability is about creating work in which you don’t know, and in which you’re not done thinking it through. It’s like, “Here’s what I’ve figured out so far.”
Marion: Yeah, I think that’s vulnerable in itself. I think so many people say to me, “Do I have to wait till I have it all figured out to write?” And I always say, “Oh dear God, if you ever figure it all out, good for you, but I haven’t figured out anything. I just, I’m on the way. I’m always on the way. This is what I’ve got till here, till now, right?” So good. Well, I look forward to reading your work as you continue to write and draw.
And thank you for bringing this new book to the world, Something Not Nothing, A Story of Grief and Love is just beautiful. And I congratulate you on it and we will all be better for it. Thank you, Sarah.
Sarah: Thank you so much for having me. What a delight to talk to you.
Marion: You’re more than welcome.
The author is Sarah Leavitt. The book is Something Not Nothing, A Story of Grief and Love, just out from Arsenal Press. See more at sarah Leavitt dot com. Get the book wherever books are sold.
I’m Marion Roach Smith, and you’ve been listening to QWERTY. QWERTY is produced by Overt Studios in Albany, New York. Reach them at overtstudios dot com. Our producer is Jacqueline Mignot. Our assistant is Lorna Bailey. Want more on the art and work of writing?
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