♪ (heroic music) ♪ ♪ ♪ - Hello, and welcome to Comic Culture.

I'm Terence Dollard, a professor in the Department of Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke.

My guest today is writer-artist Tessa Hulls.

Tessa, welcome to Comic Culture.

- Thanks for having me.

- Tessa, we are here today because you have a fantastic graphic memoir called "Feeding Ghosts," which is, gosh, according to my recollection, only the second graphic novel to be awarded any type of Pulitzer Prize.

What is it about the graphic novel or a graphic presentation to tell a very complex and very emotional story that appealed to you?

- Well, I knew that I was going to have to tell this story that covered three generations and Chinese history going back to the 1850s.

And the thing I love about comics is that by putting yourself in as the narrator, you're able to jump through time and space without losing your reader.

And so I knew from the jump, if I was going to tell this family story, this was the only format that I could do it in.

And there's so many amazing examples of Maus, Persepolis, The Best We Could Do that show the amazing potential of this form to talk about how personal history is entwined with larger national history.

- What I find really fascinating about your use of the form is that-- I mean, I'm used to traditional American four-color heroes.

The storytelling is done in a certain way where it's very much A follows B-- I guess A leads to B, C, and so on.

Whereas you are using the art in ways that something is symbolic, something is not necessarily related to the story, but is creating the moods.

As you're putting together the words on the page and thinking about the illustrations to go with it, how do you find that balancing act between the narrative and the symbolic?

I think for me, it's really somatic.

I've always been somebody who lives in my body.

I am happiest when I'm out in the wilderness.

And gosh, going back 15, 16 years now, I like to go for multiple thousand-mile bicycle rides by myself.

And I think what that's done is it's really given me a very different understanding of sequencing and flow.

And so when I wrote the book, I wrote it as basically a 10,000-word creative nonfiction essay first, just to figure out the format.

And then I honestly didn't know which sections were going to be drawn versus written.

And it was this constant negotiation between forms.

So there was never a part where I wrote a script.

There were never thumbnails.

And thankfully, my editor had never edited a graphic novel.

So she didn't understand that I was proposing something ludicrous and borderline impossible.

But I think that's where I picked the format and taught myself the format so I could make this book.

It wasn't that I had been raised on those rules.

So I didn't know A plus B plus C equals D. I was like, oh, X, K, Y, 7, 43, purple.

That's what this format can do.

- And it's amazing because it works so well.

I mean, I was reading through this.

I mentioned this before we started.

There is just something about the way you're presenting this.

And I said I underestimated this.

I'm used to comics or graphic novels.

This is a deep, personal memoir.

I mean, it is special.

One of the things I think is fascinating is you're tying together this concept of the hungry ghost with family, I guess, trauma.

So as you're putting this together, is this like you have this theme.

You're talking about these 1,000-mile bicycle rides.

Is this something where it's just your mind is putting together these pictures and the idea, the concept behind trauma and lore and culture and belonging?

Is it just something where it just works for you?

Or is this-- again, you're thinking, well, this would be a really interesting way for me to assemble this story.

- Definitely option one.

I think the best way I can describe it is when you have a wine glass and if you wet your finger and you run it along the lip, when you hit the right resonant frequency, it starts to hum and make a noise.

And for me, that's always how I've worked.

I'm playing and I'm tinkering until I find that thing that resonates.

And it's a feeling.

And I think the reason I recognize that feeling is because of the way I've taught my body to trust itself from doing these things in the wilderness.

So when I'm making, I'm not at all being intellectual or academic.

And I guess that's one of the ironies of this book is it's very much about how I responded to my familial trauma by becoming an incredibly analytical person and just sort of like, I will intellectualize this so I don't have to feel it.

But the process of making the book and doing all those drawings, it was really emotional.

And that's another thing about comics that I think is so much more powerful than just a wordsies book, as I call it, is by seeing human forms rendered into different poses, by seeing expressions, there's this empathetic bridge that's forged with the reader that isn't happening just in words.

But the unfortunate collateral damage of that is that you're having to feel everything and relive everything as you're drawing it.

So I wouldn't say I enjoyed that part.

- One of the things about art is that you tend to do it in isolation.

You don't usually work with a lot of people around you.

But there's also, as you're working through this experience, this trauma, these memories, these feelings, at some point you say, I'm going to share this with somebody.

So when you are sharing it with your editor or you're sharing it with somebody who's going to maybe give you that feedback, how do you find the courage to say, OK, I'm ready to share this part of me that you don't know, that I'm afraid, I kind of compartmentalize, I keep it inside.

Let me share this with you now.

- That part actually was never hard for me because I think I've always been good at going in the studio and not thinking about what happens when whatever I make goes out in the world, maybe to an unusual degree.

So once I've done it, it's like I make it to-- not distance myself from it, that's not the right word.

But I make it to get it out.

And once it's out, it gets to have its own life.

It doesn't have anything to do with me anymore.

And I do feel like I got very, very lucky with my editor, Daphne Durham.

I was lucky that I had a lot of interest and a lot of potential editors.

So we would have these very intense, hour-long mutual speed dates.

And my editor is also a mixed-race Chinese-American.

And so having somebody who understood on a cellular level so much of that tension of cultures, I think, really helped us have a really great understanding from the jump.

And then the thing that I had written in my notes from that conversation was not a linear thinker.

So I knew that I had the right collaborator.

And that made it pretty easy to just be like, well, this is this weird thing that I've done, and hopefully it's intelligible to you.

- There's so much going on here that I would love to talk about.

And I'll probably dance around a little bit in trying to wrap my head around it.

But one of the things you're talking about in the graphic memoir-- I should get that correct-- your character, the you, the narrator, you will break that fourth wall and address the audience directly.

And you'll even say, I'm going to do this now, even though I'd much rather go to a historical piece because it's going to spare me the emotions.

In this case, I'm going to go lean into it.

As you are sitting down, is this-- again, you said you had the wordsy piece already written.

Is this something where you knew what you were going to do on page one, and by page x, you were going to be done?

Or is this something where you started, and you're like, you know what, it's turning this way, it's turning that way.

I'm just going to follow that along.

- It pivoted many times.

And I think that's something where, because I hadn't written a script or an outline, and I was keeping things in this state of dynamic negotiation, I was able to shift it in ways that really just aren't possible if you have everything premeditated from the jump.

And to me, the idea of going thumbnails, pencils, inking, so that when you're drawing the actual pages, there's no room for spontaneity or play or surprise, I just-- that's not how I work.

It's never been how I worked.

And in the case of the narrator, I had no idea my narrator was going to start breaking the fourth wall like that.

And when that started to happen, my editor and I, we actually had a nickname for her.

We called her Rogue Honey Badger Narrator.

And I'm just like, I don't know, she's doing some weird things.

She's like picking up my paintbrush dinosaurs, using them as time machines.

And again, I think that's why I had the right editor.

She was the one who saw that I was doing something that was using the format of a graphic novel, but was deliberately breaking a lot of rules.

- One of the things about your artwork, it strikes me a lot of almost like woodblock printing, because there's a lot of black on the page.

If it's just regular traditional brush and ink on a piece of bristleboard, that's a lot of work.

And it's a different way, I mean, the way you're using negative space and the like.

So again, as you're sitting down in the studio, what is your process to kind of get the idea on the page, not using thumbnails, kind of like that freeform jazz mentality of here's what happens?

- Well, so what I would do, I had my written outline.

And I used a program called Scrivener to basically plot out about how many pages I thought that book was going to need.

And so I would have a section that would literally say, here's where I will explain the cultural revolution in three pages.

And then I would page through all of those until I found one where I'm like, OK, maybe I know what that might look like in panel layouts, or I know some part of the page.

So sometimes I would start drawing some of the panels direct to inks, not even knowing what the rest of the panels were going to be on the page, having no idea what the text was, because the text was all a digital layer.

Basically, any element that did feel like I had an idea or I knew what it would look like, I would just go straight to final drawing on it.

And then the rest would bleed out and develop from there.

And I think that's because I used to be a painter, that was my most polished medium before I switched for this book.

And so I had that visual vocabulary of knowing how to have a conversation with a blank page as a painting.

And eventually, I think that the thousands of hours I've spent as a painter started to bleed into the visual language of Feeding Ghosts.

And the woodblock side of it, it was really, in some ways, the book is a refutation of the idea of binaries.

And so I was thinking, how can you use a literal binary of black and white and give it something that appears to have value and nuance and gradation?

- It's fascinating because there's so much life on every page.

And it seems like it's taking you forever to do a single page because of all the brush strokes or pen strokes.

And again, I'm thinking if you were doing this as somebody working for Marvel or DC, you would be still working on the first issue because it seems like, first off, your process might be more expressive than commercial.

So when you're sitting down and working, how long does it take you from page one, which might not have been the first page you worked on, to the final page that you completed?

- So I worked on the book for nine years.

And I did not put any sort of pen to paper or even words to page in terms of writing the book itself for the first four years.

That was just research and educating myself about the Chinese history that I needed to know.

And I think that's something that I've always been able to allow myself is a really long marination and percolation period.

And I don't start working until I feel, again, that within my body, the click of being ready.

So I would say the actual drawing and writing took about four years.

On a good day-- I mean, on a super productive day, sometimes I could do two pages, which is pretty masochistic.

Don't recommend it.

But also, I have a friend who's a poet.

And she said something that I love so much, where everyone would tell me-- they'd say, oh, take lots of breaks.

Step away from it.

Be kind to yourself.

But my buddy Arlene, she said, if you are wearing very beautiful, very painful shoes, the thing you must never do is take them off if you have to put them back on again.

And I was like, yes.

That is my approach to this book.

The way out is through.

I'm going to be relentless until I cross the finish line, because then I will be done.

- It's a great philosophy.

A lot of times, we tend to-- we want to take that break.

And then the next thing you know, oh, there's something on TV.

And we don't want to go back to it.

I do want to point out, I've got a colleague at the university, Dr.

Hudson, who uses graphic novels to teach Asian history.

And I recommended that he pick up a copy of this book, because one of the things I find fascinating is you take the history of China for hundreds of years, and you condense it into really interesting blocks.

There's even a chart at the beginning of the graphic memoir that goes through the various wars and periods of humiliation, I guess, and then through the revolution, the Communist Revolution.

I know that you have had many careers, many different journeys in your life.

At what point did you start diving into the history?

And at what point did you start to think that that was the key element to telling this story?

- Well, I kind of grew up seeing the aftermath of that history, because my grandmother was a journalist during the Communist takeover.

And she and my mom had to flee mainland China, because she ended up on the wrong side of the Maoist regime.

So she ended up having a mental breakdown.

And I, therefore, never really knew her as a person, just as this broken fragment that lived in my family.

And I think I always had some measure of curiosity about what had happened to make her that way.

But it wasn't until after she died that I started to realize that to heal my relationship with my mother, it wasn't just that I had to go back a generation.

I had to go back into Chinese history, where I couldn't explain why my dynamic with my mom was so broken without talking about the Chinese Civil War, about the Sino-Japanese War.

And actually, the timing and location on this interview is really pertinent to the book, because I actually-- my mom has dementia, and I'm her caretaker.

And so I'm down here right now, and I'm doing this interview from my grandmother's writing desk in my grandmother's room.

And so in a way, that idea of things coming full circle and the past repeating, I spent nine years within the feedback loop of my family's past, and now I am within the feedback loop of my family's present.

And so Chinese history is something that I think about a lot in looking at where my grandmother and now my mother have come to rest.

- One of the things you did is you went back to China with your mother to sort of put those pieces together from your grandmother's memoir, I guess, the book that she wrote when she was in exile in Hong Kong.

So you were able to sort of connect with your mother in a very real way and connect with the history in a real way.

It's not easy to go back and pick at those wounds.

So was it easy for you to get your mother to agree to take this trip with you?

- Well, I had an immigrant parent unicorn in that my mom actually wanted to talk about all this stuff.

And when people reach out to me and they ask, how did you get her to do that?

I'm like, that was me winning the lottery because yeah, I think, I started this book at the worst point of our relationship.

And so she was really skeptical that I was actually gonna see it through.

And it took a number of years for her to really see like, oh, you're doing this.

So by the time I had gotten a grant to go on my first research trips to Hong Kong and China, and I asked my mom if she would come with me, I think both of us felt like it was a really a powerful opportunity.

And it really did start this incredible softening within our relationship.

And also I always feel like the best way to get access to family stories is through food.

And so that was the fun part of it.

It was just like wandering around China with my mom, eating all sorts of street noodles, just with my notebook, collecting all the family stories.

- First off, I think we need more street noodles in this country.

- Agreed, always.

- But one of the things I remember early on in the memoir, there's a scene where you're peeling a mandarin or your mother's peeling a mandarin, and that sort of comes back later on.

And it's almost like you're peeling the different layers of the history and of the relationship.

So again, I hate to keep going back to this, but again, it seems like these symbols are part of the story.

And I'm just wondering, Bob Dylan once said, "There's no symbolism in anything I write.

"Just take it at face value."

And I'm sure he was being facetious.

But I'm wondering, as you are sitting down and you do that first page, is that going to be something that you're like, you know you're going to reference, or is this something where it's just organic?

- Oh, I'm very calculated.

Yes.

I had on my wall when I was working on it, I had a list of the things that I knew were gonna be recurring motifs.

And so I was very deliberately weaving them in in repeated ways.

And actually that scene with the mandarin, the book opens with my mother peeling a mandarin and handing it to me.

And there's a scene later when she and I are in Shanghai together, where I am handing her a mandarin.

And if you look closely, the way that I've drawn our hands, it's the exact reversal.

She passes it to me, I pass it to her.

And there's a lot of stuff where the poses and the panel repetitions across generations, I use the same layout.

And I don't think that anyone is consciously gonna notice that.

But when I'm talking about these instances of the recurrence of intergenerational trauma, the panel layouts and the things that are happening between my grandmother, my mother and me are identical, but they might be 100 pages apart.

- Another theme that you weave through this is your sense of belonging in many ways.

And again, I don't mean to be personal, but it's in your book.

It's you have a sense that you don't necessarily fit in at home or in the outside world a little bit.

And you talk about at one point, your character is asking, am I Chinese enough to be writing this book?

As somebody who is examining your own life as well as your family's generational journeys, is this something where there's any reluctance on your part to delve into it, knowing that it's going to bring this up?

- Well, I didn't really feel like I had a choice.

We talked earlier about how the book has this concept of hungry ghosts.

And my family's ghosts are really pushy.

And they literally told me someone has to feed the ghosts.

And so I was kind of, I entered into this grudgingly saying, okay, if this is what I have to do for all of us to just find some peace and get out of this feedback loop, then I will do it.

And I think for me, once I accepted that I had started, I was pretty much, I'll see this through wherever it goes.

You know, there's nothing that's off limits and there's nothing that I'm scared of because I took the leap off the cliff and now it's just gravity.

- When you land, which you do wonderfully, I mean, this not only is a fantastic work, but it's your first work.

If I'm not mistaken, and it is awarded a Pulitzer Prize.

And like I said, it's the first graphic memoir to win a Pulitzer Prize in the memoir category.

So at what point do you, you know, the book comes out, how do you find out that it's been nominated?

And what's that process like for you when you discover that your work is not just personal to you, but it's resonating with the audience?

- You don't find out you're nominated.

You just find out you win at the same time the public does.

So you just have the weirdest day of your life.

So for me, I've for many, many years, split my time between Washington State and Alaska.

And so when I found out I had taken a five month job working as a sous chef for the legislative lounge, feeding all of Alaska's senators and representatives and the award announced slightly before lunchtime.

So I was making sandwiches and my phone just started blowing up and then everyone, floor session broke and everyone came in for lunch.

So I just had to hand food and be like, what just happened?

- You know, one of the things about this, your story is just so fascinating because you've done so many things in your life that would define somebody else's entire life.

I mean, you were stationed in Alaska, not Alaska, Antarctica.

How do you sort of find yourself in these positions and at the same time be an accomplished artist and have time to actually write the great American memoir?

- Well, it's because of seasonal work.

That was really pivotal.

And I think something that I wish more artists and writers talked about openly is that if anybody seems like they're making a living off of their craft, there is something propping it up.

It is a broken system and we would be better served if we were just transparent about that fact.

Usually it's someone has a spouse in tech or there's intergenerational wealth or a day job that's not acknowledged.

And for me, the way that I made that work was by being very, very low income for many, many years so that I had basically free health insurance and paid almost no taxes.

And that meant that I could only afford things like rent for half of the year.

So I would spend the other half of the year taking seasonal cooking contracts and then being alone on a bicycle for two months.

And so what that meant is that whereas most people who are working artists and writers, they're in this place of constant financial worry of must make, must make, must make, must make.

I was able to, for four months every year, just say, checking out from the hustle, I'm gonna make food, it's gonna pay me a living wage.

When you're in these places like Antarctica or wilderness lodges in Alaska or on a boat, you're not paying rent, your food is covered.

You are outside of commerce, you're not buying anything.

And so basically what that does is it leaves you with a chunk of change and people got used to the fact that I was this wilderness artist who only took on freelance work for half the year.

So I could set up my projects and basically have a lot of control over my schedule.

And the collateral damage of that is you need to be really flexible with housing because you're kind of always figuring out where you're gonna sleep.

You might be taking a sublet here.

Like I think if you're somebody who is able to manage a life that's constantly in flux, it can be a really good pairing.

When I'm in my creative season, I can focus on it fully.

And I think it actually really saved me from burnout to have those cooking seasons.

And I miss them terribly.

Like I fantasize about, oh, could I just go back to my old job cooking 90 miles into Denali?

And I wish that was something that was in the cards, but I think also the older you get, the harder it is to drop off the face of the earth for three or four months.

And now with my mom's dementia, I'm not at liberty to do that.

But that was a complex interlinked answer, but that's kind of the only way I answer things apparently.

- I think it's a great answer.

I go to comic conventions quite a bit and you always see that there's the great artist that you wanna meet.

And then there's that person's spouse.

And that's the person who, well, while they're there, they're helping out.

But then you find out that's the person with the steady gig, with the healthcare that allows the artist to work essentially in an industry that is paying the same wages that they paid in the mid 90s.

The fact that you're able to go out and have adventures to fund your creative venture is, it's fascinating because you are taking risks, both doing things like going to Antarctica, which is one of those places that is so desolate that only a few get to go, but then you take risks with your work.

And I see in my rather terrible segue here that we have just a few moments left in our conversation.

If the folks watching at home wanted to find out more about you and your work, is there a place on the web they can do so?

- I'm a curmudgeon and I hide.

I have a somewhat out of date website, tessahulls.com.

And I've basically been off social media for a couple of years, but I pop back on the Instagram maybe once every three months if there's something that I need to broadcast.

So I am @tessahulls on Instagram, but I don't see myself really reentering that world fully anytime soon.

So really you just have to find me physically hiding in Alaska.

- Do you have any projects coming up that you are excited about?

- Yeah, so I'm pivoting what I do to become a comics journalist, working with field scientists.

So I am currently working on a piece about Sequoia science where I got to go climb Sequoias in Yosemite with some canopy researchers.

And I'm working on another piece about an Alaskan marine heat wave.

And I'm hopefully doing something else that will let me go out in foul weather chasing belugas.

So that's really what I'm doing is I'm taking my love of the wilderness, my desire to have my work, leave it better than I found it in terms of some sort of social and environmental good and threading the needle of a bespoke career that I am inventing for myself to inhabit.

- Tessa, thank you so much for taking time out of your day to talk with me.

It's been a great half hour.

- Yeah, thank you so much.

- And I'd like to thank everyone at home for watching Comic Culture.

We will see you again soon.

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