ERIN:
With this particular blog series, I’m very interested by artists whose writing work can’t be possible without another discipline, or where the disciplines really collaborate with each other…so I feel very excited to talk to you about your relationship to text and visual mediums. I also wanted to address the role of silence in your work. I don’t know if that was intentional but it’s very potent in The Stone Fruit, particularly in the dream sequence where they are in the weeds. It made me emotional. There’s something very filmic about it.

LEE:
See this is why I asked you if you read comics. It’s something I’m curious about. I love feedback from people who don’t read comics because I get something totally different. I feel like the act of reading comics is a practice that people develop over time. I’ve definitely met a good handful of people who mostly read prose and fiction novels and they find that a particular and different part of their brain is engaging when they’re reading graphic novels.

I grew up reading comics so I didn’t really think about this in depth until I started looking more into theory of comics. There’s this guy called Scott McCloud who makes these comics theory books called Understanding Comics and Making Comics. I like alternative comics that push the genre outside of conventions a little bit, but it’s helpful to read them because he explains the particular magic that comes from visual storytelling. There’s a lot of theory about visual storytelling techniques in film, a lot of weird sorcery there, and a lot of crossover with comics.

ERIN:
There’s something about visuals and text overlapping that has its own really satisfying alchemy.

LEE:
I know! He talks a lot about the power of gutters between each panel and how the reader uses those spaces for their own interaction with the piece.

ERIN:

As you say, it's really interesting how things get stitched together, and the white space, the gutters… I don’t know the technical terms. The white space feels like you’re having a conversation with someone and then there’s this silence that isn’t awkward. It’s intentional and caring—a rest. You don’t often get silence these days. There’s so much density, especially with imagery online. The feeling is poetic. It’s like when you go outside early in the morning and no one has stepped on fresh snow. It’s that kind of feeling.

LEE:
That is really nice to hear. Yeah, I think it’s important to have those moments in your life, especially in the pandemic. When you were talking it was making me think about the reading experience. I think one of the things I like about poetry is that there is a spaciousness on the page for poets. They think visually about the way they group words on a page and sometimes this isn’t as commonly seen in fiction. I mean, sometimes it is written into the language itself. I really need those pauses. I’m a very fucking chatty person and I gravitate to people who also are. We can get very carried away and then one of us is willing to take a moment with something that’s potent or important or, you know, emotional. I feel like a dog straining at the leash sometimes because I’m always in a rush, but it’s really nice to have those moments.

Also, as a reader, I’m slightly dyslexic. I’m not a good reader. I tend to struggle with linear reading—like left to right and up to down. I see that comics offer a challenge for readers in that they give you all the information on the page at once. It’s not like how it is with film. You only get what the screen is showing whereas, in comics, you’ve got every frame for as many images as the cartoonist wants to put on the page. It’s a discipline to not let your eyes jump ahead and to, you know, try to appreciate the page as a whole. Of course, the story has an intended order, so I hope that those pauses slow the ride in some moments. I hope there is, you know, a build to my story and that those moments of pause land, not only emotionally, but also land in a way that gives the reader a breath.

ERIN:
The reading experience does make you very conscious of rhythm. There’s a musicality to the whole of the piece that feels purposeful. It’s interesting too to think of the dissimilarity between film and comics as you were saying. In film there is a very intentional aperture where you’re managing the audience’s perception of what they can look at. I’ll admit that I did read some of the panels of Stone Fruit out of order then I would go to the beginning and read it differently. There’s an agency in that reading experience that I like. I can notice the last thing first and go back and the work still translates. There’s central action occurring but there’s peripheral action as well, and I can choose what I want to focus on or engage with.

Actually, I wanted to talk to you explicitly about the line work involved in the stunning monstrosity that occurred when Rachel, Bron, and Ness were in the park together. They seemed in this free animal mode and I felt very gripped by the movement in these scenes. When we first meet Bron, she’s in that mode and then we see her out of it. I was curious about how you found that more animalistic mode for the work and how you decided to translate it visually.

LEE:
I mean, a lot of things in this book were an experiment. It was a debut, so there were a lot of things I didn’t know how to do beforehand. It felt like an enormous learning curve. I’d been doing comics for a good eight years beforehand but they were short comics. I had never done anything with magical realism like this. Magical realism is something I love that I wanted to try because a lot of my work is based in realism. A lot of my work is based in bodies and domesticity. I love those things and I wanted to bring them into a longer story, but I also wanted to see if I could do something fantastical for the fun and challenge of it and to loosen up a bit.

Honestly, I found it incredibly hard, and it’s not something I would repeat again in a hurry. It’s one of those funny self-talk things that doesn’t stand up well when I try to justify it, but I have this idea that fantasy and fantastical things and magical forms are the hardest to draw because there’s no basis for them. There’s no point of reference. I don’t think everything has to be original, but I do think there is a level of intention that has to happen in magical forms.

If it emotionally translates then I guess something landed and it was worth it. I think the easier part of those animalistic scenes in Stone Fruit was the writing. It was so fun to write those scenes. The drawing was…it was a challenge to figure out how the lines moved differently, how to make bodies move differently and how to capture enough of a character. You know, how are they still recognizable in this more monstrous form? The childcare aspect of the story was huge too. That was a seed I began with before I knew anything else. That aspect was emotionally essential to me, so I thought I’d just keep chipping away at it until it seemed like something I wasn’t too embarrassed to share.

ERIN:
The book is stunning Lee! Definitely not something to be embarrassed to share. It’s interesting… In my interpretation, it was very much a meditation on family and connection, and I think I detected something around the loss of innocence as well? I love the moment where Rachel’s sister Amanda is talking about her separation from David and she says: I feel like my child (Ness) is comforting me and that this shouldn’t be the case. There was this brief exchange around the fact that we might not give kids enough credit, you know? Like they might have more knowledge, capacity, or perspective than adults initially assume. I found the agency, vibrancy, and perceptive qualities of the child interesting.

I think the story managed to speak to innocence without using Ness as a symbol or token…something more allegorical. There was an intimacy to these childhood scenes. I also appreciated the tender relationship between Bron and her sister when Bron moved back home. There’s that moment at the dinner table where, even if there has been colossal growth and expansion, all these old patterns come back for everyone in challenging ways. I think a lot of people and families can relate to that.

I also found the narrative of the love story unique.
It continued to be a love story, but they didn’t stay together. It didn’t end horribly.

It was centered on individual empowerment and making space. On self-work and self-love. That is uncommon in love stories I think. I loved the tenderness and stillness in the park reunion scene.

LEE:
All of this is very validating because I’m like…these are the things I wanted to bring into the story but, from my perspective, it’s hard to know what’s coming through and what’s not. Breakup stuff was really important– that they didn’t end up back together and that they went through this arc. That the story would begin after the relationship had already had its peak. Especially in queer films, I feel like the narrative focuses on the point when someone realizes they’re queer, they enter the queer world, and it’s like, oh yes, now all the problems are going to be solved. I’m nearly thirty and I’ve been living as a queer person for the last fifteen years, being in a lot of different types of relationships: friendships, and romantic relationships. Breakups have been a big part of my life. I don’t regret these relationships or their endings. They’ve been really important. It’s something my parents and I speak very candidly and emotionally about. The warning they gave me was just like, love is not enough. It’s a cliché, but it’s true. You can want to make something work, and you just can’t. Sometimes the kindest thing you can do is separate and allow each other to grow.

I have been humbled by the urgency of growth I can feel in myself because of relationships. It’s remarkable what you can learn. I am hoping I wrote this love story, this queer love story, in a way where it’s about the relationship and also not about the relationship at all. That has been very important to me. Ideally, the story could be useful to someone else in that way.

ERIN:
Well, this is actually a question I wanted to ask. I wondered if, because of the subject matter around queerness and caregiving, I wondered if you’d received notes or exchanges from readers who have felt particularly represented or transformed by the work? Yeah, just wanting to talk to you about how conversation might ripple out past the book and what that means to you.

LEE:
I’ve had a lot of really touching messages from people. We’re complete strangers, but there’s this immediate familiarity around an experience they had with the story. I was very bowled over by certain stories, connecting with folks who have similar life experiences to me, like the first TV series where I saw a trans character, or Mariko and Julia Tamaki’s book SKIM…

ERIN:
I love that book! (SKIM)

LEE:
It was so meaningful to me because it was a weird mixed-race Asian teen who’s queer, and I was just like, I have never seen this before. It smacked me straight in the gut and was extremely inspiring. So I think I was prepared for some level of resonance with folks who could relate to some elements of Stone Fruit in a shared identity sense, but it was gratifying to see people who are really outside of that experience also resonating. My experience of writing is always in specificity and my hunch, even though I cannot say this with any kind of confidence because I haven’t been writing or sharing my work long enough, but my hunch is that specificity is what ends up making work feel resonant for other people, even if there is nothing objectively recognizable in the two experiences. That has been my experience as a consumer of stories. It’s hard for me to write characters that I don’t love. Even if they are antagonistic and a bit shit, I still have to love them, or I can’t write them very well.

ERIN:

Speaking of antagonists, I was surprised when Bron went back to her very conservative and religious family even though there had been immense harm that occurred there. The narrative was so beautifully nuanced and complex. The complexity came from the specificity. There is that scene when Bron and her Mother are gardening. Somehow when they are doing an activity they are able to connect more than through their words. The visuals show this tension and connection. There is this moment of grace in seeing the acknowledgement of both of their anger, and both of their limitations as well. It surprised me, because when Bron was depressed and decided to go home where she had been harmed I was like: no, no, no, no, but it ended up being complex and necessary. Even though there was harm there was also connection, interrogation, support, integration, or acceptance. There was something right in the impulse to go.

There’s something in Rachel’s utopia of home with Bron as well. The idea that utopias are impossible and the way Rachel was pushing. I liked the evolution of all of the relationships. These small gestures of forgiveness and acceptance that shift things subtly over time. You could see these exchanges visually on the page and it’s true that time and small gestures can sometimes heal more than words. These were great moments.

I keep going back to this idea of collaboration giving me hope. A graphic novel feels like a collaboration between text and visuals in such an integrated way. With collaboration in mind, I wanted to ask you if there is a collaboration you’ve had that has opened up another way for you to see yourself or your work?

LEE:
It's such a good question. I think I don't have the kind of satisfying pointed answer that I want. I think about long-term relationships here. There is so much cooperation involved. I think of a long-term relationship as a thing separate to both people, an entity or character of its own. One of my longest friendships is with this person called Tommi (goes by the name Tommi PG). They also are a cartoonist and they also publish with Fantagraphics. They also come from Melbourne and we met in my late teens. We were both in the same scrappy drawing and music subculture of Melbourne and then both ended up moving to Montreal. We followed kind of the same trajectory. Now they live in Western Massachusetts. I feel like we’ve challenged each other and been such cheerleaders for each other’s artistic life. Our friendship has gone through all these different ebbs and flows that have been very very satisfying, and we certainly did a lot of self-learning and mutual learning through that relationship.

I feel like my creative practice has been this kind of secret wife on the side where I’m committed and betrothed to this person (my practice) who takes all of my energy and all of my time, but then I leave her at home and do my personal life elsewhere and bring information and energy back from these exchanges to put into this secret wife relationship with my work. With Tommi, I feel like we both understood this. We had these other personal relationships outside of creative practice, and then these intense relationships to work. So there was a kind of funny polyamory there that we could share.

We’ve been able to share studio spaces for months or years at a time, and a big part of our relationship has been working in silence together for days. We both have the same kind of feverish consuming relationship to our work. I mean, God, it’s amazing to be able to show work to somebody, it’s amazing to be really egged on in that way. Sometimes we have also had moments of being like, this is unhealthy. Let’s pull each other up and remind each other to go outside. We’ve also edited each other’s work intensely. They weighed in a lot on the characters in Stone Fruit.

We would talk about the characters like they were real, like they were friends that you’d gossip about. They just have such an intense amount of curiosity. They’re so good at asking questions which has allowed me to be braver in my own work and to allow the edges of my relationship to my creative practice to be more porous. I think a lot of cartoonists are cagey, and comics publishing and edits are often hands-off. So there can be a secretive preciousness about finishing the work on your own, having nobody look at it, and then putting it out into the world. With other forms of writing it seems like there can be more exchange, more writing workshops (whether formal or informal). I think this is starting to happen with schools for comics like the one in Vermont. I think a lot of cartoonists are often introverted and solitary people who tend to hide in their bedrooms and make their work, then in this final big scary push, they share.

ERIN:
You must miss Tommi, with them not being in Montreal anymore.

LEE:
I'm hopefully going to be visiting them in a couple of weeks.

But yeah, I didn't know how important it would be to have friendships in that way. I thought I could just have my creative practice and then have my friendships and let those two things be talked about, but not interacted with in any kind of emotional way. That relationship has taught me that it's more powerful and important than I thought it was to have that kind of back-and-forth exchange.

ERIN:
It’s interesting... I identify with this secret wife/mistress relationship to work.

It’s this assumption that your personal self isn’t the same as your creative self. I mean, if you think of selfhood as a kind of sounding board, there’s certain things you turn up or down in different contexts. You don’t want to keep creative life or creativity down on that board for too long, or ever really, because then you start feeling cut off from something vital.

LEE:
At least most people I know, including myself, have an inclination towards a certain level of self-conscious perfectionism. I won’t let anyone see my work unless it’s resolved…unless it’s complete or “good” by my own weird standards of what that’s supposed to be. It’s vulnerable to share. I think there’s an element of getting over myself that needs to happen in order to share with people.

ERIN:
It’s a lifelong process. A nonlinear lifelong thing, I think.
It’s interesting to think about constructions of “success” or “career” when it comes to creative practice. You’ve had some very well-known platforms publish your work. Do you ever fear what meeting deadlines, or participating with some of these publications might do in terms of impacting your authenticity, agency, or vision in any way?

LEE:
Yeah, it's such a good question. I was just talking about this the other day in a class I teach actually. A bunch of new cartoonists and I were talking about autonomy and self-consciousness—the self-consciousness of financially relying on your work or publicly sharing it. One thing that was really helpful is that, in the first four to five years of making comics and putting them out into the world and getting paid more, I was working in kitchens the entire time. I had another job that gave me room to not financially rely on my comics for a really long time. For a few years now I have been able to rely on my comics, but even in this time, I’m pretty much ready to get another job at any point because I don’t want that pressure of having to make work that is first and foremost going to commercially fly.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that most artists end up being from middle-class backgrounds because there is a level of financial risk and living in elective poverty.

It’s tricky. I feel like we’re talking about creativity, but I’m talking about money and they’re not being more related than they ideally should be. Having autonomy to make what I want and share it on my terms and then retract it, especially on the Internet, is important.

I see artists who blow up on Instagram with a really particular aesthetic style and there’s lots of pressure. It’s like the need to keep having this cohesive aesthetic and they can’t experiment too much, or the changes need to be acceptable or follow trends. It’s not like these pressures don’t exist outside of social media, but I think they have really latched to commercial social media algorithms. But yeah, about deadlines, I need them! I’ll get solicited for a gig and I’ll have no ideas at all but I’ll need to come up with a comic that is ten pages long in a month. It ends up being a really great help.

ERIN:
It seems you’ve been able to keep your creative freedom amidst that pressure too which is really wonderful. What you mentioned about social media…specifically Instagram and making things for that medium. It’s strange to think of how often something could get co-opted or shared without credit. It’s also interesting thinking about NFTs, this notion of digital ownership of images. No matter how many times NFTs are explained to me, I am still like, what? How does this make any sense?

LEE:
I feel irresponsible sometimes, as someone who does create things and puts them online. I feel like I should investigate NFTs more, but I just don’t want to. I don’t want to think about it. I guess give me five more years until I absolutely can’t ignore it. It doesn’t take up too much space in my brain at the moment.

ERIN:
I am all backwards about it I’m sure, but sometimes it feels like the same people who buy very expensive NFTs are the same folks who poach lions or something. There’s something…I don’t know. Maybe I don’t fully understand or it will become more accessible or evolved in a way I can connect with more.

LEE:

Yeah, I mean, it could be that we’re being dismissive of it. I remember feeling the same bad taste in my mouth about Instagram when it first came out. I was just like, what is this level of broadcasting? Why are we doing this? Why is it important? Then I did see the potentials of the platform creatively and was like, ok let’s give this a go. I came to it a bit late but still early enough that it was before the algorithms were as powerful as they are now. I think it's still helpful and important to think about Instagram critically though. It is still this particularly thriving arm of capitalism. Instagram and Facebook as a corporation. I am dependent on it for my work though.

ERIN:

It’s so complex isn’t it?
In terms of my next question, it is more creation-focused. I am wondering if you have any recurrent obsessions, symbols, or questions that arise in your work?

LEE:

Yeah! I think the themes I end up being obsessed with are... I mean it’s just the shit that I end up talking about all the time with friends. I like talking about people’s families, friendships, and romantic relationships. Relational dynamics are so important to my life and tend to be important to the people I gravitate towards. A lot of these conversations end up in my work. Not as a direct transposition, because fiction is important, but yeah. Usually, I am fixated on something I am trying to figure out in my own life. So Stone Fruit was a lot around love not being enough and around chosen family. That utopia of family that you mentioned versus the pitfalls of reality and the beauty of those pitfalls too. The book is also connected to trying to figure out self and childcare.

So far, in my experience of making comics, and writing and drawing, one thing I realized was how every single project enables the next one, and also that the process in itself helps me reconcile myself with what I feel are the failings of the past project. What I want to explore ends up being really informed by what I've already made.

I finished a project with these two boys who are going through the first year of their relationship and dealing with challenges a year before I started Stone Fruit. This was the longest comic I had done. You could probably read it in six minutes, but it was the most thorough exploration of two characters that I’d experimented with at that point. That experience gave me enough confidence to stretch and reach for Stone Fruit.

ERIN:
What's something right now that you're putting your energy towards? Something you’re excited by?
LEE:
I'm working on another long-form book called Cannon. It’s about two friends who are connected in a place of scarcity, and then they enter adulthood and both of their lives start changing and they have to figure out their relevancy to each other. They need to explore how to stay close, and whether or not they still like or love each other. It’s set in a kitchen that’s loosely based off of a kitchen I was working in Griffintown, so it’s also about experiences of working in a kitchen, and dealing with anger. Stone Fruit is definitely visually inspired by Montreal, but it also really looks like Australia. It was written in the first few years of me being here in Montreal. I think it’s been six years that I’ve been here. Now I feel more confident in making work that’s grounded in the setting here in a way that doesn’t feel as scary as when I first started making Stone Fruit.

ERIN:
Does Cannon explicitly feature Montreal as a setting?

LEE:
Yeah – I have a habit of just intensely romanticizing any neighbourhood that I'm living in. I just take walks and cycle everywhere, so I end up looking around a lot. It’s not surprising that the places I’m around end up in the work. I'd love to talk to writers who don’t need their physical surroundings to reflect the environments that they're drawing or writing about.

ERIN: I'm just looking at my questions here and I want to... Oh yeah, this is an important question to me that I’ve been asking everyone. When you’re dealing with a subject matter that is sensitive or feels personal, for example, you’re talking about anger in Cannon, so when you’re talking about things that feel close or sensitive for you, how do you take care of yourself?

LEE: That is such a good question. I’m always trying to go through the motions of taking care of myself. I think one of the both helpful and frustrating elements of comics is that they’re so slow. It takes so long to do a single page. It might be one intensive week of writing a chapter, a couple of weeks of editing and figuring out what I want, and then seeing how that writing impacts the story beats for the following chapters. Then I draw and it takes like two months to three months to do like seventy pages of panels. In that time, the slowness is excruciating, but it’s also really important because I have the chance to read and reread it and realize...oh that’s too candid, or that’s too close to the bone. It’s too personal. I might need a bit more separation.

I work at a glacial pace because I’m constantly redrawing pages. I’m especially doing this with Cannon because it is more personal. I’m learning as I’m doing and the slowness allows me to constantly pause and check in with myself and make sure: Is this what I want to be sharing? Is what I’m making a harmful thing to be putting into the work? Is it unfair to me or anyone who might end up being implicated in it?

I am not naive about the fact that I’m writing about emotional things that are recognizable in my own life. If I write about conflict, it’s probably because I’ve had conflict in my life, even if the details look different. I want to make sure those things land well with the people I love, even if it’s not directly about them but still impacts them in some way, so I have people in my life read it at some point in the making process to make sure it’s ok. From a storytelling-effectiveness point of view, but also from an emotional point of view. I'm really grateful for the slowness of comics all of the time.

ERIN:

I’m seeing your values around love, community and relationship. I’m seeing that in your creative process and practice too, which is really wonderful. It’s like: I’m not doing this in a vacuum that is separate from my life and relations. I think that's exciting. I think the myth of the individual/ egotistical artist who says: I’m going to go off alone in a cabin and do my singular unique genius work separate from everything else and who cares who it injures trope is a thin and outdated version of art-making. I hope to see people continuing to deconstruct this.

LEE:

I think those kinds of personalities will probably always exist. But even the people I know who are like that have somewhat aged out of it. I’ve never met anyone who works like that who isn’t fucking miserable. Maybe they get quite successful doing work like that, but it’s not a very joyful way to live.

ERIN:
Yeah, and again, there are the notions of constructions or different definitions of success and career.

LEE:
Yes, questioning what success even means.I wouldn’t be very happy if I didn’t have a lot of community around me and if my work was not in a good symbiotic relationship with that, even if it slows the work down enormously… I don't think I would be able to do anything.
ERIN:
I completely hear that and I am pleased with my segue into my next questions which is: Do you feel that there is an act of generosity of community-building in your art? Do you connect art at all to social change, or revolution? What is your relationship there?

LEE: I feel like I have a very ambivalent answer. I do connect art to social change in the sense that I believe in the radical power of storytelling and stories as a tool of compassion, but I also have my own relationship with organizing outside of that. I guess the more I make work that is public, and that is published… The publishing industry, the book industry, is weird, the more I learn about it, the more I have a funny taste in my mouth, but it’s also really exciting and amazing and I meet lots of great people that are all very inspiring.

Everything capitalism touches gets weird. I can’t live outside of it, because none of us can. We’re in cities. We’re on colonized land. I don’t want my work to be the main avenue I consider as social change, but I think my work and my politics are inextricable. I mean, if I can make any contribution at all to making the systems we’re in a little less awful… I think there are much more actionable things that need to happen than publishing sensitive stories…but I want to keep publishing sensitive stories.

ERIN:
As a part of an ecosystem?

LEE: Yeah, yeah. I meet a lot of activists who do incredible frontline work and love art. I’m still figuring out where my own art fits. I’ve had incredible transformative, like even politically transformative, experiences with other people’s art. I don’t know how my own fits into that and I don’t think I’m going to find any quick and easy answers overnight, but I do know that art-making is what keeps me happy and what helps me function as a person.

Art-making gets me out of bed every day.

A WRITING PROMPT!

Imagine and / or write a scene playing out between two characters. What can we learn within the scene about their context from before the scene takes place? What happens to the scene & characters when we change that context?

ABOUT THE CREATOR

Featured

The Alchemists- Helen Simard

The Alchemists- Lee Lai

The Alchemists- Sheryda Warrener

The Alchemists- Gabe Maharjan

The Alchemists- Jessica Bebenek