Seattlest interview

I recently did an interview with Jen Betterley at the Seattlest. The full interview can be found at http://seattlest.com/2010/06/02/q_a_with_canadian_graphic_novelist.php. Here's a sampler:

"the road to god knows... involves a teenage girl, Marie, who is learning to cope with her mother's schizophrenia--have you personally known anyone that has schizophrenia? How did you go about your research for the novel?

Yup, definitely. My mom was diagnosed schizophrenic when I was pretty young, maybe when I was around ten years old. I should add that she died when I was 20 so she never saw me draw let alone read the story. I certainly used a lot of my own experiences for the framework for the narrative. I observed a lot while my mom was going through all of these battles. She was a beautiful and very loving person, but she also had a disease that she couldn't beat. She exhibited a lot of courage through it all, though.

A lot of road is quite autobiographical, but I chose fiction for a few a reasons. The main one was that I wanted some distance from the subject matter so I could examine and explore it somewhat objectively. Pure autobiography also brings up pesky questions; things like how do you represent real people and how do you deal with time? Fiction allowed me to really muck around with character and sort of conceal the identities of people I knew. It also allowed me to compress time - a lot of what's in the story really did happen, but it was over months or years rather than weeks. That allowed the narrative to be more focused and hopefully more compelling."