Sarah Mirk is a graphic journalist, editor, teacher, zine-maker, and illustrator whose comics have been featured in The Nib, The New Yorker, Bitch, and NPR. Mirk is currently a contributing editor at The Nib, where she writes and edits nonfiction comics about history, politics, and identity, and also works as a writer on The Nib’s animation series. She currently also works as a digital engagement producer for Reveal at the Center for Investigative Reporting, where she co-writes the investigative comics series In/Vulnerable, illustrated by Thi Bui. Mirk is the author several books, including Guantanamo Voices, an illustrated oral history of Guantanamo Bay prison, You Do You: Figuring Out Your Body, Dating, and Sexuality, Sex from Scratch: Making Your Own Relationship Rules, the graphic novel Open Earth, and the self-published collection Year of Zines. She is an adjunct professor in Portland State University’s MFA program in Art and Social Practice, where she teaches a graduate seminar on writing and research.

EB: First off, I wanted to say I love your work for The Nib, and I am really interested in both your comics journalism and also your diary comics. When it comes to journalism, how do you decide when a topic would work well to be reported through a comic versus a traditional prose article?

SM: I am always trying to think of things visually. You don’t want to have a story where it’s just a bunch of talking heads—one person’s face with a speech bubble next to them, over and over again. How can you tell the story in a visual way? Policy stories about bills being debated in Congress are really hard to depict in an exciting visual way. But what is the bill about? Is there somebody who I can go talk to who has a really vivid story about experiencing that issue in their life? Then you can tell the story from that perspective. So, for example, I worked on a comic that was about the history of male birth control. There’s not a lot of interesting visuals with the pill itself—it either looks like a gel or it looks like a pill. But you can use visuals to set the scene for what these trials look like around the world, or you can do some interesting graphics explaining the science, like how the medication works inside of your body.

I also love to do stories that have a strong interview component—talking to actual people about their lives and making that the center of the story. Oftentimes, I’ll do a comic that’s just built around one person’s story. I think that comics journalism is particularly well-suited for sharing a personal story from a particular perspective, because it’s very clear, when you’re making a comic, that you’re not striving to be like an “objective” observer. This is a personal story that this person is telling about their experiences from their perspective. And you can tell that more easily in a comic because it’s drawn by a person. You can literally see the human hand behind it. They don’t have this facade of trying to pretend that the reporter in the situation is just a bias-free robot. It is showing, quite literally, how the story is shaped by the people who are writing and editing and producing it.

EB: That’s really cool. I also love doing interviews, too, obviously. (See: this series.) I also like your point about seeing the human hand—I don’t buy that there is any such thing as 100% objective reporting. So, then, how does comics journalism compare to diary comics?

SM: I make diary comics to share stuff that I think is funny or interesting, and when I am experiencing something, I’m often already thinking of how I would draw it. Like when I hear someone say something that really sticks with me, I immediately think of it in a speech bubble.

The combination of writing and drawing comes naturally to me. I’m one of those people who drew a lot as a kid, which a lot of kids do, but I just never stopped. Almost everybody gets talked out of drawing some point—whether it’s an elementary school kid saying you’re not good at it, or if in high school you start to think it’s embarrassing or not cool or in college, you’re told it’s not profitable. Being an artist is really stigmatized in our society. But I was lucky enough to just start drawing and never stop. I’ve always kept journals that are also sketchbooks.

EB: So, is your creative process for writing and drawing the same?

SM: It takes me a much longer time to write traditional prose. I have a newsletter, and the one-to-two paragraph introduction is the most time-consuming kind of writing I do. I find it more difficult to have the message be carried on the weight of the words alone.

EB: Got it. Have you always been writing and drawing nonfiction?

SM: I grew up reading comics, and, when I began drawing my own, I drew my own comic stories about my own life. It was the way I expressed my feelings and shared my perspective with friends. In college, I even helped create a student comics newspaper. But at the same time, I wanted to be a journalist and do really serious journalism. And, to me at the time, I did not think that intersected with comics—comics were what I did on the side, comics were silly and fun. So, for eight years or so I worked as a reporter for The Portland Mercury, writing about local politics and culture, and then I became an editor at Bitchmagazine. Both of those were super stressful jobs, writing and editing and assigning stories all the time, and I also kept making comics on the side—so it was these two parallel tracks: making, reading, and publishing comics while also working as a reporter and an editor.

And then, after Trump was elected in 2016, I had a real crisis. I kept asking myself what my role is in the world and what I could be doing better. I felt like I had spent the last eight years focused on trying to create cultural change through journalism, and that it wasn’t working. It seemed to me that our culture was just getting worse. So, I began to think about the media that has impacted me and what things really expanded my horizons, and it was all comics. That was when I decided to focus on comics because I felt it was a way to reach out to people and draw them in. People will read a comic about a topic or an issue that they might seek out in a different medium. People are more likely to read a comic about Guantanamo than a dense history book about the U.S. and Cuba. Comics as a medium can really reach out to people and can engage the kind of audiences that are typically siloed in our current media landscape. I really wanted to be doing work that was not just preaching to the choir, but to be finding ways to connect with people who wouldn’t be inclined to seek out my work in a book or magazine.

EB: That’s such a good point. Comics make things easier to understand and digest. Human eyes are just drawn to colors and images. So, in 2016 you pivoted to doing comics full-time?

SM: 2016 also happened to be the year I turned 30, and I had decided that I would quit my job, travel for a year, and refocus on something different. I saved up a bunch of money and spent some time traveling and thinking about the kind of work I want to do. That was January 2017, and, at the same time, I got hired as a freelancer for The Nib. So I started drawing a lot more comics.

EB: I wanted to ask you about the fact that you regularly collaborate with people on comics. I know that you regularly draw and write your own stuff, but then you also often write a comic that someone else draws, like your series with Thi Bui. What is your process like, working with other writers and artists? When do you decide to collaborate versus just work on your own?

SM: I’m always down to collaborate. I’m a jack of all trades when it comes to comics: I write comics, I draw comics, I publish comics, I edit comics, I write comics that other people draw, I draw comics that people write, and I’m always down to edit work that’s written and drawn by somebody else. But that’s really different from a lot of comics journalism. If you look at comics journalist whom I really admire, like Marjane Satrapi or Joe Sacco, they spend years working in relative isolation. They go and research a topic, and then spend several years creating a whole reported book or memoir, but my work as a journalist is a lot more collaborative. I like to research a topic, write about it, and then get someone else to come in, and draw it. That’s how I was able to do Guantanamo Voicesin one year.

EB: I’m sorry, what?

SM: Yup, the Guantanamo book was written and drawn in twelve months.

EB: That blows my mind.

SM: Yeah, we had a pretty tight deadline because we needed the book to come out before the election, and that was only possible if I was not the only person doing the work.

EB: Wow.

SM: I always try to have no ego about my work—I don’t hold anything precious. Instead, I love to hand it over to someone else and say, okay, what’s your vision for what happens next here. My process for writing a reported comic is I do the research and then I write a script that looks just like a movie script, where I say what text should go in each panel. Then I share that with the artist and ask what they think, and oftentimes, they’ll make suggestions for how to move things around or point out things that don’t feel quite right. After that, the artist will start doing a storyboard with pencils, inks, and then finally colors. I see myself as like the shepherd of the process—it’s my job to make sure it gets to publication.

EB: And you had to do a lot of shepherding! Weren’t there a dozen different artists? That must have been so much to keep track of and coordinate. And at such a fast pace!

SM: Yeah, I sold the book proposal in July 2018—which feels like a million years ago—and then the text was due June 2019 and all the art was due January 2020. And the book was published in September 2020.

EB: That is so intense. I also sold my book based on proposal in January 2019 and it’s not coming out until 2022 at the earliest…

SM: At times it felt impossible and really overwhelming. I was super nervous that people I wanted to be in the book would say no to interviews, or that artists would fall through or not be able to finish the work in time. But all of the artists were extremely solid and everyone finished on deadline—except for two of the artists who live in Beirut, but they had good reason. They emailed me and said, “Hey we’re going to be late getting our files in because there is a revolution happening… and there is no Wi-Fi.”

EB: Yeah, that’s a pretty good reason. How did the book come about initially? You had been thinking about it long before January 2019, right?

SM: In 2008, I met a veteran named Chris, who had served as a guard at Guantanamo. I was twenty-two and I knew nothing about the place—Guantanamo was really just a word I’d seen in headlines. Chris and I met through the Independent Publishing Resource Center here in Portland, and Chris started telling me their stories about working at Guantanamo and their conflicted feelings about it. And then Chris was invited to go on a speaking tour around England with several former prisoners at Guantanamo, who are part of a group called CAGE. And I was like, you’re telling me a former guard and former prisoners are going on a road trip around the world together? I thought it was the most insane thing. So, I asked if I could go with them and they said yes and so I traveled around England with them and kept a blog of the trip, documenting their talks and experiences. At the time, I really thought it should be a book. I promised myself that as soon as the trip ended, I would start working on a larger project about Guantanamo. But honestly, I had no idea what to say, and none of the skills to create a book yet. I was an unpaid intern at a newspaper and didn’t know anyone who had written a book, let alone how to write a book myself. But I knew from the start it should be a graphic narrative because the text alone couldn’t convey the reality of these experiences. The power of comics is to build empathy between the reader and the subject of the story because you have to really see people’s faces, see what they’re wearing, see what makes them real people. To most Americans, Guantanamo doesn’t seem like an actual place, in part because the government censorship of it is so strong. That’s the way it was designed: to be out of sight, out of mind. So, I always thought that to make this place feel really real, there needed to be a comic about it.

But like I said, I didn’t have any of the skills to create a book then. Over the next ten years, I worked on developing the skills that I needed, and I was always thinking in the back of my mind that I needed to work on this Guantanamo project. I felt like I needed to do the book as an American, especially as a white American, because the government created Guantanamo in my name, in the names of white Americans, to defend white Americans. And that felt really gross to me. It seemed like my obligation as a citizen to speak out about Guantanamo and to create something that that would change our historical narrative about this place

So, over the next ten years, I made more nonfiction comics and learned a lot more skills, and then six or seven years ago, another veteran who served at Guantanamo contacted me after reading the blog I had kept in England. She also felt conflicted about it and had been looking for a way to process her experiences, so we decided to make a comic about her story. The comic was originally published in Symbolia, and now it is on PEN America, and it came out really, really well. It was the most powerful piece of journalism I had ever made. And it was powerful for the woman who I had interviewed because she now had a way to share her story with people.

It was a really raw emotional experience, and I thought it was really powerful for readers to learn about Guantanamo and understand it as an actual real place in the world. I wanted to do more. So, I used that comic to put together a book proposal and pitch the idea. At that point, I had an agent and had published a couple books, so I knew how to manage a project like this and I had the connections that, unfortunately, you need to get in the door. I also had the emotional strength to do it. I knew what I was getting into.

EB: Ha, yes. You definitely need a lot of emotional strength to get through writing a book. I am feeling that right now. Which brings me to my next question—who did you turn to for support in all this? Who is your creative community? Are there non-writer/artist people in your life you turn to when you’re having a meltdown? I guess what I want to know is: how did you make it through?

SM: I had to find different ways to try to keep myself sane. I had to design scaffolding habits. The hardest part I think is just working on the same thing for a year, and there is nothing good to show people for it—like it’s literally just a Google Doc. So, I decided I wanted to make something that I could share with people to express how I was feeling, so for the whole year I was writing the book I also made a zine every day. Just a little piece of paper that’s folded into squares, pretty simple, but I made myself make one every day in order to make something where I could process my feelings and share with other people. It didn’t have to be perfect. It was also a chance to get off my screen every day and make something by hand. Writing can be really isolating and I didn’t want to become alienated from everyone, so making the sines was also a way to keep my connections with others and share a small piece of art each day. And it worked. It became something that kept me above water throughout the year. When things were going really badly, I could put that into a zine and then I could publish it and people would say, wow, sounds like that’s really bad, and I would feel supported.

EB: That’s awesome. Maybe I should start doing that, while I’m trying to slog through my book.

SM: It doesn’t have to be a zine! It could be writing a postcard every day.

EB: I love that idea. So, feel free to answer about Guantanamo Voices specificallyor about writing nonfiction in general, but what do you think is the most challenging part of the process? And what do you think is the most rewarding?

SM: Definitely the most challenging part is representing people in a way that is accurate and true to them. That always is my biggest fear, that the people I am writing about will feel misrepresented or that I used their story to accomplish some sort of personal goal. The caveat to that is I don’t really care about how I represent politicians or other decision-makers whose role is to be a public person in society and have immense amounts of power. But for regular people in my work, that’s always the thing I’m most worried about.

The most rewarding thing is when people read my work, and tell me that it changed the way they think about something. I think that writing nonfiction is like planting seeds and seeing what happens. It can take a long time. I get messages about things I published two, three years ago. It feels really good when I can introduce somebody to an idea they’ve never heard of before or a personal story that they didn’t know about, and help expand their world. Anything that expands our horizons and makes us think that our futures can be different.

EB: Well, your book totally did that for me. I knew nothing about Guantanamobefore reading Guantanamo Voices. So, thank you for doing that.

SM: I’m so glad. And it’s not your fault that you didn’t know anything about Guantanamo. It’s by design.

EB: Finally, what is a favorite passage of nonfiction by a fellow “non-man”?

SM: I have two. Can I have two?

EB: Of course!

SM: I’ve been reading a lot this year about plants, and one excellent book I just read was Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Klimmer. She has a brilliant passage about harvesting cattails, which I had never thought about, what cattails give to humans. A student of her asks, “How can humans give back to all the cattails we’ve taken?” And she responds, “That is the work, to discover what you have to give.”

EB: Oh, wow. I love that.

SM: And the other one is from Rebecca Solnit’s book Hope in the Dark. In it she writes, “To be hopeful means to be uncertain about the future, to be tender toward possibilities, to be dedicated to change all the way down to the bottom of your heart.”