23 minute read
An Interview with Sarah Mirk
Sarah Mirk by Audra McNamee
Sarah Mirk
Sarah Mirk is a graphic journalist, editor, and teacher. She is the author of Guantanamo Voices (Abrams, 2020), an illustrated oral history of Guantanamo Bay prison. She is also a zine-maker and illustrator whose comics have been featured in The Nib, The New Yorker, Bitch, and NPR. Sarah began her career as a reporter for alternative weekly newspapers The Stranger and The Portland Mercury. From 2013 to 2017, she worked as the online editor of national feminism and pop culture nonprofit Bitch Media. Starting in January 2017, she moved on to become a contributing editor at graphic journalism website The Nib, and also works as a writer on The Nib’s animation series, which garnered nine million views its first season. Comics she edited for The Nib were nominated for two Eisners in 2020. Mirk currently also works as a digital engagement producer for Reveal at the Center for Investigative Reporting. She co-wrote the investigative comics series In/Vulnerable, illustrated by Thi Bui, which won an RFK Human Rights Award for Journalism in 2021. She is the author of several books, including You Do You: Figuring Out Your Body, Dating, and Sexuality (Lerner, 2019), Sex from Scratch: Making Your Own Relationship Rules (Microcosm, 2014), Open Earth (Limerence Press, 2018), and the self-published collection Year of Zines (2020). 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. Mirk holds a degree in history, with honors, from Grinnell College. She identifies as white, cisgender, and queer. In her free time, she befriends strangers’ dogs.
Interview with Sarah Mirk
By Audra McNamee and Rachel Obert
https://jsma.uoregon.edu/SarahMirk
Audra McNamee: Let’s define our terms: what is your definition of comics journalism? And what drew you to comics journalism? Sarah Mirk: Comics journalism can be any reported story in comics. What reported means is you interview somebody, you collect facts, and you try to do accurate, reallife storytelling in comics. My definition includes memoir, people reporting on their own lives, as well as writing about somebody else’s life. I’ve done both comics and journalism for basically my whole life. I always wanted to be a journalist. When I was a kid I loved reading the newspaper and I thought it was just the coolest job you could have. I like talking to strangers, and I love being curious about everything, and being a journalist is really good for both of those things. I get to basically find people I’m interested in, and then figure out what’s going on with them. I started working as a journalist when I was in college at the school newspaper, and then I got an internship at a newspaper in Seattle, called The Stranger, when I was 19, and started working for papers from there. At the same time, I also always made comics. I grew up reading a bunch of comics—Mad magazine, Groo by Sergio Aragonés—and would draw all the time with my brother. In high school I started drawing diary comics and zines, but I’d never heard of either of those terms before (I thought I invented the medium). After college, I was a very serious journalist and then drew comics on the side. But throughout my journalism work, I tried to incorporate more comics, and eventually worked with Matt Bors who runs The Nib. We made a couple pieces together, and he invited me to join The Nib in January 2017. Rachel Obert: What would you say your collaborative process is like? For example in Guantanamo Voices, you’re working with a lot of different artists from different parts of the world. How was that in terms of editing and collaboration? How do you manage a project of that scale? SM: I would say that all comics is a collaboration. Even if you’re one of those people who’s drawing and writing your own comics and putting them out on your own, you’re probably working with a publisher or an editor, or at the very least you’re collaborating with the people who are going to be buying your comics and really thinking about your audience. So comics is great for collaboration, because typically you have people doing each piece of the project. For Guantanamo Voices I researched and wrote the stories in the book, which are based on interviews with people who have spent time at Guantanamo. So it’s ten different stories, from ten different people who have spent time there. I interviewed those people, took the transcripts of those interviews, and turned them into scripts for the comic. Then I worked with a different artist for each chapter to illustrate those stories. So that was helpful because it made a different visual voice for each chapter, along with the different actual voice of each story. I also saw the people who I interviewed as collaborators, so I shared the draft of the scripts with them, as well as the draft of the pencils with them so that they would feel really good about what was published. The way collaboration worked with the artists on the book is that I wrote the scripts, and then I gave the scripts to the artists, and they went through thumbnails, pencils, inks, and colors.
I really love to work with artists in a way that gives them a lot of agency, I hope, and makes them feel like the project is theirs as well. So I don’t give a lot of feedback on the visuals; I give them a script, and I have a suggested image for each panel, and I give a giant dropbox full of reference photos. And then they can make whatever artistic choices they want: what perspective to show things from, when to do a really detailed close up versus a scene that’s far away, if they want to cut panels or add panels. And the feedback I gave was mostly around “does the text work?”; “does it literally fit in the panel?”; and on visual accuracy: “the boat would look different”; or “that person wouldn’t have been handcuffed at that time”; or “this uniform is actually slightly different.” Sending the script and the pencils to the people who I interviewed is helpful because they can do a lot of that visual fact checking. I really hope that everyone I worked with on the book feels like it’s their project too and not just mine.
AM: You have an enormous variety of ways that you tell a comics journalism piece, so when you’re beginning a piece, how do you decide if you’ll draw it or if someone else will draw it and, like who that person will be but also if it’s going to be zine or an online comic or a published book? SM: You know that’s a great question; I don’t have a great answer. Because it’s just what feels right. When I’m thinking about a story, I see it in my head as either a comic, or I start thinking about it as a text piece, and it’s the way that I visualize it in my head. I don’t know how to explain that, besides it’s just the way that I see it, and the way that I tell a story to myself. Usually, the stuff that I draw is mostly about my own life or my own experiences. I don’t draw stuff if I don’t have the skills to draw it. Like in Guantanamo Voices, there’s a lot of really complicated drawings of different buildings, helicopters—I can’t draw a helicopter. My style is more cartoony; it’s very fun, and not very true to life, and so it didn’t really feel like the right tone for that really dark story that needed to be really visually accurate. It’s so much more fun to write a script and hand it over to somebody else and have them draw it rather than to have to draw it myself. People know that writing comics is a total scam because you can write it way faster than you can draw it. You can just write “oh yeah there’s 20 people standing around a horse,” and then some poor sucker has to draw that thing. So I really love writing comics and handing them off to somebody else to see what they do with it. AM: How do you think that the physical format and presentation of comics journalism—zine versus an online comic versus a book—change the message of a work? SM: Definitely, with the book people take it a lot more seriously. It feels like a really big deal and also is a bigger deal because it takes so much time and money. I wanted to make Guantanamo Voices for about ten years before I actually started on it. It was a project where I knew I wouldn’t be able to do it without a bunch of money because you have to pay to tell the story right. It needs to be relatively long; the book is like 216 pages. It’s all these different artists working on the different chapters, you have to pay all of them, and printing and distributing a book costs a lot of money, and you need all those connections. If it’s not something that I wanted to devote the next five years of my life to, and all of my money, and call in all of my favors, I wouldn’t make it a book. But I like to make zines when it’s quick and easy, when it’s a story that I want to tell immediately. Maybe it’s just a small story that I want to tell whether it’s a joke, or a funny thing that happened, or something that just feels more immediate that I want to get out there immediately, I’ll make it a zine, and I love making zines because they’re so quick. They’re easy to make; they’re cheap to reproduce—it’s 10 cents to photocopy a zine. It’s not seen as weighty as a book. I don’t have colleges calling me to talk about what zines I made. If you want to actually reach people I think online comics are the way to do it. Because the number of people who will read a book versus click on Instagram posts it’s nowhere the same: A book that sells well might be 20,000 copies; an Instagram post that’s read by 20,000 people is middle of the road. You just reach a lot more people with online comics, so if you actually want people to read your story within the next year, just publish it online, because people will actually read it. A book takes a long time; it takes a lot of money; it takes knowing people, and calling in every favor you’ve got from everybody. So most of the stories I want to tell, I don’t want to tell them in book format. Publishing either yourself or with publications online, you can reach more people more quickly. RO: Who do you see as your audience? SM: It totally depends on the comic I’m working on. With Guantanamo Voices I was thinking of the audience as Americans who have heard of Guantanamo but aren’t super clear on what it is. I was specifically thinking of somebody who’s 19 or 20 years old, because the prison is 20 years old next year, and so I was thinking of somebody for whom the prison has been around for their whole life. They probably heard the word a few times, and maybe they think of it as a normal part of American life. I’m 34, and I can remember a time before Guantanamo, and I want to make it clear that this is a prison that was made by people within my lifetime, and it can be ended by people within my lifetime. With my other comics, I think of the audience as being somebody that has no previous knowledge of this topic. So if I’m writing about anything where I have to explain something, I just think this has to be accessible to somebody who has no idea what I’m talking about. I make sure I’m not getting too erudite or using obscure terms or assuming any kind of base knowledge. For my zines I think of the audience as my friends. People constantly say my work is really relatable, which I always find surprising because I just write it about my own life, and I always think it’s unique and weird. And then people say, “The exact same thing happened to me!” or “I feel the same way!” It’s really nice that people can connect with what I make that way.
AM: How do you perceive yourself as supporting or uplifting diversity in your work? SM: One thing I really think about as a journalist is, what stories do you take on to tell? When I was first starting out as a journalist for the first six or seven years, I would report on anything anytime. Like this is happening; I’m going to go write about it. And now I’m much more careful about what stories I take on: Is this a story that’s good for me to tell? or Should someone from a different background or ethnicity or experience write about this? So that’s something I think about now; I only take on the stories that are right for me to take on, and if somebody asked me to write a story, where that’s not a good fit for me, I tell them to hire somebody else who has had that background. The other thing is I like working as an editor, which is getting other people’s stories published. As an editor you’re behind the scenes, you take pitches, and edit stories, and then help get them published, so that’s what I do at The Nib and that’s
also what I did when I worked at Bitch magazine. I love having people come to me with ideas, and I’m there to help them tell the story and get it published. I hope, as an editor, that I always come across as empathetic and supportive because it is a job about supporting other people, and especially people whose voices are left out of media—that’s who I’m interested in publishing. So I try to focus on people of color, trans and non-binary people, and people from other countries, because we’re really missing voices from the global South in U.S. media. So those are the people who focus on editing and publishing at places where I work, and when I do have the power to hire people for a job I make sure that the first people that I call are women, queer people, and people of color, and there’s people who don’t have a huge amount of influence and power to get a ton of work on their own, so maybe it’s younger artists who are just starting out. Also paying fairly and equitably: so never asking anyone to do work for free, that’s a huge deal. With Guantanamo Voices, I didn’t do it for a long time because I didn’t have the money, and once I finally got the money, I was like, “Now I can pay people to do this.” As a journalist, you have to be really clear about where your sources are coming from. That’s one thing that’s always a big issue in journalism: Whose voices are you quoting in this story, whose perspectives are you valuing? So if I’m working on a piece about anti-trans legislation: How many trans people did I talk to versus cis politicians? You always want to make sure you have a diversity of voices that are included in the piece. RO: Talking about sources and making sure you have the full picture, how do you approach subjectivity in your work? SM: The old school journalism mindset is that you’re an objective reporter and every story you tell is objective, and I have never believed that. That’s totally rooted in white supremacy; it’s rooted in patriarchy; it’s rooted in “There is only one story to tell and it’s mine, a white guy who’s 55 years old.” I always think what’s much more important as a journalist is to be clear about who you are, try and understand your own biases, and be clear about your own identity. Are you approaching the story as a white person? Know that that’s something that’s factoring into the way that you’re reporting it or who you talk to. Are you approaching this as a cisgender woman—which I am? How does that factor into the way that you’re reporting on it? What I typically try to do, if I’m working on a story, is interview as many people as possible and see where the patterns line up. So if I talk to five people, who all have experiences on the same issue, what do they bring up, and what do they not bring up? For example, I just did a big piece for NPR about dog adoption. The big trending story right now is that people are returning dogs to shelters, but every single shelter I talked to said that that was not their experience. So in that case, I would never frame a story around the idea that everyone’s returning dogs to shelters, because the five people that I talked to said that wasn’t happening; maybe it’s happening somewhere to some people. So that’s an easy example of that. A much more difficult version is for a story like Guantanamo, where every single fact is contested, and there’s no transparency because the government won’t tell us anything. For example, I just wanted to make a little infographic at the front of the book to have some basic facts. One thing I wanted to include was how many kids have been in the prison. So how many people under 18 were imprisoned there? That number varies wildly. I forget what the official government number is, but different groups have gathered different numbers. I finally had to do a range: “The number of juveniles in prison at Gitmo is between 15 and 23.” So we don’t know that number. What I’ll try to do is either use a source that I think of as reliable and cite it, like, “Here’s what Amnesty International says,” or I’ll just do a range to make it clear that it’s unknown and try to be straight-up about that.
When I’m telling somebody’s experience, like in Guantanamo Voices, I think the best thing to do is make it very clear that this is this person’s experience. Somebody else who was at the prison would have had a different experience, but this is this person’s experience so they’re telling their story. Hopefully by putting ten of them together in a book, you see there’s different experiences that happened here. There’s not one universal truth. This person who was in the military experienced something different than this other person who was in the military. And then, as much as I can, I try to find facts and stories that I can back up and cite. So they’re telling me life experience, and I’ll see what details around there can I confirm. I don’t know what happened 30 years ago in another country, but maybe there’s a news report that can back that up. I try to fill out those life stories with as many facts that are confirmable as possible, but then always present it as this person telling their story. What you’re reading is a person’s perspective and experiences, not an objective, universal story. RO: With Guantanamo Voices there was a lot of sensitive material. Talking about the technical side of journalism, how do you personally conduct an interview to accommodate difficult stories like that?
SM: I try to do a bunch of research beforehand about the person and what they experienced so that I know going into it what they’ve experienced. I don’t want to ask someone a question that is really upsetting to them and triggering to them because I didn’t do enough research about what they’ve said in the past. I see it as a form of respect for the person I’m interviewing to read as much about them as possible. If I’m talking to somebody about a really sensitive topic, for example torture, if they’ve written about it elsewhere, and I can use that material, I don’t ask them to repeat it for me, for the interview.
In the book, for example, I talked to Moazzam Begg, who was a prisoner at Guantanamo. He’s written a whole memoir about his experiences, which goes in depth on the torture he experienced, and he’s done literally hundreds of other interviews where he talks about it, and he said I could use that material. He said I could quote from his memoir. He said I could quote from other interviews he’s done. So I know that I don’t have to ask about those things in the interview, because I can use that other material. And that’s really helpful to know so that somebody doesn’t have to rehash the most terrible things that happened to them again for me. I also just try to be really respectful that it’s a person that I’m talking to. I try not to push them or to mine a specific story out of them that I want to get. I really try to approach it more as, “Hey, I am here to ask you questions about your life, but if you don’t want to answer them that’s totally fine.” Because I always want to acknowledge that there’s a power imbalance when you’re being interviewed by a journalist. They are the person that’s going to take your story and publish it to the world and share it on the page. That’s a really scary thing; that’s a lot of trust to put into somebody. So I want someone to feel like they don’t have to tell me the things I’m asking about if they don’t want to. I don’t want them to feel any kind of pressure or power struggle going on there. I also always ask them if they have any questions for me. If they have questions, for me, I can answer them so that they feel like it’s not just like an interrogation. Sometimes we’ll talk for 15, 20 minutes, sometimes half an hour before I start asking them questions. It feels good to just talk like normal humans for a little while before you start the interview. I think that sharing their quotes with them before they’re published or sharing the script with them before it’s published is really helpful. I know some journalists don’t do that, but I would 100% rather have them flag something before it’s published than after the fact.
AM: I want to follow up on your response to truth and subjectivity and ask if you see the form of comics journalism as a better way to get across a journalistic message with regard to truth and subjectivity? SM: What I really like about making comics journalism is that readers know that it’s made by a person. I think when people are reading an article, there’s just not a lot of media literacy out there to know that this is written by a human and probably edited by another human and they’re bringing all of their biases and background to it. It’s seen as objective fact. It’s printed on the page; it’s got to be true. Newspapers hold up that false idea sometimes, so what I like about comics is that because they’re drawn by a hand, you can see the hand of the artist in there, and it’s very clear that this is made by a person. As you’re reading it, you’re really thinking about who made it. Whenever I’m reading a comic, I’m always thinking about the person that drew it and the person that wrote it because it feels so much more handmade. Reading an article I feel less of that connection to the person that wrote it.
Comics are really a good medium for journalism, because you immediately think about who’s making it. And then that puts you in the mindset of thinking about what biases and experiences they are bringing to it. The form of media most akin to it is podcasts where you’re hearing somebody’s voice, reporters telling you a story, and the whole time we’re thinking “this is a person, a human who is telling me the story.” Often in podcasting and with traditional radio more and more, the reporter can put themselves into the story and say, “I went here, and I was thinking this”; “I got interested in writing the story because of my experiences.” I think that’s really good to tell us who you are; why you are interested in the story; what’s your perspective that you bring to it. I see that as like the clearest translation to writing comics where you’re often putting yourself in the story and letting readers know who you are, and then they can see your hand throughout the whole story. AM: What have you learned from your previous works of comics journalism? And do you see your work developing and changing over time? SM: Yeah, I hope I’m getting better. I hope that’s changing. Definitely my art has gotten a lot better; my own ability to draw has improved dramatically over the last 15 years. Fifteen years ago, I was trying to tell similar stories to what I’m doing now, but it just looked a lot worse. And so now it’s really cool to be at a point where I feel that my art’s at a level where I can actually tell the stories I want to tell. When I started out as a journalist, I was really focused on proving myself. I felt like I had a lot to prove you know, I was really young and a woman, and I just felt like I really had to like work to show that I was serious, capable, intelligent, and hardworking. I was very serious. I’ve really been able to loosen up a bit over the last few years and tell more stories about myself, report on stuff that I care about that’s not necessarily serious journalism. What stayed the same is I’m always more interested in the project than I am in making any kind of money, so I don’t really care about the money involved. I’m not interested in being a commercial success. I give away a lot of zines; I give away a lot of comics; I’ll volunteer my time for any kind of good group, and with Guantanamo Voices I’m donating the royalties from the book to people that are working to end incarceration and Islamophobia. RO: How do you see comics journalism evolving in the future?
SM: There’s a lot more people doing comics journalism these days, both more artists, more writers, and more news outlets taking it seriously. Six or seven years ago I looked at the Wikipedia page for comics journalists and there were five people listed. It was Joe Sacco, Sarah Glidden, Susie Cagle, and two other people. Now there’s dozens and dozens of comics journalists, and that feels really cool. If you like to draw and you like to tell stories in comics, you feel empowered to do a nonfiction story, and to do a little bit of reporting. And hopefully if you’re a traditional journalist, you feel like comics is a medium you can work in. I just hope that it becomes another medium like radio or like print that people feel can be really useful for telling stories, and that a lot more people feel able to do. When I started out making comics people often said to me, “I know comics are popular, but I don’t know where to start, or I don’t know how to draw, so how would I ever make something like that?” People have more tools now to make their own work and publish it, so I’m excited to have more people be able to make comics, and hopefully places publish them.
