Sarah Leavitt: On Navigating Grief Through Art

Sarah Leavitt is the author of the graphic memoir Tangles: A Story About Alzheimer’s, My Mother, and Me (Skyhorse Publishing, 2012), which is currently in production as a feature-length animation, and the award-winning historical fiction comic Agnes, Murderess (Freehand Books, 2019). She is an assistant professor in the School of Creative Writing at UBC in Vancouver, BC, where she has developed and taught undergraduate and graduate comics classes since 2012. Follow her on Facebook and Instagram.

Sarah Leavitt

Photo by Jackie Dives

In this interview, Sarah discusses the interplay of art and poetry in her new memoir, Something, Not Nothing, how her grief helped her take more artistic risks, and more. Sarah Leavitt

Name: Sarah Leavitt
Literary agent: Samantha Haywood at Transatlantic
Book title: Something, Not Nothing: A Story of Grief and Love
Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press
Release date: September 24, 2024
Genre/category: Memoir, comics
Previous titles: Tangles: A Story About Alzheimer’s, My Mother and Me; Agnes, Murderess
Elevator pitch: Something, Not Nothing is a collection of short comics that I drew and painted in the first two years after my partner died. The comics document her death and the time of grief and transformation that followed.

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What prompted you to write this book?

My partner, Donimo, had had chronic pain and illness for decades, and her health suddenly declined in 2019, when she was 54. She had a medically assisted death in April 2020. We had been together for 22 years and life felt so strange without her. Moving through grief was more complex and layered than I could have anticipated. I felt her absence physically in unexpected ways—I often felt literally off balance. The experience of grieving was also full of love and joy, and I hadn’t anticipated that. She and I had talked a lot about the idea of an afterlife—would she go somewhere after she died? I hadn’t thought about this concept as applying to me, but I ended up feeling like, as the survivor, I was also in an afterlife after her death: a strange new world that I was struggling to make sense of.

So, there ended up being lots of things about the experience that I wanted to document and explore. I’ve been making comics since the early 2000s, and I instinctively turned to comics again.

I had begun experimenting a bit with abstract imagery a few years earlier when I made a series of comic strips about what it was like to be partners with someone who was living in constant pain. I’d discovered at that time that using abstract shapes, patterns, and colors felt essential when I was trying to convey intense feelings and ideas that I didn’t exactly have words for.

After her death, artistic experimentation felt even more necessary, and I dove more deeply into it. I started using new (to me) materials like watercolors and colored pencils, grids I hadn’t used before (12-panel and 16-panel), and abstract imagery. Most of the comics were short poems as opposed to linear narratives.

How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?

Before my partner died, she said she knew I’d make some kind of art about her dying and death. At the time I was in so much pain that I couldn’t conceive of making art. I was just trying to survive physically and emotionally and take care of all the many tasks involved in caring for someone ill and preparing (or trying to) for death. About a month after she died, I went to a comics workshop with Teresa Wong, who got us to make four-panel comics about things we saw around us during our pandemic lives (this was in the summer of 2020). I kept doing these, and they were all about objects that I associated with Donimo. Then I started doing weekly art nights with a friend, and slowly (I can’t remember exactly how) moved into creating the comics in this book. Once I was making them, it seemed obvious that of course I was always going to make comics about the experience. That’s what I do. But I couldn’t imagine doing it before that.

As I made the comics, I posted them on Instagram, and made a lot of beautiful connections with other folks who were also dealing with all different kinds of grief, and finding ways to express it through art.

After about two years of making these comics, I felt like I had a collection. Arsenal Pulp Press bought the book in the spring of 2023 for publication in fall 2024, and we spent about a year on edits and design. I was fortunate to work with Jazmin Welch, the designer at Arsenal, who patiently worked with me to make my rough collection of comics into a beautiful book.

Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?

This is a collection of comics that documents a discrete period of time, so I didn’t make the kind of edits that I have done for other books, like adding or shaping material to make a narrative more cohesive or clarify a character’s motivations, things like that. I wrote a preface and acknowledgements, and redrew a few of the comics, but for the most part they appear just as I created them in the moment. The process wasn’t a surprise, but I definitely noticed how different it felt from my other two books.

Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?

The main surprise for me was the way my style changed, as I describe above. I had to find new ways to make comics in order to try to convey very new and strange experiences and feelings. And in addition to that feeling of necessity that drove my stylistic experimentation, something about being in such deep grief cracked me open. I took more risks and cared less about whether or not my work was good. By the end of two years, when I began wrapping up this collection, I felt like I was finally making comics in a way that felt right to me—I was making comics my way. That’s a very beautiful thing that has come out of the pain of losing my partner.

Another surprise was the connections I made when I posted the comics online. Most of the time when I posted a comic that I thought was so weird no one would respond to it, it would turn out that people found something in it that made sense to them. There are so many of us trying to understand, live with and move through our grief, searching for writing and art that will help us. It’s been very nourishing and generative to share my work with others and discover work that comforts, challenges and inspires me.

What do you hope readers will get out of your book?

I hope people who have experienced deep loss and its aftermath will find something here that makes sense. I hope that people who love and study comics will be interested in the formal experimentation I’m doing in the book, and have nerdy conversations with me about grids, panel composition and so on.

If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?

This question is so hard, and I’m afraid my answer is a cliché. But honestly, the thing that has helped me more than anything is just sitting down and making work. I spent so many years not making anything, because I was so scared it would suck. Or making a few things and then obsessively editing them, trying to get one thing exactly “right.” For me, the transformative shift has been to make lots and lots of work, to make enough work that I can figure out what I’m trying to do before I go back and try to revise and refine it. 

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