This post is the very first in a series of interviews I’m planning with talented storytellers about the creative process and also about how they bring their works to light.
I’ve known Annemarie Jutel for a long time and so am pretty familiar with her incredible energy and varied accomplishments. She is a critical diagnosis scholar and Tumuaki ō te Kura Tātai Hauora (Head of the School of Health) at Te Herenga Waka (Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand) and has a list of academic publications as long as the Nile. She has been an intensive-care nurse, a rural first responder, a rugby player, and a competitive runner (she even wrote a book about running that I love, A Woman’s Guide to Running: Beginner to Elite).
BUT, even though I knew all that, I was still amazed to learn that in the space of five years not only has she taught herself to draw, but she has also WRITTEN AND PUBLISHED a fabulous graphic novel! Launched last month at Wellington’s Unity Books, The Tear Bottle offers a fresh, funny, and moving perspective on family connections.
Can you give a bit of background about how a professor suddenly becomes a graphic novelist? When, why, and how did you start telling stories with pictures?
Over the [Covid-19] lockdown, I started doing some little crayon drawings to entertain my grandsons. I was a terrible artist, and made silly little pictures on subjects like: Social Distance from a Shovel! Three things to do with a bike during lockdown! Keeping warm during lock down!
I drew them with crayons on the back of scrap paper. Then, I would take a picture with my phone, and send them to the kids every day. It was sort of fun and I wasn’t very good. I kept putting hands on backwards and confusing shoulders and elbows. I did a lot of bicycle-themed cartoons, but I couldn’t draw a bicycle very well, so I drew a few bicycles, cut them out and then use Blu-Tack to put them on the subsequent cartoons.
One of my friends found an online cartoon workshop and suggested I attend it. When I did, and saw all the work of the other participants, I learned the cartoon face didn’t look like a da Vinci, it was usually just a little J shaped line with the nose some eyes about halfway up; a mouth and eyebrows that reflected the emotion of the character. And so I started practising the language of cartoons.
I’m good at language I speak fluent French. I’ve taken three university level Maōri courses. So learning another language was not as complicated as learning how to draw. I learned more by devouring graphic books. I particularly like graphic memoir, even though I generally don’t read memoir in prose. Funny, eh?
The incident that starts the book is you trying to soothe your crying grandson Luka by telling him about your grandmother’s tear bottle. He asks you what that is, and this leads to a maze of family stories and memories. As far as I know, this is all true. At what point did you realize this could make a great story?
The day that Luka asked me about the tear bottle, I was in a drawing-pictures-every-day phase, but I wasn’t that good with sequential storytelling yet. I was much more connected to the one or two frame cartoon with caption. I had done one short story about a cat that had walked into my office and sat on my lap unexpectedly, but that was only six frames.
The story of the tear bottle handed itself to me. It was such an intriguing enigma and I knew I could draw it, but I didn’t know what the story was completely at the get go. The enigma was two-fold: firstly the idea that we all knew so much about Mama’s tear bottle but didn’t even know what a tear bottle was; and secondly, that it wasn’t a tear bottle at all!
When I first started working on the story, I treated it like a mystery story. Did Mama know that tear bottle wasn’t a tear bottle? Did anyone else know that the tear bottle wasn’t a tear bottle? You can see that I’m avoiding telling you what the tear bottle is, because your readers will have to read the book to find out what the tear bottle actually was.
So my first set of drawings were all about my fact finding. I read about tear bottles. I spoke to my sisters. I spoke to my mother’s elderly cousins. I wrote to the British museum, to tear-bottle collectors.
But after pulling together a first draft, and doing what creative writers do—that is to say talking to other creative writers—it became more clear that the story was not about the tear bottle, rather, it was about how my family in particular, and families in general, deal with grief, guilt, death and belongings. Of course, it was also linked to how objects provide a foundation for stories about those important themes. The tear bottle itself was a Macguffin.
Can you describe your composition process? (eg How long did it take? Did you work on it steadily or in bursts? Did you need to do a lot of editing and how does editing work with a graphic novel?).
I drew every day. When my husband was watching TV I was drawing cartoons. When something funny happened in my research, I drew a cartoon about it. I wrote the story, showed it to somebody, then rewrote it. I probably spent a year getting a full story written, and then I sent it off to one of my famous cartoon friends, who I only knew casually: Ian Williams. He warned me that he would be a harsh reader. But he wrote me back words of encouragement and told me which of my pictures was his favourite. He mentioned that I had to develop my style, so I developed a style based on the picture he said was his favourite. It was mainly just a line drawing with a splash of colour, as opposed to a fully coloured image. So I started drawing everything like that.
I also had another exquisitely famous cartoon friend. Dylan Horrocks works at the university with us, and his wife is my good friend. The Rolling Stones magazine said he was the 12th best non-superhero graphic novelist of all time. He, maybe unintentionally, shoved me towards using a graphic tablet and drawing digitally. That made editing lots easier.
When you draw something digitally, you can make important adjustments without having to completely re draw. It’s a bit technical, but you have a system of layers where you can draw different things on different layers and then edit the layers independently without damaging a different layer. That means that if you have a character whose hand is on backwards but everything else is perfect, you can make a new layer with that corrected hand, and just replace the bad one by erasing it on the original layer. Or you can change colours with just a click if yellow works better than red. It’s magic.
But at the end, when I was getting ready for publication, I worked very closely with an experienced editor, who went through page by page and layer by layer, and gave me marching orders. He had a more developed fluency in the graphic language then did I, and so could recommend important changes that I wouldn’t have known to do. All in all, I probably spent three years on The Tear Bottle, even though I had written a full draft in one.
Were there any books, films, articles, or people that inspired you while you were composing (writing/drawing)?
There were many graphic memoir texts that inspired to me while I was composing the tear bottle. I read as many graphic memoirs as I could. Tom Hart’s The Art of the Graphic Memoir was incredibly helpful, as a source of graphic memoirs (although I didn’t follow his instructions). I loved Sarah Levitz’s Tangles (I thought I looked like the cartoon of her mother), and thought it was one of my favourite graphic novel but she didn’t like The Tear Bottle, and wouldn’t blurb it so I guess I should change my opinion. I haven’t yet. I also loved Danny Noble’s Shame Pudding. It was more a coming-of-age memoir but it had Jewish grandmothers in it like mine!
Judith Vanistendael draws beautiful books. I don’t know how much of it is translated into English and Iit’s mainly fiction that it reads like memoir; I wish I could draw like she does. And Lizzy Stewart also writes fiction that reads like memoir that blows me away.
The epigraph “Kia whakatōmuri te haere whakamua” (“I will walk backwards into the future with my eyes on the past”) had me thinking that in some ways the book is a meditation on the flux of time and on ancestry. In a very playful and natural way, the book explores the relationship between fact and memory, the significance of physical heirlooms, and the things that connect and divide family members through the generations. Of course, each reader extracts something different but I was curious whether time and ancestry were on your mind when you were writing.
Time was not on my mind while I was writing but my tūpuna were. It’s interesting that having moved to New Zealand the notion of whakapapa has greater significance. But it’s not just that. It was after I moved to New Zealand that I started losing my parents. And it was that loss and actually the possessions that came with that loss which gave me a view of the Māori concept of whakapapa. It became more clear to me how the history of my family was of course, duh, the history of myself.
Can you talk a bit about the process of publishing the book? How did you find a publisher? What were the steps you had to go through? Was it what you expected?
Oh this is a tragedy, the process of publishing the book. I had previously published nine books. All non-fiction, and most scholarly. The process of finding a publisher for a graphic novel was more arduous. You cannot imagine how flattered I was when I received my first nibble. A wonderful publisher called Graphic Mondo expressed interest, the acquisitions editor met with me, but it fizzled. I think she probably felt my work was too naive and would require more editing than she had the time to undertake. I have learned so much since then. I also imagine that we could have pulled it off a year later.
But my famous cartoon friend’s partner kept telling me how lucky I was to have had a nibble at all. That gave me conviction and I kept on looking for a publisher. And I landed one. I signed a contract in April of 2024 with a small independent cartoon publisher. The editor was in Canada whilst the publisher was based in the UK. He was the publisher of one of New Zealand’s most prominent graphic authors, and I checked with him first before I signed, but it all fell over. I delivered the manuscript promptly, but the publisher had financial problems and quite clearly emotional ones too. We ended up parting ways somewhat acrimoniously. I did have a publishing grant from my university which allowed me to produce a small print run locally, and so the book you have read is actually self published.
What reactions have you had from family members portrayed in the book?
I think that memoir is a dangerous genre. In fact I know it’s a dangerous genre if you are going to contradict the realities of your family members. In a sense this book is co-authored. I don’t think there’s a single picture in the book that was not viewed by the character and either approved or challenged. I hope you will find entertaining one of the challenging ones. I made my sister character say something that my sister never said and when I showed my sister her sister character she contested it. Loudly. I have preserved that exchange in The Tear Bottle. She thinks it’s funny.
Do you have another graphic novel planned?
I actually have two graphic texts planned. One is fully written as a first draft. The first one is a graphic explainer, which draws in cartoon style my scholarly interests, directed at first year university students. It is about the psychologization of society You may not know my scholarly interest as a sociologist is diagnosis and how it is used outside of the clinical realm. So this book gives a theoretical explanation for our focus on psychological diagnostic terms in daily life, with a view to stepping away from those terms. I have had some interest in the book, but entertainingly, the publisher the most interested retorted with a “we don’t really have the infrastructure to promote graphic books. Would you instead write us a scholarly one?” I am a bit tired of writing scholarly books about diagnosis. But I may have to do that first.
The other book is a bit more like The Tear Bottle. But I haven’t yet discovered the story. I lost a friend last year who had been my best friend when I was a child. What made our friendship so fascinating was fact that we were best friends for probably only two years and then she moved to Europe, but both of us remembered one another as our bestest bestest friends in spite of our short time as little friends. But we also also both lived in the same house at different times. When my family moved out her family moved in.
As her death approached, and she realised she would never visit me in New Zealand, I spent a year and 70,000 words and hundreds of videos on WhatsApp getting her a virtual tour. There is something about our shared occupancy of space and place which is at the heart of this story a friendship. I’m not sure yet the story is but I have started drawing elements of it.
What writing/drawing/publishing/marketing advice would you give to you-at-the-time-you-began-the-book from current-you?
I am not wise enough yet to be handing out advice: even to myself!
How can people find The Tear Bottle? Is it available everywhere?
It is available from most New Zealand independent book sellers. Unfortunately, postage is a bit dear to the rest of the world, but an ebook version is also available via the link on The Tear Bottle home page.
