In her genre-defying Feeding Ghosts—“Crying in H Mart meets Persepolis”—Tessa Hulls tells the story of three generations of women in her family, exploring love, grief, exile, and identity. Teresa Wong also explores multigenerational ties and memories in All Our Ordinary Stories, sharing the obstacles a daughter faces trying to connect to her immigrant parents. Sarah Leavitt, meanwhile, explores a different kind of loss in Something, Not Nothing: that of the death of her partner of 22 years. Using deeply moving text and abstract images, textures, poetic text, layers of watercolour, ink, and coloured pencil, she explores love, loss, and navigating the two. Together, these exceptional artists discuss baring oneself through visual art and the poignancy of graphic novels for sharing complex ideas. Moderated by Emily Chou.
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EMILY CHOU is a writer/cartoonist from unceded xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ territory who ran away to the UK, Japan, and Italy, and now finds herself right back where she started but with the addition of a rescue American (pitbull) and rescue Italian (human). She has an MFA in Creative Writing from UBC. Her poems and comics have appeared in various magazines and anthologies such as Room, Chinatown Today, and Geist.
TESSA HULLS is an artist, a writer, and an adventurer. Her essays have appeared in the Washington Post, Atlas Obscura, and Adventure Journal, and her comics have been published in The Rumpus, City Arts, and Spark. She has been awarded grants from the Seattle Office of Arts and Culture, 4Culture, and the McMillen Foundation, and is the recipient of the Washington Artist Trust Arts Innovator Award. Feeding Ghosts is her first book.
SARAH LEAVITT is the author of the graphic memoir Tangles: A Story About Alzheimer's, My Mother, and Me (Freehand Books, 2010), 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.
TERESA WONG is a writer and cartoonist based in Calgary, Alberta. Her comics and illustrated essays have appeared in The Believer, The New Yorker, McSweeney’s, and The Walrus. Her first graphic memoir, Dear Scarlet: The Story of My Postpartum Depression (Arsenal Pulp Press), was a finalist for the City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Book Prize and was longlisted for CBC’s Canada Reads. In 2021–22, she served as the Canadian Writer-in-Residence at the University of Calgary, and she currently teaches comics at Gotham Writers Workshop.
