A Q&A with Jillian Tamaki — Carol Shields Prize for Fiction

By Emily Donaldson

Among its literary-award peers, one of the things that makes the Carol Shields Prize unusual is that it’s open to graphic novelists. This means that, on top of the many awards she’s already won, author-illustrator Jillian Tamaki may one day bag a Shields as well.

Tamaki grew up in Calgary, where she attended the Alberta College of Art and Design. As well as being a freelance illustrator, she’s the author of three children’s picture books and several long-form graphic works aimed at both young adults and mature readers. Several of the latter, including the New York Times-bestselling This One Summer, which won the Governor General’s, Eisner and Caldecott awards, and Skim, were produced in collaboration with her cousin Mariko Tamaki. Jillian’s sole book to date aimed at adult readers, Boundless (2017; another is forthcoming in 2023), also won the Eisner and made many best-of-year lists, including at Slate, NPR, the Washington Post and Boston Globe. Tamaki currently lives in Toronto.

As you know, the Carol Shields Prize is open to graphic novelists. I’m curious how you view that breaking down of barriers, genre-wise, as far as prizes are concerned. Is storytelling simply storytelling, whatever form it takes?

I guess I've always had a bit of an odd relationship with awards. My first award experience was when Skim, a graphic novel co-created with my cousin Mariko, was nominated for a GG in 2008. There was a bit of a controversy because it was just nominated for the text, which doesn't make a lot of sense when you're talking about a comic. Similarly, it didn't make a lot of sense when our next book, This One Summer, won a GG for "illustration"—comics aren't illustrated books. Our books are often about other forms: picture books, children's literature, adult literature. So I often feel like a bit of an interloper wherever I go!

I'm always grateful when our storytelling is recognized, whether it be from within the comics world or outside. It's absolutely fabulous when a literary award takes comics into consideration. It helps that individual creator and promotes comics as a literary form.

Most of your work had been labelled young adult. What do you enjoy about the genre?

I don't really consider myself a YA author because I don't participate in that corner of the industry very often. My cousin Mariko put it best when she said that we make books about teenagers, haha. Coming-of-age is such a rich time for storytelling because it's when you're experiencing everything for the first time. It feels very natural for a teenager to earnestly question the world and the way adults do things. I remember being a teenager pretty vividly, but I'm 42 now—while there are probably some things that never change, the teen experience seems very different now versus the 1990s.

Do you have plans for more adult-oriented books?

Absolutely! It's just a matter of finding the time to do it all. My next book with Mariko, Roaming [Fall 2023], is about college freshman travelling on their own for the first time over March Break. So we are kind of creeping veryyyy slowly out of teenagedom into adulthood. It's our first book that is explicitly not YA, but I think it's still spiritually related to our previous work? I guess we really can't resist sitting in between categories, can we?

What’s different about creating YA versus adult work?

I've actually never been totally clear as to what the "rules" for YA are. The rules for TV ratings are quite explicit: "Y swear word is no-go but you can say X swear word three times per episode," etc. I've never been sure what the actual definition of YA is, and I am the type of person that hates writing to a specific demographic so I'm not sure I ever want to find out. I'll never forget how when we first wrote Skim as a self-published mini-comic we thought it was so grown-up, had a warning on the cover and everything. And then when Patsy Aldana at Groundwood bought it she informed us that the story was YA.

When I'm creating for younger audiences I think I try to infuse a bit more punch, snappiness, energy. Whereas when writing for adults, I allow myself to be a little quieter, less theatrical? Sometimes the subject matter alone sets the audience. In Boundless, there's a story about getting bedbugs as a metaphor for marital discord in there. No kid wants to read about that.

*Boundless*, published by Drawn & Quarterly

Can you talk about your ongoing collaboration with Mariko, how the process differs from your solo books?

We have always called ourselves co-creators—versus "writer and artist"—to reflect that the storytelling comes together via both words and pictures. However, in our previous collaborations Mariko was solely responsible for the script, whereas with the new book, Roaming, we both conceived and wrote the story together. So that's a bit different. Regardless, my books with Mariko always start with a script. It looks a bit like a screenplay. When I'm doing things on my own, I will sometimes write a script first but often I will write and draw at the same time, so the thing is being conceived in pictures right from the get-go.

At some point every writing instructor has told their students: Show, don’t tell. With comics and graphica though, showing is the default. Do you struggle with that balance—of showing vs. telling?

That is a really great question. One of the biggest cartooning sins is to illustrate the text. For example, text and image conveying the same idea. Literal. A-to-A. The space in between the words and pictures is where the artistry and individuality comes in. Everyone will play within that space differently. So it's still a push-and-pull between showing and telling but it's maybe more a matter of how to show, since there are infinite ways of depicting everything. Also, as an aside, it's totally possible to "tell" too much within comics, just like within prose.

Is it sometimes hard to know where that too-much-telling line is until you actually draw or write it out in panels?

I think that when comics "tell" too much, it's often because it relies on text too much, versus having the images and text interplay. Therein lies the difference between "illustration," which is illumination of text, and comics, which is something distinct.

I don't know if "too-much-telling" is my problem. Sometimes I worry about being too literal, which maybe equates to too-much-showing!

Comic artists like Alison Bechdel, Chris Ware, Seth, Julie Doucet and Marjane Satrapi are now fixtures in the book review pages of major newspapers and magazines, but this hasn’t always been the case. What changes have you seen/experienced in the way comic arts have been treated over the course of your own career?

Some of those names have been in the discourse for about 20 years, so it's not totally a new thing. I started reading and making comics around 20 years ago, when "literary" comics were starting to really take off. So it didn't feel like a left-field type of thing to do. It seems like some of the optimism around comics being embraced by the mainstream has been tempered a bit lately. Ten years ago it seemed like major publishers might be interested in publishing a wide range of comics, but ultimately it seems like the interest is mostly centered around the middle-grade and YA audience, i.e., commercially very lucrative. Still, I think the form is much more widespread than it was when I first started. It used to be a big deal when a bookstore had a graphic novel section. Of course, the comics community is chugging along regardless of what the wider book world thinks.

Who’s been influential on your work—and I don’t just mean graphic novelists…

Many people for many reasons! Something I'm thinking about lately is how to be a multi-disciplinary mid-career artist, so I really admire people like Shary Boyle, Sook-Yin Lee, Kate Beaton and Sheila Heti, who continue to evolve. All Canadian women, incidentally.

Q&A with Jillian Tamaki, Author of Boundless