An Interview with Sarah Mirk
We met Sarah Mirk in San Antonio, TX in the early days of the pandemic, at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) conference. We had a panel, “Get Inked: Comics as Cultural Critique,” and many of the original presenters were unable to attend—luckily Sarah agreed to step in at the last minute to chat about comics and community with us! Below Sarah talks to us about her journey into comics journalism, making a daily drawing habit, and zines as an antidote to anxiety.
How did you get into making comics?
I grew up reading and drawing comics. My older brother and I loved Calvin and Hobbes, the Far Side, Groo, and Mad Magazine and would often draw our own comics inspired by what we read. A lot of people draw when they’re young but then are discouraged at some point—told that their drawings aren’t “right” and that drawing at all is embarrassing—so they stop drawing. I feel really grateful that I never stopped drawing. I made comics for myself and my friends all through high school and college. I always wanted to be a journalist and pursued that career very seriously. While I was working at newspapers and magazines, I always did comics on the side. I remember standing over a photocopier on a Saturday night, copying a zine, thinking, “I guess this is my idea of fun.” While I was working as a reporter at the Portland Mercury, I started writing and drawing nonfiction comics about Oregon history. From there, I began writing, researching, drawing, and editing nonfiction comics whenever I could. I didn’t expect my paths of journalism and comics to cross, but in 2017, my friend Matt Bors, editor of The Nib, asked me to join the staff as a freelance editor. That opportunity really opened up my world and I not only gained a lot of skills in writing and editing comics journalism but started taking my own comics more seriously and devoting more of my time and energy to drawing.
How did you develop your "voice" or unique comics style?
I don’t know, I think that everyone has a unique visual voice that comes out when they draw. Ask 10 people to draw themselves and no two drawings will look the same. If I’d had more guts when I was going to college, I would have gone to art school. But I didn’t see that as practical, so it took me a long time to see myself as an artist and actually make time to draw. My comics have gotten a lot better over the past 15 years, mostly because I’ve practiced drawing more and more. In 2019, I did a project where I drew a zine every day for a year. Taking at least an hour to draw every day improved my work a lot. My style looks pretty much the same as it did when I was a teenager, only cleaner, smoother, more dynamic, and easier to read. But I can look at comics I did when I was 18 and see myself working to express the exact same things I’m still trying to express today.
The zine bike is a super cool project. You've also led some recent drawn zine workshops. How do you think zines (and comics) create a community forum?
I think we live in a rare time period in human history where anyone has the tools to publish their own work. The ability to write something and immediately publish it, without needing anyone’s permission or having to get past gatekeepers, is really revolutionary. But most people have so much anxiety about writing and drawing. For a lot of people, it’s terrifying to stare down at a blank page. When I ask people to draw something, most often they’ll respond, “I can’t draw.” I always find that really sad—the way people shut down their love of drawing years ago and its fermented into anxiety. I think comics and zines are a great antidote to that anxiety, because they can look like whatever you want. There’s no correct way to create a comic. They can be anything! With zines, I typically use a speedy, low-stakes format where I draw a zine on one sheet of printer paper and fold it up. Creating zines helps me embrace imperfection. It doesn’t have to be “good.” It doesn’t have to be perfect. It’s just about expressing what I’m thinking about and processing a feeling. So in my workshops, I try to help people see that every time they put pen to paper, they can create whatever they want, and hopefully they feel empowered to share their thoughts with the world.
Are you working on something now?
I’m teaching a couple comics classes right now that have taken up a lot of my time, but I’m always down to run a workshop for any groups that are interested. I charge a sliding-scale rate, so that any teacher or library can afford to host a workshop. The biggest project I’m working on right now is a book that will be a guide to making comics journalism. My Nib colleague Eleri Harris and I were talking about how we have gained so much knowledge about how to create nonfiction comics and there’s no guide available that gathers that kind of information. I hear from a lot of journalists who want to learn more about making and publishing nonfiction comics and from cartoonists who are curious about writing reported stories but don’t know where to start. So Eleri and I are writing and drawing a book that will help journalists, cartoonists, and people who love comics create better comics journalism.
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, which Kirkus called “extraordinary… an eye-opening, damning indictment of one of America’s worst trespasses.” She is also a zine-maker and illustrator whose comics have been featured in The Nib, The New Yorker, Bitch, and NPR.
Visit Sarah’s website: https://www.mirkwork.com
Follow Sarah on Instagram: @sarahmirk
Check out Guantanamo Voices