Committing to Your Story with Teresa Wong
Teresa Wong talks about how she writes memoir to make sense of life, perseverance when writing a manuscript, and the reality of being a working writer.
Interview by Raegen Montaque
Photo of Teresa Wong by Kaitlin Moerman
All Our Ordinary Stories (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2024)
Teresa Wong is the author of the acclaimed graphic memoirs All Our Ordinary Stories (2024) and Dear Scarlet (2019), both finalists for The City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Prize and longlisted for CBC Canada Reads. Her comics have appeared in The Believer, The New Yorker, McSweeney’s and The Walrus. A teacher of memoir and comics at Gotham Writers Workshop, she was also the 2021–22 Canadian Writer-in-Residence at the University of Calgary.
MONTAQUE: Why did you start writing memoir?
WONG: I don't feel skilled at writing fiction. I write from life, and the thought of writing fiction scares me because the story could be anything. Writing from life is not easier in a way, but easier in the sense that the thing has happened, so you don't have to determine the plot points. I think I started writing to try to make sense of my own life and to discover what I think about it.
MONTAQUE: It's easier to write from something that already happened, but also recollecting what happened and being able to portray it accurately is another hard layer of non-fiction.
WONG: Yeah it is, and kind of interpreting real people into characters on the page.
MONTAQUE: When talking about your family in your graphic novels, did you show them the manuscripts and get facts approved?
WONG: I did. Not to get the facts approved, but so that my parents wouldn’t be surprised about what they saw. They knew I was writing the book, and they knew I had been working on it for a long time. I'd interviewed them a few times about their escape stories and their life stories to get the facts, but I don't think they knew the scope of the book. That it would be more than just their escapes. I didn't want my mom to be surprised, opening the book and seeing herself in the hospital because she doesn't read English, and neither does my dad. So, before I sent my manuscript to my publisher, I sat down with them and I walked them through each page and tried to describe what was happening and what the story was about. I wasn't really asking for permission either at that point, because I had signed a deal, this book was gonna be published, but I didn't want to hurt them by surprising them.
MONTAQUE: Can you tell me more about your research process?
WONG: Some of it was interviews with my parents and other relatives to try to get their stories from their points of view. Then some of it was Google searching and reading news stories from the past around that time, and trying to read books about the Cultural Revolution in China. For my great-grandfather's story, I detail it in the book, but I spent a lot of time researching through Library and Archives Canada, trying to find his documentation from the early 1900s. Because I found that resource lacking, I ended up down a rabbit hole of all these other resources related to Chinese Canadian genealogy. There's a lot of research out there, where people have done really good work to try to compile documents, or make it easier for people to find their ancestors. Those were the types of research I did. It wasn't heavy duty in the sense of true academic research, but I felt like it was enough to round out the stories I was trying to tell.
MONTAQUE: What did your writing and comic schedule look like?
WONG: I wouldn't have completed this book if I didn't have an opportunity through the University of Calgary to be their writer in residence in 2021 to 2022. Until that point, I had been spending years thinking about the story but not getting much down and getting little bits and pieces. But those 10 months at the University of Calgary gave me actual concentrated writing time away from my day job. I took a sabbatical from my job as a copywriter, and spent all my time at the University. Half of it was community outreach time, the other half was my own writing time.
I'd say I probably had two to three hours a day to work on this project. That's when I sat down and thumbnailed out a full first draft and got everything down in a structure that I liked. By the time I finished that first draft, I had gone way past the residency into the summer and fall. I had to do the second draft, which is the finished pencils and inks, while also working. I probably worked on one page a day, and it took me a whole other year and a bit more to complete the finished manuscript.
That's just the reality of being a working writer and not someone who's famous like Margaret Atwood. You’ve gotta figure out a way to work it around your work schedule and your family life. For me, that means I generally can do a page a day. The beauty of it is those pages add up and you look back and you go, oh, I've actually made a book.
MONTAQUE: Seeing the fruits of your work and having that commitment shown physically in the pages is so nice.
WONG: Yeah, it's important. Making a graphic novel or graphic memoir, I feel, is one of the hardest ways to write a book. I'm not putting down prose writers, but for a prose writer, you write the prose and pour it into the container of a book. Whereas for a comics person, you have to create the container before you can even do anything. You have to decide: what size are the pages gonna be? What are the dimensions? What panel layout am I gonna use? Then you have to draw everything. It's drawing thousands of images to go with the words, and it is super time-consuming. There are times when you're like I don't want to do this anymore, but I think the key to that is to find a process that you enjoy. I probably would have worked faster if I had drawn everything digitally, but I don't like drawing digitally. I don't love how it feels, not that I don't touch up digitally afterwards, but I know for me, drawing on paper was important. Putting ink down and having that feeling of seeing the ink go on paper. I really like that. That made the long slog more worth it because when I sat down to work, I wasn't like, oh, I have to kill my eyes with the screen again and draw in a way that I don't like. I get to just spend some time filling in black ink. Making lines on paper gave me a satisfying feeling, and it was almost meditative, and because of that, it made the process feel better even though it was taking a long time.
MONTAQUE: Staring at the screen is truly horrible when you're at it for so long.
WONG: If you do have a day job or you're going to school, you have to stare at a screen for that too. Working on paper gives you a break from that and feels like a treat.
MONTAQUE: Comparing Dear Scarlet to All Our Ordinary Stories, I noticed the artistic growth, the change in the styles, and the amount of details. How did you prepare for your second book?
WONG: When I drew Dear Scarlet, I was just starting, I wasn't an artist. I didn't think I could do it. When I had the idea for Dear Scarlet, I had written out a script and was planning to collaborate with my friend, Doug, who is an illustrator. Before I gave the script to Doug, though, I kind of cut it up and put it into a sketchbook and on the left side, I had the words, and then on the right side, I sketched out what I thought it could look like, just to give him ideas.
I gave him that sketchbook, and he gave it back to me, and he's like: I'm not doing this. This story is so vulnerable and so personal. It's got to come from your hands. I said: I could only draw like 25 percent better than what I’ve shown you here. I’m not an artist and I don't want to make a fool of myself. He's like: you’ve just got to do it.
Dear Scarlet is my very first comic work, and it was kind of hacked together. I Googled how to make a graphic novel and tried to just figure it out. I was still learning and very shaky in my abilities to portray real lives. Some people say: all your style in that book is so spare, and your lines are so simple. Yeah, because I couldn't draw anything else. I was expecting at some point in the publication process for someone to say stop, stop, stop, this is a good story, but let's get you a real artist to draw this—and no one did. So, the book came out and it was received quite well. I thought, I guess I'm doing this now, maybe I should really learn how to be a cartoonist.
During the first year of the pandemic, I took a class online through the School of the Art Institute of Chicago on making comics. That class walked you through making one piece. You started with thumbnails, then the next week would be pencils, and then the third week would be inks and lettering. It was very technical, and the instructor, Jeremy Onsmith, was very happy to answer questions. After that class, I felt like maybe I could do this, and in that class, the piece that I created was the part in my book about going to piano lessons on the bus.
What I've learned in comics is that it’s not about making hyper realistic renderings of the world, It's more about being able to communicate with your drawings and communicate a feeling or a story. You can do that with simple lines, or shaky lines, or even stick figures if you're committed enough to it.
MONTAQUE: I feel like some artists or writers who want to go into comics might not have as much confidence in their drawing abilities, so I think what you just said is a nice encouraging piece for them.
WONG: I teach comics through Gotham Writers’ Workshop, and I tell my students, if I could do it, I'm sure most people can. Swallow your pride a little bit. Some people are gonna look at my work and go, oh it's not great drawing, but it's your commitment to putting out your story that matters more and some people are going to vibe with it, and some people aren't.
MONTAQUE: Going back to your friend who you initially wanted to illustrate your graphic novel. Do you think that if he didn't say that he wasn't going to draw it, that if you did have a different illustrator, would you be somewhere else in your cartooning or writing process?
WONG: I don’t know if I would have become a cartoonist. That feels very sad for me. Before that, I identified only as a writer. With All Our Ordinary Stories, I'd written a 40-thousand word draft as a prose memoir through the Humber College Creative Nonfiction Certificate Program.
I had taken this program in 2007, I think. It was correspondence back then because online didn't exist yet. So, I would send pages of my manuscript to my mentor, who would scribble on them and send them back. I had this work, and it wasn't going anywhere, and I couldn't figure out how to fix it. What I realize now is I had to become a cartoonist to fix it, and that graphics is the right medium for me. I can write prose, but something better happens when I draw and write together.
If Doug had drawn my book for me, it might have done okay, but I don't know if I would have gone on to do anything else. I think my career would look very different, or my creative life would look very different too. I'm really thankful that I found drawing as a medium, even just for myself. It feels different from writing. I don't know if you know the work of Lynda Barry, the cartoonist, but she says that drawing is part of the immune system for the soul and that everyone should draw whether they think they're good at it or not. There's something about that act of drawing that is healing, especially in the modern world, where people stop drawing by age 8 or something like that and then they get into the “serious world of writing.” I agree with her. I think everyone should draw.
MONTAQUE: People or kids just end up comparing themselves to each other and discouraging themselves before they even give themself a chance to do something that they really love.
WONG: Lynda Barry says: so often the question is, is this good or bad? But, what if you didn't ask that, what if you just asked, how did that make me feel? Was it fun, or was it not? Those are better questions to ask when you're doing art.
MONTAQUE: I think we'd have a lot more artists if that were a regular practice.
WONG: We’d just have a lot more happy people.
MONTAQUE: What emotions do you focus on when you're writing memoir?
WONG: Is wondering an emotion? Like we were talking about earlier, writing as an act of discovery is my big thing. I find that when I'm writing memoir, mostly what I'm trying to do is capture that feeling of discovery, or curiosity, or wonder and then try to work my way through that in the writing. It's a feeling of just questioning things and then trying to find the answers in the course of the piece.
MONTAQUE: The theme of this issue of Arrival is Explore, so I wanted to ask you, what ways do you explore in your creative practice?
WONG: There's the work itself, exploring questions, but then the craft of it, I also like to explore in the sense that I'm trying to push myself to the limit of what I can do. Dear Scarlet was the top of the limit of what I could do at that point. It wasn't great in many ways, but it worked. Then with All Our Ordinary Stories, I could have just stayed with the Dear Scarlet style and stayed with no gutters between panels or being extra simple, but I wanted to see what else I could do. So again, All Our Ordinary Stories is at the top limit of what I could do in terms of craft and skill. Now that I've done that book, I want to explore new ways of making a book. I could stick with the same panel grid, I could stick with black and white, I'm now practiced at it and I'm better at it and I've done a whole book that way, but what I'd like to do now is like get into colour or break out of panels and maybe do more page-based work. I want to see how much further I can take it, or where I can grow my skills.
This whole creative life is an attempt at exploring what's out there and what the possibilities are. All my favorite works from different graphic novelists, graphic memoirists, and even writers are from people who are working on the edge of what's possible. What even is a book? What can a book be? How can you break the forms and do something different? It's all about exploration.
MONTAQUE: I'm very excited to read what that's gonna look like in your next work.
WONG: I mean, I don't know. There's always the risk when you're exploring that you won't be successful in whatever sense of the word that is. There's a chance that the work I make won’t be that great either, but we’ll see. It’s just a learning process.
“Swallow your pride a little bit. Some people are gonna look at my work and go, oh it's not great drawing, but it's your commitment to putting out your story that matters more and some people are going to vibe with it, and some people aren't.”