Sarah Leavitt
Sarah Leavitt is the author of the graphic memoir Tangles: A Story About Alzheimer’s, My Mother, and Me (2010), and the historical graphic novel Agnes, Murderess (2019).Tangles was published in Canada, the US, UK, Germany, France, and Korea. It was the first comic to be a finalist for the Writers’ Trust Non-Fiction Prize, was a Globe and Mail best book of the year, and is currently in development as a feature-length animation with Vancouver-based Giant Ant Media and a US production company. Tangles has been included in a number of exhibitions, notably at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum and the National Library of Medicine. Tangles is part of the curricula in both health and literature courses from Canada to the UK to India. Agnes, Murderess represents quite a departure from Tangles — Sarah describes it as historical fiction with a touch of horror. It all started when Sarah was visiting a small historical site in the Cariboo and found a pamphlet about a nineteenth-century serial killer. This led to nine years of research, writing and drawing, as she figured out how to tell the story of Agnes McVee, an historical figure who maybe never really existed. Sarah has developed and taught comics classes for the UBC Creative Writing Program since 2012, where she is stealthily working on converting as many writing students as possible into comics makers.
Tangles: A Story About Alzheimer's, My Mother, and Me
Sarah Leavitt
What do you do when your outspoken, passionate, and quick-witted mother starts fading into a forgetful, fearful woman? In this powerful graphic memoir, Sarah Leavitt reveals how Alzheimer’s disease transformed her mother Midge―and her family―forever. In spare black and white drawings and clear, candid prose, Sarah shares her family’s journey through a harrowing range of emotions―shock, denial, hope, anger, frustration―all the while learning to cope with a devastating diagnosis, and managing to find moments of happiness. Tangles confronts the complexity of Alzheimer’s disease, and gradually opens a knot of moments, memories, and dreams to reveal a bond between a mother and a daughter that will never come apart.
Something, Not Nothing: A Story of Grief and Love
Sarah Leavitt
In April 2020, cartoonist Sarah Leavitt's partner of twenty-two years, Donimo, died with medical assistance after years of severe chronic pain and a rapid decline at the end of her life. About a month after Donimo's death, Sarah began making comics again as a way to deal with her profound sense of grief and loss. The comics started as small sketches but quickly transformed into something totally unfamiliar to her. Abstract images, textures, poetic text, layers of watercolour, ink, and coloured pencil - for Sarah, the journey through grief was impossible to convey without bold formal experimentation. She spent two years creating these comics. The result is Something, Not Nothing, an extraordinary book that delicately articulates the vagaries of grief and the sweet remembrances of enduring love. Moving and impressionistic, Something, Not Nothing shows that alongside grief, there is room for peace, joy, and new beginnings.
© 2024 Pagebound