From ‘Hamlet’ to Hannah: How Understanding ADHD Made Me a Better Writer
The debut author explores her experience growing up with ADHD, and how it informed her novel Hannah Edwards: Secrets of
Menu
Sarah Leavitt is the author of the graphic memoir Tangles: A Story About Alzheimer’s, My Mother, and Me (Skyhorse Publishing, 2012), 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. Follow her on Facebook and Instagram . In this interview, Sarah discusses the interplay of art and poetry in her new memoir, Something, Not Nothing , how her grief helped her take more artistic risks, and more. Sarah Leavitt Name: Sarah Leavitt Literary agent: Samantha Haywood at Transatlantic Book title: Something, Not Nothing: A Story of Grief and Love Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press Release date: September 24, 2024 Genre/category: Memoir, comics Previous titles: Tangles: A Story About Alzheimer’s, My Mother and Me ; Agnes, Murderess Elevator pitch: Something, Not Nothing is a collection of short comics that I drew and painted in the first two years after my partner died. The comics document her death and the time of grief and transformation that followed. Bookshop | Amazon [WD uses affiliate links.] What prompted you to write this book? My partner, Donimo, had had chronic pain and illness for decades, and her health suddenly declined in 2019, when she was 54. She had a medically assisted death in April 2020. We had been together for 22 years and life felt so strange without her. Moving through grief was more complex and layered than I could have anticipated. I felt her absence physically in unexpected ways—I often felt literally off balance. The experience of grieving was also full of love and joy, and I hadn’t anticipated that. She and I had talked a lot about the idea of an afterlife—would she go somewhere after she died? I hadn’t thought about this concept as applying to me, but I ended up feeling like, as the survivor, I was also in an afterlife after her death: a strange new world that I was […]
Click here to view original page at Sarah Leavitt: On Navigating Grief Through Art
© 2024, wcadmin. All rights reserved, Writers Critique, LLC Unless otherwise noted, all posts remain copyright of their respective authors.
The debut author explores her experience growing up with ADHD, and how it informed her novel Hannah Edwards: Secrets of
Photo by Mikaela Wiedenhoff on Unsplash Email, we can probably all agree, is generally a bummer. At the moment, my
