Meg Waite Clayton: In Praise of Writing Friends … and Publishing and Bookselling Ones, Too

The history of my writing starts with a purse. Like the character of Linda in my second novel, The Wednesday Sisters, my first writing teacher—at a college extension class—dumped hers out over the table and told us to write for five minutes about anything that spilled out. She swore we wouldn’t have to read (just as Linda does in The Wednesday Sisters when she’s pushing the sisters to write at the picnic table in the park). Then she called on me to read first.

Which is the good news. If she hadn’t, I’d have ducked out before she could. It had taken all the nerve I had just to get to that class, to admit that, yes, I dreamed of writing novels.

To make a long story short from that point, I’m just going to say it: Ten Years. That’s how long it took me from dumped purse to first novel on bookstore shelves. The thing that kept me going: writing friends. Like the Wednesday Sisters in the book, none of my early writing friends was published when we started out, but we now count - as of the publication of The Four Ms. Bradwells yesterday - seven books between the four of us, and an eighth under contract. We’re a stubborn bunch—which, if you’ve read any of the guest posts I’ve been honored to host on 1st Books—seems to be what it takes. So it seems fitting that the first Four Ms. Bradwells sighting was by my best writer-pal, Brenda Rickman Vantrease.

It took me another five years to get a second novel published after my first, The Language of Light, sold "modestly." (I'm absolutely thrilled, though, that Ballantine will be releasing it in paperback for the first time this June.) In the interim, I learned the hard way that while just being published is lovely, book sales are important, too. I have come to see that booksellers are the front line in helping new voices find audiences, and I do my best to support the booksellers who support writers. Selling books is as much a labor of love as writing them is.

And so is publishing. I know the publishing world can seem impersonal. Believe me, I know what a form rejection looks like. But I also know that most people in publishing stay there because they love books, and work really, really hard. I feel incredibly lucky to have a wonderful team helping me negotiate the turbulent waves of these changing publishing days.

Which leaves me with readers.

C.S. Lewis once said, "We read to know that we are not alone." It's a funny thing to think that a solo activity connects us in ways that little else does. But I know reading has made me feel understood, and helped me understand myself in ways that nothing else does. I hope that my writing will make you feel understood, too. And I appreciate all the precious time you commit to reading. Without readers, there would be no books. - Meg

P.S. If you're leaving here to take a look at The Four Ms. Bradwells - thank you! And will you take a look at The Peach Keeper by Sarah Addison Allen as well? It came out yesterday, too, and is a wonderful novel. Thanks!

Treasures of the Mind

My third novel, The Four Ms. Bradwells goes on sale tomorrow, and I'm so looking forward to sharing the joy of that at Kepler's, where friends will be gathering for refreshments and a short reading. But I'm going to be spending so much time talking about that at so many readings over the new weeks that I thought I'd use today to talk about some of the things I've been reading. I've just finished The Peach Keeper, a lovely novel by Sarah Addison Allen. It, too, goes on sale tomorrow - I hope everyone who takes a look at The Four Ms. Bradwells will take a look at it.

And like everyone else, I suppose, I've been glued to the news - Japan, Libya and Cairo and Bahrain - and sometimes wondering what good writing does in this kind of world. But for a reassuring answer to that, I turn to the wonderful historian, Barbara Tuchman, who said

"Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are engines of change, windows on the world and lighthouses erected in the sea of time. They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind.

Books are humanity in print."

And so I'm doing my best to set my light glowing at the top of my lighthouse, to shed what light I can. - Meg

Belle Yang: My Life, My Family, My Graphic Memoir in Snapshots

I will be at Kepler's at 7:30 P.M. July 8th talking about the process of making a graphic novel. Please join me.

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A drawing from 1967, the first year of my family's arrival in America. I like to show school children I wasn't drawing any better than most of them. The scene is of San Francisco Chinatown New Year's parade. Bing, Bang, Bong! Loving comic book sound effects at an early age.

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My parents and I moved to Carmel in 1971. I was lonely the first summer and Nancy Johnson, a professional watercolorist, who lived across the street, took me in her green VW Beetle to join her elderly students sketching and painting at Point Lobos and Cannery Row. The latter was no tourist destination. It was still the real Cannery Row of John Steinbeck.

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Self-portrait in my studio with my cat, Chairman Mao. Mao is a homonym for Mao--Cat (different tone. In Mandarin, there are 4 tones). You'll find him in my graphic memoir, "Forget Sorrow: An Ancestral Tale." He appears in the present and in the past, because I wanted to connect my father to my great grandfather who were spiritually atuned.

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During my three-year sojourn in China, I studied traditional Chinese painting from contemporary masters. There he is, Chairman Mao sitting on his bistro chair.

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My studio at night.

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I use pigment markers for shading and hatching. Pigments do not turn blue or purple with age. This ensures my art work remains unchanged. I continue to do everything by hand. Some artist draw with Photoshop, but this leaves them with no original art. Perhaps they retain merely the sketches, which were scanned into the computer to begin the art work. Maybe not even sketches. I feel rich when I have stacks of art work under my bed, in the closet.

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A tube of gouache (pronounced goo-wash). It's an opaque watercolor and gives me the richest black. I prefer lamp black to permanent black.

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An Ames guide allows me to draw parallel lines. They corral my uneven lettering. But my lettering is hardly as good as it was in grade school. WW Norton decided to digitalize my handwriting, so I have a Belle Yang alphabet. It looks good. I had to do a double-take when I saw my pages with the new alphabet inserted in the captions and word balloons.

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A graphic novel page in the works.


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Taping off an edge of a panel so . . .

I can paint a straight edge. But I rarely use this trick, because my hands have gradually grown steady and I can make a straight edge free hand.


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Having a little show on the carpet of the living room with my dad watching on. It's so satisfying to spread out a bunch of the work and see how far I've come.

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Asked to try my hand on the jacket art, I drew these two pieces. As you can see from the published book, we went in an altogether different direction.

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The last page--"Finis!'

And Matt my loyal Fedex man comes to take it all away. It still amazes me my precious art, the results of 14-years, can reach New York City in less than 24-hours.


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My great granddad, Yang Junchen. He is the tragic hero in "Forget Sorrow."

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The Yang Family resettled in Tianjin during the mid-1930s after the Japanese attacked Manchuria.

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My father Zu-Wu, or Joseph Yang, and me. This was taken in 1994 when my first self-illustrated, adult nonfiction book, "Baba: A Return to China Upon My Father's Shoulders," was published.

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Laning and Zu-Wu. My parents on their engagement.

A life-long partnership.


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My next project will be on my mother's Hakka tribe on the Island of Taiwan. Hakkas were pushed out of the north in the 3rd Century by horse-riding peoples of the steppes. Hakkas in turn became nomads and are often called the Jews of China. My grandfather was adopted by a Japanese family when Taiwan was a colony of Japan (1985--1945), thus the kimono.

THE END

The Tao of the Graphic Novel

Belle Yang Interviews Belle Yang

Before we begin today's Q and A, please click here to watch this 4 minute film in which I am drawing a graphic novel page.

Q: Ms. Belle, are graphic novels all fiction?

A: Well, Belle, this area of art/literature is still being defined as it develops, but I asked my friend the librarian Ruthie Pennington Paget who is my go-to gal pal. This is what she says:

Comics are non-continuous, short stories that you find in a newspaper.

Graphic novels are book length, but they are their own format, which uses the methods of movies for presentation. They are the fiction format.

Graphic memoirs are a non-fiction genre of the graphic format.

The graphic style is a new format with fictional and non-fiction content.

Graphic style = cup. Non-fiction and fictional work are different kinds of ice cubes.

So, you got it? I am actually more rattled. I’ve read “Graphic Novels for Dummies” and it says graphic novels encompass fiction and non-fictional works as in memoirs. And some creators would be outraged to be called graphic novelists when they prefer the aesthetic simplicity of being creators of comics. Some just want to be called cartoonists. Manifestos have been written about what comics should mean. Manifestos? I thought they were only for Communists. Is Communism the root of all comics?

Q: Ms. Belle, what are a few of your favorite graphic novelists

Okay, the obvious ones are Art Spiegelman and Marjane Satrapi. Then there is Alison Bechdel’s “Fun Home”—oh, she is just so literary and laugh-engendering even in as quirky a setting as a funeral home. How can you get literary in a comic book, you ask? You can. She does and I do or at least I try to be.

There are historical comics like the Canadian Chester Brown’s “Louis Riel.” Now that’s an area I want to see grow—biography and history. Comics grow up.

“Stitches” by the Caldecot bemedaled David Small. Josh Neufeld—and I am raring to get my hand on his “A.D. New Orleans after the Deluge.”

There is Joe Sacco’s journalistic approach in “Palestine” and “Gorazde.” He’s great, even if his characters were drawn by an overzealous dentist.

Seth’s “It’s a Good Life if You Don’t Weaken,” about the main character’s obsession to discover the past of a dead New Yorker cartoonist. Seth's drawings are loose-limbed and stylish. Yes, some people get to go by one name because they are special.

Oh, not to forget David B.’s “Epileptic.” He’s French, so he gets to be just David B. (That’s Daveeeed to us uncouth Americans.) His drawings are stunning, marvelous. They make me wish I had made them. His story is painfully personal, about life with a brother who suffers grand mal seizures. Their parents’ attention is focused on the child with the problem. You get the picture. David has to live with the horrid N word: Neglect.

And I could tell you about the graphic novels I don’t love, but I always stop myself from being negative about another maker’s opus. This is my pet peeve: if it’s a bad book of any genre, it will die a natural death. Don’t throw dung at it. We need to review the good ones. Leave room for the idea that all your taste may be all in your buds?

Q: How did you choose the comics format?

A: It jumped out at me in a dark alley at a dead-end. It truly did.

I lived in Japan as a child and was devouring the telephone book-sized manga for girls and came to the US in 1967 wearing my favorite manga character shoes. Now in middle age, the manga phenomenon has washed over this continent like a tsunami.

As I mentioned in yesterday’s Well-Read Donkey post, I had a tough time selling my prose book with full color illustrations. In the eleventh year of my struggle, I reconnected with Alane Salierno Mason, my former editor at Harcourt Brace. She had moved to WW Norton and Company, and she suggested I take a look at Marjane Satrapi’s “Persepolis.” I did, and KAPOW! I was knocked over madly in like with the comics format all over again. I said, hey, I can do this, and do it well. So I turned my prose work into captions and dialogues, drew the pages in panels of art then showed them to Alane. Norton offered me a contract in the fall of 2007.

Q: Why do you work in black and white. Are you giving up color?

A: Ms. Belle, you know very well this question sends me into a tizzy.

As far as I can remember, I've loved black and white art. It began with black crayons on white sheets of paper on the backs of mom's students’ exams. When someone mentions comics, my mind flies to black and white inky panels, not color. Black and white has it's own set of parameters and design issues. Black on white is ecstatic. The two "colors"--one being the total absorption of light and the other, the throwing off of all light--are polar opposites. It's thrilling, its ecstatic, it's exhilarating. It's drama and conflict. Durm und strung.

Think about the first mark you make on a pristine sheet of paper. The abrasion of the black crayon or pencil is like an explosion in the cosmos, the moment when matter comes into existence.

Q: Ms. Belle, how should someone new to the graphic novel approach the reading of the first one?

A: I am always surprised by this question, because I learned to read manga when young, so it’s as natural to me as eating rice. You can do it any way you like: read it fast and come back to study the details. Or linger over each panel until satisfied and go on to the next. I can’t begin to break down my eye-brain functions, but I imagine I scan the panels and the entire page.

A graphic novelists like Chris Ware in his “Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth” asks us to scan the whole page, because he wants us not to read in the usual way of moving our eyes left to right and top to bottom. He requires us to take in the whole and then home in on the details within the panels. You eyes will get a lot of exhausting and exhaustive exercise when you read graphic novels. It’s not kid’s stuff. Oftentimes, you have go back to find the trail of white pebbles, like Hansel and Gretel, in order to find your way.

And no, you are not stoopid if you missed it the first time round. Reread, reread and reread.

Q: Why did you use a brush and gouache instead of markers or pen and India ink?

I’m Chinese. Chinese love the brush. Therefore, I love the brush. Chinese culture is inseparable from the brush, since Chinese calligraphy is defined as the Mother of all arts. (I’ve heard Westerners refer to calligraphy as the art of the dunce. Hey, don't frown at me: I didn’t say it.) The brush can be supple or energized. It is able to express the artist’s every emotion, whether it be peace, rage or elated trembling.

With gouache, an opaque watercolor, I can get the darkest velvety black. India ink can crack. It’s not as supple after it dries on the Bristol board and causes the paper to warp. Nothing uglier than warped art.

Q: Why do you say the Chinese horizontal scroll is like a pre-modern motion picture. How does it relate to the graphic novel?

When you go into Asian museums, you might see a horizontal scroll unrolled in its entirety under glass. This is the wrong way to look. Horizontal scrolls were hand-held devices. Intimate. You unroll a section to the left and roll up what you’ve seen on the right. It’s as if you are riding on the back of a donkey and you get to travel the landscape, entering the mountain, descending into a village, crossing a bridge, getting into a boat to float downstream . . . the boat goes over a waterfall (Uh, just checkin’ to see if you are still with me.)

This is exactly what I try to show the reader of a graphic novel. I take my reader into the landscape of my story. And I might add that scrolls have lines of poetry written directly into the silk or paper, just like captions in a graphic novel.

Q: Why are you nuts about this format?

A: Because it’s perfect for me. In my prose books, the two-dozen pieces of art got lost. In my children’s book, the art was dominant partner. In graphic novels, words and images come together in a perfect balance and neither overwhelms the other. And how cool is that to be make ice cubes to fill a largely unfilled cup. My cup runneth empty is a good place to be.

Q: What are you going to blog about tomorrow, Ms. Belle?

A: I’m taking you on a photographic visit of my workspace and the tools of my trade, which includes empty, white tofu containers. And the latter has zero to do with being Chinese. I also want to show you family pictures of ancestors. But I have 24-hours to change my mind.