With SelfMadeHero’s 2023 publication of artist-athlete Mylo Choy’s inspirational graphic novel Middle Distance, an exploration of their path to self-knowledge and self-care, both on and off the track, Martin Dean here reflects on the abiding connection writers have long felt between the lived experience of running and writing.
Running! If there’s any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I can’t think what it might be. In running the mind flies with the body; the mysterious efflorescence of language seems to pulse in the brain, in rhythm with our feet and the swinging of our arms. Ideally, the runner who’s a writer is running through the land- and cityscapes of her fiction, like a ghost in a real setting.
(Joyce Carol Oates, New York Times, 19 July 1999)
What role does the body play in acts that draw heavily upon the mind, like writing? We might consider writing to be an entirely mental activity: having thoughts and ideas – with the body then merely brought in to (literally) “describe” them by typing them up or writing them down, but rarely considered the driving force. It’s often this quality that people find attractive about reading and writing – the escape. A departure from the physical realm or the “everyday” world and a journey somewhere else, to experience something like a dream created by the waking mind.
However, when you consider how important the body and exercise, particularly running, are for many writers (just as they can be to everyone as a means to manage and transcend certain states of mind) it’s tempting to reflect on how this works as part of the creative process. In other words, weather that escape can be in both directions.
Can bodily experience be used to empower the mind to create, or to create in a certain way? It certainly feels appropriate that the process of writing as a creative escape ‘“outwards”’, a departure, an adventure away from the everyday world, can be enabled through a regular return “inwards” of the mind to the body through physical training – running, or whatever it might be. Almost like a ship, long at sea, returning from the open waters of the imagination to dock and return to three-dimensionality and the present – and refurbishment – before setting out again. It’s as though the body presents a place for the mind itself to escape to, from time to time, so that the process of writing can continue.
But where does running feature in the processes of different writers? This is how Haruki Murakami put it:
When I’m in writing mode for a novel, I get up at 4 a.m. and work for five to six hours. In the afternoon, I run for ten kilometres or swim for 1,500 metres (or do both), then I read a bit and listen to some music. I go to bed at 9 p.m. I keep to this routine every day without variation. The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind.
(Interview with John Wray, The Paris Review, 2004)
Murakami suggests that he imposes the physical upon his mind to direct it, and even elevate it. It’s a ritual act that gives rise to a certain mental condition, like the rhythmic drumming used in some shamanic rituals to attain a trance state and access to other frequencies of consciousness.
For others, there is a greater emphasis on the fact that the body is finite, material, and located in a certain place, so that the body becomes something like an anchor for the mind, preventing confusion, distraction, or worse. It soothes – or subdues – the chaos of mental activity in order to send it in one direction only: either onwards, through the narrative; or just across the room, to sit down at your desk and get on with it once the voices of doubt or inertia are too tired from that run to bother you.
Carl Jung would often turn to yoga, he tells us, to use the body as a means of re-rooting himself in the world, and preventing his emotions from disrupting his state of balance.
I was frequently so wrought up that I had to do certain yoga exercises in order to hold my emotions in check. But since it was my purpose to know what was going on within myself, I would do these exercises only until I had calmed myself enough to resume my work with the unconscious.
(Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 1961)
The sensations of breath and weight, of three dimensions, linear time, and temperature, can supply a refuge at times when the mind won’t rest. When simplicity and direction are needed, the body can provide these, and eventually an equilibrium is reached between free imagination and the physically lived experience. Then things born of the mind find their way into manifestation, either as a written narrative, or a ten-kilometre journey at pace. (Or, if you’re Murakami, both.)As we run, and our bodies slowly exhaust themselves, our minds move closer to sleep and the alertness of our waking consciousness further into a liminal state. The experience of the body, of being in reality – of pain, momentum, motion, rhythm – educates our imagination, the automatic narrative inherent in determination subsiding into exhaustion, and the rhythmic changes of that progression with each footfall or repetition populate and punctuate the mind’s activity. (No wonder that a late play by that inveterate walker Samuel Beckett was called Footfalls.)
Both running and writing are acts of self-mastery and sacrifice. Each is a confrontation with oneself, to undergo a process that can at times be as difficult as it is rewarding at others. Mostly, the difficulty and the reward overlap. It demands a will to continue, to allow some physical momentum to override your mind’s occasional (or perpetual) reluctance, and accept the inevitability of pain, in some form or another. It brings with it the understanding that if you just listened to your mind instead of your body, you’d get nothing done, would never push further, and that sometimes, your body is needed to show your mind how to make things happen.
Perhaps some of that reality gets carried across, the momentum infectious, the sacrifice on one plane making things happen on another – in a narrative – wherever the imagination is deployed. It is almost a mystical process, as created characters begin to feel real pain, falter in fatigue, or else push on regardless, driven by momentum born, and experience lived, in circuits around your local park until they feel like extensions of your bodily experience brought to life elsewhere. The poet Charles Olson talks about “the kinetics of the thing”:
A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it (he will have some several causations), by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader... And the line comes (I swear it) from the breath, from the breathing of the man who writes, at the moment that he writes, and thus is, it is here that, the daily work, the WORK, gets in.
(Charles Olson, Projective Verse, 1950)
(Breath is another Beckett play.) Running could be seen as a means to generate the kinetics required for the work and to breathe sufficient life and reality into it from the experience the body has had. In this way, the runner starts to feel like Joseph Campbell’s monomythic ‘Hero with a Thousand Faces’, with the realms of otherworldly wonder to be found on the other side of discomfort or challenge (which can certainly be euphoric) to bring back riches for the mind – things alive with the truth of the bodily experience of reality which can pass that life on to the written experience, the read experience. Writing becomes something like a mediating line between mind and body, a point of meeting between two poles. This is perhaps akin to the place between extremes of mental or physical activity which the author of Middle Distance eventually feels able to occupy.
There are many ways in which running might work for the process of writing: to attain a different state of mind; to exhaust the critical inner voice; to introduce limitations on the mind’s wandering; to experience body, pace, rhythm and time more intimately, and transfer that harmony into writing (‘pace’, ‘rhythm’, and ‘time’ being the pulse of all writers’ work); and to feel what one’s characters might feel and understand the dimensions of their lived experience. There’s one final element though, I think, that isn’t exclusively limited to running, and this is simply the experience of the wanderer, going out into the world with an intention to see:
Promptly at 2:00, Dickens left his desk for a vigorous three-hour walk through the countryside or the streets of London, continuing to think of his story and, as he described it, “searching for some pictures I wanted to build upon”. Returning home, his brother-in-law remembered, “he looked the personification of energy, which seemed to ooze from every pore as from some hidden reservoir.”
(Mason Currey, Daily Rituals, 2020)
So for those without the energy to run, there can be merits to a vigorous walk too – as Dickens here (and, before him, the Romantic poets, too) remind us. Especially if the intention is to bring home the pictures, characters, and settings on which the mind needs to work. Perhaps the very best encouragement – to runners and writers alike – is the famous advice once offered by the Czech Olympian athlete Emil Zátopek (himself the inspiration of another graphic novel by SelfMadeHero): “When you can’t keep going – go faster!”
Best of luck from all of us here at SelfMadeHero to everyone at this year's London Marathon!
Aimée de Jongh is an award-winning animator, comics artist and illustrator from the Netherlands. She published her first comic aged 17, before going on to study animation. She has since created work for children's books, TV shows, music videos and art installations, alongside numerous comic book series. Her animated film Aurora was screened widely in the Netherlands, and Janus, a video installation she created with the L.A.-based artist Miljohn Ruperto, was exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The Return of the Honey Buzzard, her first graphic novel, won the Prix Saint-Michel, and her 2021 graphic novel Days of Sand was a two-time Eisner-nominee.
So, we decided to finally have a proper conversation with Aimée all about her unique journey from webcomics to daily strips to critically acclaimed graphic novels and animations.
SelfMadeHero: Before Return of the Honey Buzzard (2014/16), which earned some major acclaim (and a film adaptation), you started out with a regular strip in the Netherlands’ Metro newspaper that ran from 2012 to 2017. Can you tell us more about it, and what it was like working on other graphic novels at the same time?
Aimée de Jongh: I've published comics online for a long time before I got into graphic novels. After I graduated from my Animation studies in Rotterdam, an editor from a Dutch newspaper had seen my comics online. I was asked to develop a daily comic series and I was lucky to have this job for the next 5 years. I wasn't only doing these strips, but also animation on the side and, a few years later, that graphic novel. I enjoyed everything. I mean, it was a lot of work and I struggled to have any free time left – but all these things gave me joy. Having that daily strip gave me a certain speed in drawing, a certain recklessness too, because you need to simply deliver a strip every day. Good or bad. I believe it really helped me further as an artist – I'm still quite quick when I draw.
SMH: Your next book after Honey Buzzard was Blossoms in Autumn (2018/19), which was your first author-illustrator collaboration, with Belgian author Zidrou. How did you find the transition into that from a more solo-act creative process?
Aimée: I learned so much on that project. When working alone, you become such a hermit. It's you and your project against the world. But this time I had a partner and we had to make this book together. I learned to communicate my thoughts, my vision, my visual choices. He also pushed me to draw scenes that I would never have chosen. For example the supermarket scene. I HATE drawing supermarkets - all the shelves and products and all that perspective. But when Zidrou wrote that scene and explained the importance of it, I had no choice but to do it. He took me out of my comfort zone and that's never a bad thing!
SMH: We at SelfMadeHero had the pleasure of bringing both of those titles to the English-speaking monolinguals, as well as Days of Sand in 2022 (which we’ll discuss more later). Have you been struck by any differences in how your work has been received abroad as opposed to at home?
Aimée: Interestingly, there are differences in the audiences I meet at festivals. In the Netherlands and Belgium, where I lived and studied, I hardly see young people, or women, LGBTQI readers. I miss that sometimes. When visiting other festivals around the world, it's sometimes the opposite, which is so interesting. The comics culture in each country has had different waves and origins, and I can almost see that history by just observing the crowds. The same goes for the reception of my books – they are read by different ages, genders, backgrounds. It's been a joy to discover that.
SMH: The international theme leads us into 2019’s Taxi!. What inspired this foray into the autobiographical? Was it anything to do with your previous books making their way out into the world?
Aimée: Yes, absolutely, it was inspired by the trips I made during promotional tours for my books. When doing such a tour, I would always start at a train station or airport and I'd have to take a taxi to my hotel. A few times, in Washington D.C. and Jakarta, I'd spent more than an hour in that car because of traffic. Then there's a point where you just start a conversation. And these conversations were wonderful. I know taxi drivers have a bad reputation – so with this book I wanted to share these moments, and perhaps change people's view a bit.
SMH:And from that we finally reach Days of Sand (2021/22), your first Eisner-nominated title, along with plenty of other accolades! Your works seem to have naturally expanded in terms of mediums, place, and subject matter. The research trip to America you took for this book based on an American historical figure – do you look back on it all as the height of that international motion?
Aimée: Definitely! I still think back of my research trip in Oklahoma as one of the best times in my career. I had no idea what to expect then – I had just sent out a bunch of emails to researchers in American libraries, museums and historical societies. Meeting these people there and talking about the subject of the book was incredible. Everyone was so enthusiastic about the graphic novel project. I drove from Oklahoma to California on the route that the migrants in the book would've taken. In California I was invited to a traditional "Okie BBQ" with historians, and I visited the migrant camp where John Steinbeck and Dorothea Lange wandered around, two of the biggest inspirations for the book. I thought at the time: even if nobody ever buys this book, at least I'd have the richness of that trip – and it would've been enough for me.
SMH:Another Eisner nomination came soon after for Sixty Years in Winter (2022), and this year your new adaptation of Lord of the Flies is on its way! One book about an older woman on the move, another famously about children trapped in one place… Is there a kind of symmetry (or asymmetry) to that?
Aimée: I never thought of symmetry in my work too much, because all these books have different origins (Sixty Years in Winter was written by Ingrid Chabbert, and roughly based on her friend's life). But I think 'change' is a recurring subject in all my books. Sometimes the characters choose to change something themselves, sometimes the change is forced upon them. But without change, there is no story... For example, I ride my bike to my studio and I pass the same vegetable stall every day, where an old guy sells his greens. One day, the stall wasn't there. And immediately I started wondering what had happened. Did he die? Did he decide to retire? That's a story. And basically all it is, is change, I think.
SMH: Alongside all of this, you’ve worked in both (graphic) journalism and animation, and you’ve also taught. So, especially considering today’s world demands more multidisciplinary work than ever, what do you want budding artists to learn from your own career?
Aimée: That's a difficult one to answer. The more I teach, the more I find out that every student is different and that there isn't one single path for everyone. My career was partly driven by luck, too. Being at the right time and the right place, and so on. I believe that if I'd been 21 now, it would've certainly been harder. I hope budding artists will have confidence in their work without needing to compare it to others. We're all individuals with a story to tell. Some things only you can say, so go on and use your work to say it. We need more voices. It's the only way we'll understand other people.
If you fancy meeting us and Aimée in Uppsala (with some events in English!), email for tickets info while you still can!
And head here to read more about Aimée's life and career, and to see more of her work!
Samantha and George are a couple heading towards a sabbatical year in the quaint Mexican town of Oaxaca. For Samantha, it is the opportunity to revisit her past. For George, it is an unsettling step into the unknown. For both of them, it will be a collision course with political and personal events that will alter their paths and the town of Oaxaca forever. In tandem, the remarkable and arduous journey that a Monarch butterfly endures on its annual migration from Canada to Mexico is woven into Ruins. This creates a parallel picture of the challenges of survival in our ever-changing world. Ruins explores the shadows and light of Mexico through its past and present as encountered by an array of characters. The real and surreal intermingle to paint an unforgettable portrait of life south of the Rio Grande.
After its Eisner win in 2016, Ruins returns TODAY in paperback! Click here for a preview!
We sat down with author/illustrator Peter Kuper for a chat about his history with entomology, conservation, and the past, present, and future of Ruins.
SelfMadeHero:You recently described in Fictionable how moving to Oaxaca and visiting the Monarch sanctuary fulfilled a “lifelong dream” – Ruins came out years later, but how far back do its migratory themes go for you?
Peter Kuper: I was probably five years old when I'd heard about the existence of a place where Monarch butterflies would migrate, but in the western world exactly where millions of them flew remained a mystery. The image of a gathering of butterflies was lodged in my brain from then until 1976 when National Geographic magazine had a cover story on the discovery of the mountain location. I pored over those images of trees filled with Monarchs and it still took me another 30 years before I could see it for myself. It ended up more spectacular than anything I had imagined.
SMH: Entomology is also a lifelong passion for you, obviously. Did living in Oaxaca bring out your inner conservationist, or does that specific passion go back further as well?
Peter: Thanks to my parents, I had the good fortune to travel starting at a young age. My father had been a boy scout and my family camped with a tent and explored nature as long as I can remember. My father, a college professor, was always finding mushrooms to cook and foraging. We spent his sabbatical year traveling summers in a VW minivan through Europe and then lived for a year in Israel. I continued to travel as an adult – I met my wife while traveling in Spain and she and I spent years traveling around the world (Africa, Middle East, South East Asia, Central America) before moving to Oaxaca with our daughter. These travels opened my eyes to the planet and made me very aware of our limited resources and the value of basic things, like clean water.
SMH:That move to Oaxaca in 2006–2008 was with your wife and daughter, and you raised Monarchs there. In Ruins, Samantha and George take a lot of familial baggage on their Oaxacan sabbatical. Why turn a place you and your family know so well into a proving ground for characters with those anxieties?
Peter: I had done a good amount of autobiography in my career and wanted to explore beyond that. Creating fictional characters allowed me to put them in the center of things we had experienced from the sidelines. Many aspects were based on people I knew from our time there and I used that as a jumping off point. I had some idea about what would happen when I started, but as I wrote and drew it, the characters seemed to come alive and behave in ways I hadn't anticipated. I felt like I set certain things in motion, but the characters seemed to dictate some unexpected directions. I didn’t begin knowing exactly how the story would turn out, it was a process of discovery that expanded my work.
SMH:Colour is a powerful tool in Ruins. For years people have been poking fun at depictions of Mexico in film and television, where colours are often yellowed and muted. Conversely, you show colours brightening and diversifying as the characters travel south. Was this choice made with any motive beyond capturing the country’s vibrancy?
Peter: During the two years we lived here, I drew in my sketchbook constantly – that became an entire book published before Ruins called Diario de Oaxaca. I had time to take in the environment and all the colours and that poured into Ruins. I really like the idea of playing with style and used that as a way to separate both chapters and locations. So in the beginning when my characters are in NYC the more rigid and linear environment of the city is in pen and ink with digital colouring. When they reach Oaxaca it changes and becomes more like my sketchbook drawings with coloured pencils and watercolour. I wanted to give the readers the same feeling I had arriving in Mexico – the wonderful foreignness, so much more organic than New York. Every other chapter is taken by the Monarch's migration from Canada and I did that in monochrome blues for the background so the butterfly would pop and your eye would land on the Monarch. Those chapters are also wordless which is another switch in tone to put readers in a different state of mind.
SMH:The cast of Ruins all have very specific perspectives. There are also great differences in terms of what means of seeing they use and what aspects of the world they tend to notice. Even the eponymous ruins play into the characters’ ways of seeing. Where did that particular throughline come from?
Peter: I tried to make the characters as real as the people I knew and so they naturally saw the world from different perspectives. The environment is an important character as well – there's so much history here on every street, the ghosts of the past abound. Living here gave me a strong sense of that – the visual contrast of someone on a cell phone walking past crumbling remnants of vanished empires inspired many visions. The journey the Monarch takes was a natural way to show contrasts and the struggle nature faces confronted by our modern world.
SMH: Has anything changed since Ruins’ original release in terms of what you hope readers learn from it, or even what it means to you as part of your body of work? Have things like your INterSECTS exhibition changed how you look back on Ruins?
Peter: I am deeply pleased to have Ruins come out at this moment, it's still fresh for me and I hope readers will find that too. The plight of the Monarch has increased and their numbers are dwindling, so that's a horrifying direction that has only increased since Ruins was first published. The exhibition I had in 2022 at the New York Public Library reminded me how much Ruins informed where my work was heading. I had a fellowship at the Library in 2020-21 working on a graphic novel I proposed about the history of insects and the people who study them. Showing work from Ruins was one of the reasons they gave me the fellowship. I'm now finishing the final chapter of that book, INSECTOPOLIS, that takes what I started in Ruins following one Monarch and expands it into the story of dozens of insects. Ruins was a project that reminded me how interested I am in entomology and it links up as a bridge to my very current project. The fact that I'm writing these answers sitting in Oaxaca, where I've returned once again, closes the circle.
SMH: Ending on a lighter note, please tell us one of your favourite facts about the Monarch butterfly.
Peter: We still don't know exactly how Monarchs know how to find the very same forest in Mexico – one they have to fly thousands of miles to reach. Earth's electromagnetic field? The smell of fallen ancestors? A butterfly God whispers in their ear? We live in a world that is full of beautiful, unsolved mysteries.
Ruins returns in paperback TODAY in the UK, and migrates stateside on March 5th!
We hope you had a great holiday season! To take the edge off January, how about some info on our upcoming Spring titles? Coming soon we have:
Ruins by Peter Kuper, returning in paperback.
The Last Queen by Snowpiercer creator Jean-Marc Rochette.*
The Anxiety Club, written by Dr Frédéric Fanget and Catherine Meyer, illustrated by Pauline Aubry.*
George Sand by Séverine Vidal and Kim Consigny.*
*Translated by Edward Gauvin.
Peter Kuper’s Ruins won the 2016 Eisner Award for Best Graphic Album, and this year we’re thrilled to say that it’s returning in paperback!
In Ruins, Samantha and George are about to launch into a sabbatical year in the quaint Mexican town of Oaxaca. For Samantha, their journey to this historic town is about fulfilling a life-long dream; for George, it is an unsettling step into the unknown.
Publishers Weekly called Ruins “magnificent… a beautiful, epic roman à clef about the importance of seeking the new and questioning the old.”
OUT IN UK: THURSDAY 29TH FEBRUARY! 🇬🇧
Jean-Marc Rochette, co-creator of Snowpiercer and the Eisner-nominated Altitude, returns with The Last Queen, a multi-award-winning celebration of the subjects most dear to him: the mountains, and the balance between man and nature.
Édouard Roux, once an outcast youth feared as a child of bears and witches, is left disfigured and alone in the aftermath of the Great War. But when the animal sculptor Jeanne Sauvage grants Édouard the face of Hercules, life begins anew.
The Guardian wrote of Altitude: “Propelled by bravado and undercut by the very real risk of death, Jean-Marc’s story carries serious emotional clout, while its colourful panels capture the stark geometry of cliff faces and dangling ropes.”
OUT IN UK: THURSDAY 28TH MARCH! 🇬🇧
The Anxiety Club introduces three characters, each with a different form of anxiety. We follow their stories, and follow them into the therapy room where they discover the behavioural, cognitive and emotional tools to help free themselves from anxious thinking.
Created by psychiatrist and leading anxiety expert Dr. Frédéric Fanget, veteran psychology writer/editor Catherine Meyer, and seasoned artist Pauline Aubry, this accessible, YA-friendly graphic self-help handbook helps the reader to identify, understand and manage anxiety.
OUT IN UK: THURSDAY 25TH APRIL! 🇬🇧
The latest in SelfMadeHero’s acclaimed series of graphic biographies, George Sand dutifully explores the life of one of the great pioneering figures of 19th-century French literature.
Born in 1804 – at a time when women were deprived of their civil rights (along with minors, criminals, and the insane) – Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin (later known as George Sand) grew up to defy those norms, both in her life and her forty-year career as a novelist and playwright.
OUT IN UK: THURSDAY 9TH MAY! 🇬🇧
We have big plans for this season, these exciting titles, and the year as a whole! So, thank you for reading, and watch this space…
Monarchs, painters, runners, starmen! And not to mention some stars newly rising as we speak…Thank you all for joining us for this holiday wrap-up of 2023! And without further ado: Created by Francisco de la Mora and endorsed by the Frida Kahlo Museum, this year’s first new title was Frida Kahlo: Her Life, Her Work, Her Home.
April was a regal month, with Teresa Tobertson and Leo Schulz bringing us The Comical Eye’s British Monarchy. (This would later make it to the US in time for the finale of The Crown…)
We went into the next month Armed with Madness thanks to Bryan and Mary Talbot’s surreal portrait of Leonora Carrington. Special thanks to the Cartoon Museum and Gosh! (again) for helping us share that madness with the world.
The Cartoon Museum had us back soon after, with a flood of curious souls coming to see Jurga Vilé discuss Siberian Haikuwith LDComics’ Rachael Ball.
Ironically, things really heated up in September, starting with SPX! We got to show off Zarate and Kleist, and also debut Mylo Choy’s Middle Distance!
Soon after, we started on one of the highlights of the year. The First Graphic Novel Award brought in 170 entrants, twice more than the last competition… And then on to LICAF (after wrangling Oscar, the Talbots, and the Rickards into coming)!
As November rolled in, we celebrated Middle Distance arriving in the US with a talk and a signing at P&T Knitwear!
Meanwhile, back in October the FGN judges had managed to whittle 170 entries down to a healthy longlist of 30. When Thought Bubblerolled around the FGN wheels kept turning with the 7-strong shortlistbeing announced live and in person!
Then we returned to Sophie’s World with the second volume of Vincent Zabus and Nicoby’s graphic adaptation of Jostein Gaarder’s groundbreaking classic!
The capstone on our 2023 was the First Graphic Novel award ceremony at Waterstones Piccadilly! Seven shortlisters, seven judges, a sold-out crowd, and one winner: Alexander Taylor’s Bone Broth!
Everyone involved in FGN is still reeling from all the enthusiasm and support we’ve found at every step – not to mention the amazing coverage, like the live on-air announcement from Radio 4!
So this wraps up 2023 for us here at SelfMadeHero. For now, thank you for an amazing year, we wish you all the happiest holidays, and watch this space to see what 2024 might bring!
