Behind the Essay with Tamara Jong

Today, we invite Tamara Jong to the blog to share the origin of two entries from her debut memoir Worldly Girls! Read on for insights into the inspirations and questions that led Tamara to write the essays  “Weight” and “Tell Me a Ghost Story”. Take it away Tamara!

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I first came up with the last essay “Weight” and “Tell Me a Ghost Story,” in Worldly Girls as graphic narratives.

The comic rendering started because I finally got to take a course with writer Nicole Breit in 2020, near the beginning of the pandemic, called Spark Your Story. I could finally put aside time since my full-time job was on hold because it was an in-person job, and then I was doing part-time gigs when I could, waiting for the call to return to work. In the course, I learned about new ways to tell my stories, such as diptychs and triptychs and visual art that included work by artist Ai Weiwei, for example, and assignments which helped me access art in a way that helped me remember, Hey, you loved art and used to draw, so I started drawing again.

As a kid, I read all the Saturday paper comics, front to back, in The Montréal Star or The Gazette, depending, and was a fan of Archie, Charlie Brown, Garfield and Superman comics. Oh, and Mad Magazine and Cracked. I would doodle and draw comics, and I used to send off my work to the Draw Me ads for The Art Instruction School in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and I hoped they would pick me. They must’ve sent a letter or something, because my parents took me downtown in Montréal and met up with a salesperson who tried to sell them on the idea of art lessons by mail, but I was just a kid and they couldn’t afford something as expensive as that. I did draw here and there and took art class my whole high school, but never considered myself a real artist and still came up with silly stories and my childhood was filled with my very busy Jehovah’s Witness life, so it went off to the side eventually, much like my writing.

The course had me sketching as a way to get to my writing and what I wanted to say in the piece, and it served as a version of outlining for me. I submitted “Weight” to Nicole as homework, and it was initially just called “Lemon Meringue Pie” in most of its exact form. However, I constructed a tiny piece of lemon meringue pie made of cardboard and added some facts, like where the pie originated.

Below was what was removed:

“Elizabeth Goodfellow is thought of as the inventor of the Lemon Meringue Pie. She didn’t keep a journal or write down her recipes. She was well known for her pastry shop, cooking school (America’s 1st) and made a famous Lemon Pudding Pie that was later included with her student Eliza Leslie’s cookbook “Seventy-Five Receipts for Pastry Cakes & Sweetmeats.” This recipe calls for loaf sugar as a topping, no mention of meringue that eventually appears on today’s Lemon Meringue Pie. Beating the whites would take an hour at most, and much trial and error for this mystery discoverer.”

See what I mean? Although interesting sort of, it was not at all the spirit I wanted to capture for the piece, and wasn’t missed once it was gone. It flowed better without it.

After Nicole’s class, I took a big leap and enrolled in a yearlong comics program with Tom Hart’s Sequential Art Workshop for 2020-2021. I had come upon Tom’s book How To Write a Graphic Novel work during Nicole’s course and was surprised by how many ways you could tell a story. I wanted to now lean into the uncomfortableness of trying something new. I was scared. It’s tough to get something you really want and be so afraid of messing it up, but I’m not sure how long you can hold on to whatever this can be. Ahead of the program, I sat in on an open drawing jam by SAW (as the school is known), and some of the students had also decided to hang out, and I couldn’t believe how incredibly gifted they were. I was most likely out of my league. Definitely out of my league! I wondered if I had made a mistake, but I had heard somewhere that comparison is the creativity killer, so I pushed through those doubts. I felt like I was starting again, because I was really. I had to be retaught what I had forgotten. It was humbling.

The school was a delight. The students, the talented students, were so generous. Tom Hart started the school because he was building a place and community for what he didn’t have as an art student, and wanted to create that atmosphere. We learned about comics history, formed a community, and hung out online outside class. It was encouraging and meditative. I gravitated to the work of Josh Bayer, Julie Doucet, Emil Ferris, Tom Hart, Mira Jacob, Jillian Tamaki, and Adrian Tomine to name a few.

Because of all of this, later on, “Tell Me a Ghost Story” came out as drawings the same way as “Weight” had, and I let the images carry the gist of what I wanted to say. Real estate was big and small in some ways for me with these pieces. I had to work within the limitations of panels and lines, remembering when Saw instructor, Justine Mara Andersen said to never waste a line, which works in drawing and in writing. I accepted and let my drawing and words be minimal when they had to be. I gave in to the form, and what it wanted to be, at least for the time.

I experimented with a lot of different types of panels and tools within the school. Much of which became autobiographical. The thing is, I had only wanted to do fiction. I had many, many ideas!!! They quickly went off to the wayside, long forgotten. I still draw from time to time but art came back to me long enough to remind me of who I was, and that I belonged in the world of non-fiction.