A few weeks ago, I was asked to say a few words at the Toronto launch for Mariko and Jillian Tamaki’s graphic novel Skim (published by Groundwood Books). Since the comic started its life as a 24-page Kiss Machine Presents mini-book, I was around for the story’s conception.

The book’s so wonderful I thought I’d post the speech I made here, on my blog…

Hi! It’s been very exciting to watch Skim become the touching and lovely book it is today and I’m thrilled to introduce Mariko and Jillian Tamaki to you.

A couple years ago, Mariko, two other writers and I were sitting in a cramped car. It was day 8 of a grueling 10-day, 10-event book tour for my anthology Girls Who Bite Back: Witches, Mutants, Slayers and Freaks. I’d asked her to contribute because I loved her novel Cover Me.

For those of you who’ve been on intense tours like that, you’ll understand that by the eighth day stuffed in a car with three semi-strangers, you’ve pretty of run out of conversation topics. I remember spending a lot of time with my headphones clamped to my head at that point.

I did take them off long enough to blurt out from the back seat, to no one in particular, that I wanted Kiss Machine, my little literary magazine, to start publishing comic books written and illustrated entirely by Canadian women.

At the time, I was reading a lot of graphic novels as research for Girls Who Bite Back, and had discovered that although there a fair number of empowered female characters in comics, very few of them were created by women. I think that’s starting to change, but it’s still quite rare that a woman writer gets to work with a female illustrator.

I mused aloud that it would be interesting to see how the kinds of heroines created by women would differ from the ones created by men. So when Mariko piped up from the front seat that she’d been dying to collaborate on a story with her cousin Jillian, I was really interested.

After checking out some of Jillian’s illustration samples online, and finding them fascinating–particularly a series of portraits she did of people in Edmonton—I realized that the starkness and restraint evident in her work could really complement Mariko’s sense of humor and tendency to be just a little brash.

Jillian’s not afraid to go to very difficult places in her work, which was an essential part of being able to pull off the character of Kimberly Keiko Cameron so believably. She has this amazing ability to express a lot in the way a character’s hair curls or the line of a cheek.

When Kiss Machine finally did publish the 24-page version of Skim, I thought it was perfect. When I saw the play Mariko wrote based on the same story, I thought that was perfect, too. Now that I’ve read the book-length tale, it’s incredible to get inside the main character’s head for a good length of time. I’m thinking Mariko was destined to write in this graphic genre. And Jillian truly has a gift for telling stories through images.

In hindsight, I feel very lucky I managed to lasso Mariko into coming on that book tour. We’ve worked together a few times since and it’s always a pleasure. Next month, she’ll be running a workshop for the Parkdale Street Writers: a boot camp for at-risk youth from the city’s west-end that I’m coordinating out of the Parkdale Library.

For the group’s young 25 writers, between the ages of 16 and 24, having the opportunity to read a book like this, about such familiar characters, who are going through the same kinds of struggles as them, and then getting to work directly with local authors like Mariko will be very inspiring. I only wish I’d been exposed to more writing like this when I was their age!

Thanks and enjoy the discussion with Jessica Westhead.