CBC Ottawa All In A Day Radio Interview with Alan Neal and Von Allan

On Friday, March 12, 2010, I sat down for an interview with Alan Neal, host of CBC Ottawa’s All In A Day radio program. We discuss the launch of my first graphic novel, “the road to god knows…”, at Perfect Books in downtown Ottawa and chat about my mom’s struggle with mental illness.

I actually thought this interview was lost, but I recently came across it through dumb luck. Kinda funny how that works! The audio quality isn’t perfect, but it’s certainly clear enough. You can listen by clicking right here or by clicking play on the player below. In addition, a lightly-edited transcript of our discussion is provided below.

Lightly-Edited Transcript

Alan Neal: There’s a point in Von Allan’s graphic novel, “the road to god knows…,” where the teenage character of Marie appears to be suspended in midair. Her desk sort of looks like it’s floating off the ground, hovering beside the classroom clock that ticks by, a classroom door that’s shut, a bookcase and chalkboard all hang around her without a wall attached to them. Now, unlike some comic heroines, Marie does not have any levitation powers. It’s Von Allan’s way of showing her headspace, that caught in a void off-the-ground moment.

And Marie is definitely not in the happiest of spaces in this book. Teenager dealing with poverty, unpopularity, and above all, her mother’s schizophrenia. And through the book, writer and artist Von Allan traces how Marie struggles with her circumstances. He’s releasing the now completely finished graphic novel on Sunday at the very bookstore he used to manage, Perfect Books, and Von Allan is with me in the studio. Hello there.

Von Allan: Hello.

Alan Neal: So I think there are a lot of teenagers who can relate to those two pages in the book, regardless of what their circumstances are. That feeling of time passing by in a classroom, not really being present. How much of this is like Von Allan in high school?

Von Allan: Some of it is. Some of it certainly is. I don’t know. I was playing with time. She’s about to go see her mom in the hospital shortly after that. So she’s in a place where… This certainly was me; the idea that “stuff” is happening in your personal life outside of school, but school is kind of this other reality with its own structure, and it’s not really real to her anymore, because there’s this other heavy stuff going on in her life. So that was very much me, particularly as I got older in high school. I was a decent enough student, but it just… “Why do I need to get my homework done by this date? Is the world gonna end just because I don’t have this done, you know? My marks are fine anyway, you know?” All that kind of stuff. And that type of unreality was something I was really trying to capture.

Alan Neal: That heaviness that you’re talking about, Marie tries to escape it through a number of different routes, whether it’s her fascination with wrestling, or even the TV show The Frantics, which you gotta respect as well. Which I think would also be tied into the life of Von Allan, as well. I realized you could have told the story as well from a boy’s point of view.

Von Allan: Yeah.

Alan Neal: What made you want to make Marie the main character?

Von Allan: Well, when I made the decision to do the story, I was kind of going, “do I want to do purely autobiographical stuff or not?” And if I went purely autobiographical, then yeah, the main character would have been a guy, would have been me. There’s so many autobiographical comics out there, but I was looking at it going, “I don’t know how to do it.” I just… I don’t. I don’t know how do you handle real people that I know. How do you fictionalize them or not fictionalize them? Would they be okay with it? Would they sue my ass off if I misportrayed them or if they felt they were misportrayed?

There was also elements of time. A lot of the things in the graphic novel are compressed; things that really did happen to me, but happened over slightly different periods of time. That kind of led to fiction. And then I just went, “if I go with a male protagonist, it’s just going to be, ‘he’s talking about himself. Look, it’s him. Yeah, it’s some guy named Fred or Mark or something, but it’s totally him.’” So going with a female protagonist, I thought, would be different. I could approach the story from a different point of view. There’d be more distance for me. All of this sort of came together at the script stage and I’m happy with the results.

Alan Neal: Another mode of distance, I guess you could say, that is different from Marie and yourself is that although your own mom was diagnosed, I believe when you were 11?

Von Allan: Yeah, 10 or 11, something like that.

Alan Neal: That’s younger than Marie in the book. Do you think it’s a different experience for an 11-year-old child to handle than a 15-year-old?

Von Allan: I don’t know. I’ve gone back and forth with this stuff. And the biggest thing is, I didn’t know that there was really anything… It’s so weird. I knew my mom wasn’t “right,” but I was an only child from a split family, and it was my mom and me and that was it. So trying to get a really big frame of reference to how other people live their lives was tough.

Now, I was a poor kid going to richer kids’ schools. I was at Glebe [Collegiate Institute] and at Mutchmor [Public School] and stuff like that, where there was more noticeable wealth around me. But it wasn’t until later on, when I was a teenager, that I really sort of became aware, as I was getting older and meeting new people, that the way I was growing up was different than the way a lot of experiences were for other people.

And I think the other thing is, I was a shy kid, and it was awkward to really sort of bring this stuff up. So, as a really good example of this, is a good friend of mine, Sterling Lynch, who’s a playwright in town, getting some acclaim himself. He and I were really good friends as kids. We never talked about this stuff. His mom also wasn’t well. He was also going through very similar things. But it’s only as adults that we’ve realized, in talking with each other, that we were going through very similar things. He lived across the street from me and then around the corner of the block from me and we never talked about it as kids.

So I think when you’re younger, there’s a sense of embarrassment, of shyness that goes with it. And then when you mature a little bit as a teenager, you’re still very powerless and you’re kind of caught. And that’s really what I was trying to do with the story. Marie’s caught. She knows she can’t do anything. She just can’t. She doesn’t even have the tools to start to try to help her mom. All she can do is really love her mom and that’s about as far as it goes. So she has to live her own life. And the choices she makes; what I tried to do was sort of show that this was a person who, while she’ll never be able to necessarily fix all the things that are happening to her, she can take certain things under her control, like getting money together to go to a show, and all this stuff. And, in so doing, hopefully a little bit of happiness out of it.

Alan Neal: While you were experiencing all of this, did you ever try to work any of it out artistically? I know you weren’t drawing comics at that point yet, but was there any way of expressing what you were going through that you tried?

Von Allan: Not really. I got lucky in the sense that I, again, I was a lonely fat kid. I was 215 pounds when I was 13. I was a really big, shy, quiet kid. I was picked on. The whole ‘kit and caboodle’. So what changed for me wasn’t so much that I had a way of expressing myself, but I wound up lying about my age to get a job at a video store that no longer exists, that sort of got me out of the house. After that, I went to the Ottawa Public Library and was doing work outside [my home].

I remember the mathematical awareness that you only need 30 [school] credits at the time, plus OACs to graduate from high school. You didn’t need the 42 or whatever you would need to graduate, like you would have if you took a full course load every year. So I started cutting back my [school] schedule to give myself more free time. I escaped into reading. I escaped into movies. So for me, it was more a matter of things that would give me a break from some of the stuff that was happening, as opposed to trying to express it. Express it, as I learned to draw, came later. When my mom died, it certainly brought up a lot of stuff that I wound up placing at that point. But it wasn’t as a kid drawing away or anything.

Alan Neal: How old were you when she died?

Von Allan: 20.

Alan Neal: 20. So, I mean, I would imagine a lot of unfinished issues as well that when you’re writing something like this start to come up again.

Von Allan: Well, I think the tough thing is that my mom never saw me draw, right? I didn’t start learning to draw until I was 24. So, she never saw me express myself this way at all. And I never got to have an adult conversation with my mom. She was my mom, but, I mean, I was 20, so I was like a young adult. But we never had that sort of trying to figure things out. And it’s harder, too, in the sense that I was trying to get my own independence. So, I had actually moved out and was living on my own, in a little bachelor apartment on Metcalfe. And at the same time, things for her were getting worse, not better.

Part of the problem with mental illness is it’s not just one thing. So, my mom was diagnosed schizophrenic, but there were anxiety disorders that she had. She was medicated a lot of the time. So for somebody who used to be a teacher, who was very gregarious, very outgoing, but near the end of her life, and she only was 48 when she died, the world had become a very scary place. It was a place that there was a lot of nervousness around it. But it also meant dealing with her sometimes near the end became very, very tough.

So, I have a lot of… Regrets isn’t quite the right word. There’s a wistfulness of being able to go have a coffee, you know, or something like that. That death, unfortunately, takes away from you. At the same time, in terms of the story, I tried to put a lot of where I was at when I was younger into the story. So, I don’t think I’d ever do a sequel to it, but if I ever did, it would probably be post-death looking back on things as opposed to sort of continuing the narrative right from the time the first story ends.

Alan Neal: Because I wondered, I mean, as an adult, was it tempting at all? Tempting is the wrong word, but did you toy with the idea of doing it through the eyes of the adult in the story? Of doing it through the eyes of the mother?

Von Allan: I didn’t think I was qualified enough. What I felt very strongly about, that I was qualified to say, is that this is what at least one kid is going through and what their perceptions of mental illness are, from a teenager’s point of view. As an adult, I have a whack of my mom’s notes that are interesting and somewhat psychedelic to read, because they’re all over the place. My mom was, again, an English teacher. She was quite a literate person, quite a smart person. But how she was perceiving the world was fundamentally changing. That’s a difficult thing to try to approach when you’re not like that and try to sort of capture the experience of what somebody dealing with schizophrenia is really going through. I didn’t really feel qualified that I’d be the guy to do that and that I would do it well. But what I thought I could do really well is show these glimpses; of when you love somebody and you see them going through this. It’s unpredictable. You don’t know. There’s good days and bad days, and you don’t know what’s setting them off. Why are things weird one day and totally fine the next day? I was trying to capture that, and because that I’ve had a lot of experience with, I felt very confident about putting it into the story.

Alan Neal: You have done it really well.

Von Allan: Thank you.

Alan Neal: Thank you so much for coming in, and we want to remind people of Von Allan’s graphic novel “the road to god knows…” is going to be released at Perfect Books on Sunday [March 14, 2010] from 4 to 7 p.m.