In Less Desolate, poet Shin Yu Pai and illustrator Justin Rueff distill the early pandemic into a series of haiku comics. This collection is hybrid in both form and content: it holds together word and image; isolation and connection; the familiar minutiae of everyday life and the immense, uncertain terrain of 2020. Each poem—confined to four comic panels and a few precise lines—crystalizes a passing moment from Pai’s life as she grapples with aging, working, and parenting in a time of quarantine and climate crisis.

I spoke with Pai and Rueff over a video call about their collaborative process and why haikus and comics were made for each other. 

***

Eliza Harris: What about comics do you think compliments haikus or the reverse?

Shin Yu Pai: The three-line haiku form almost feels like it’s made for a four-panel comic. Built into the structure of a haiku is a turn in the way that there’s normally a silent beat in four-panel comics. During the pandemic, I enrolled in this haiku comics class with David Lasky, who’s a very well-known graphic novelist here in the Seattle area, and also a friend and a colleague. David led me through thinking about a haiku translated into this visual form. It just seems to pair really beautifully because it’s one haiku line or comic panel per thought or image, which allows a spaciousness and ability to slow down as a reader.

Justin Rueff: From my perspective, the drawing becomes a part of the writing process. You’ve got all these limitations, which is just such a fun thing to play around in as an artist—to say, okay, here are the rules, and how do we kind of move around with them? How you lay out the pattern of the panels becomes a part of the poetry, like is the silent beat silent or is it loud? I think they work so well because comics are like a visual form of poetry.

EH: There’s so much that goes unsaid in comics and haikus. Both rely on readers to infer meaning from empty space, whether that’s a line break or a gutter between two panels. Could you both talk about working with that silent space?

SP: Do you want to answer that one first, Justin?

JR: I don’t know. I’m scared of that one [laughter].

To me, it’s always just like a feeling. Empty space can be very sad. It can be isolating. It can be cold. But empty space can also be very quiet. It can be very inside, you know? The way that I look at comics; it’s just like a piece of music. You create the rhythm either through the words or through the way that the pictures move your eyes through it.

SP: I was super curious how you would answer that question because as the artist, you’re dealing with physical space, visual space, in a way that I, as the writer, am not. How I think of empty space is more like interior space and the spaciousness of emotion. It’s a kind of imaginary space that’s given over to the reader to step into and inhabit, to project their imagination or their experience into the poem. 

EH: Shin Yu, you described the process of moving from haikus to comics as translation earlier. It made me think about what new meaning might be uncovered when you translate between mediums. Did seeing any of these comics uncover a different side of what you had written?

SP: The idea of translation is really important to me. I work in visual art. My mother is a visual artist. So, from a really young formative age, I was always thinking about how an idea or a thing or an image can exist in different spaces and how it might be encountered if you’re using a visual language versus a poetic language. I also think about the connection with the reader and the idea of the reader actually completing a piece of work. The idea of it existing in many languages means that there are many different entry points to that work, which I think is important when people come from different cultural backgrounds.

As to whether there were works that I saw differently when I saw Justin’s interpretations of them, I think absolutely yes. I don’t always, for instance, think of my work as funny—but it’s there. It’s often a little bit more sly and it’s embedded. If you look at certain groups of my work together, you’ll see that thread of humor, but it’s not always that obvious. I think there are certain viewpoints that Justin was able to capture and illuminate in a way that had a lot of humor and tenderness to them. Sometimes, because I’m so oriented to my own work as being thoughtful, philosophical, heavy, or of a certain emotional tone, I don’t necessarily realize that, taken on its own, there are quirky perspectives in there. That was really delightful to feel reflected back to me. 

JR: I went through that same process but in the act of drawing it. I would start drawing a comic, and it would just occur to me like, oh, wow, Shin Yu’s pretty funny. So I like to bring it forward when I see it.

EH: Could y’all walk me through the process of making these poems into comics? 

JR: At the very, very beginning Shin Yu gave me a manuscript of poems and I’d work on the ones that just kind of came forward for me immediately. It got to a point where I needed to start working through the rest of the poems because we knew that we wanted to make the book. Around then, Shin Yu and I went through the manuscript, and she put in the four panels of each poem what picture should be there. And sometimes those instructions would be very specific, like a person looking out of a window. And sometimes it would be very open to interpretation. It’d be a little more abstract. It was nice to have her panel instructions for me to follow, but I never felt like they were strict, if in the process of drawing, I saw something in the images that was in the vein of what she was trying to communicate. It’s funny; sometimes it’s the instructions that are very specific that are more challenging to me than the ones that are like, “You need to evoke this mood.”

SP: There were probably a hundred and fifty poems that I gave to Justin ultimately that he ended up illustrating. And we had to kind of cull and organize them down into categories, get through-lines. Both of us are very interested in ancestors and ritual practices, both of us were living through the pandemic, so our dialogues around how that was feeling were really important. And then we’re both really into travel and exploring place in different ways. So I felt like those were strong themes that emerged, as well as this passage of time. 

EH: What does “less desolate” mean to each of you, and how did you come to that phrase?

JR: It’s a line in one of the poems, but I also think that it just makes perfect sense with so many aspects of this book. It’s the way that the poems are three lines spread across four panels—they’re together, and they’re apart. We’re working on this book together, and we’re apart. And it’s through the pandemic, and we’re carrying this thing together, but we’re all alone when we’re doing it. So, I don’t know . . . it’s comforting, but it’s also kind of sad.

SP: I always love your answer to that. I think it sums it up well. 

When I wrote the poem in which that line appears, “I feel less desolate,” it was probably pretty early on in the pandemic, and I had been reading the prose nonfiction work of Red Pine. His real name is Bill Porter and he’s a writer and translator out in Port Townsend. He studies Chinese poetry, writes about Chinese culture, and lived in China for a long time, but the book that catapulted him to fame in China and abroad was when he decided to go to the rural, distant mountains of China to seek out Taoist hermits living in the wilderness by themselves. This was after the Cultural Revolution, and a lot of people said, “There are no hermits. They’re all gone. What are you talking about?” And he just kind of felt like, I think they’re out there. So he went looking, and he found a bunch of them, and he wrote a book about it called Road to Heaven. So I’m reading this book about hermits during the pandemic—hermits, the most lonely, ascetic people in the universe who are so separated from urban life and what’s happening in the world; they don’t even know what year it is. And here I was in a pandemic feeling isolated and alone and estranged and disassociated and I found that reading this book made me feel less desolate because there is this tradition of mountain ascetics and hermits, people who find solace and strength in being alone. I think that’s where I was coming from when I penned that poem. But it has a lot of these reverberations and other meanings as Justin was talking about. And I feel like over time the meaning of “I feel less desolate,” really encapsulates a lot of my friendship with Justin, in terms of going through this period of three years or so and being in conversation through poems and drawings, and feeling this really beautiful connection that was absolutely life sustaining during the pandemic. So our working on this book absolutely made me feel less desolate.