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“More and more comics that push the boundaries of what the form can do, more and more comics by—and wider recognition of comics by—women, queers, Indigenous people, and people of colour. It’s extremely exciting. I’d love to see more incorporation of comics in literary festivals, more awareness of comics among literary folks.” —Sarah Leavitt
July is Graphica Month at Read Alberta, and we’re featuring an interview with Sarah Leavitt, author of two Alberta-published books: Tangles: A Story About Alzheimer’s, My Mother, and Me was the first work of graphic literature to be a finalist for any of the prestigious prizes administered by the Writers’ Trust of Canada and it has gone on to receive international acclaim; and Agnes, Murderess, which won the $10,000 Vine Award for Jewish Literature, was nominated for a Joe Schuster Award, and was shortlisted for the Doug Wright Award for Best Book. It also won a 2020 Alberta Book Publishing Award in the Speculative Fiction Category.
Agnes, Murderess is a graphic novel inspired by the bloody legend of Agnes McVee, a roadhouse owner, madam and serial killer in the Cariboo region of British Columbia in the late nineteenth century. Fascinated by this legend—which originated in a 1970s guide to buried treasure in BC, and has never been verified—Sarah Leavitt has imagined an entirely new story for the mysterious Agnes. It is a gold rush story like no other: a chilling account of one woman’s attempt to escape her past by travelling into the wilds of the Cariboo.
A Q&A with Sarah Leavitt about Agnes, Murderess
What made you want to write about Agnes McVee?
The answer to this question has really changed over the years since I encountered Agnes. I first read about her in a brochure at the 108 Mile Heritage Site in 2009, and my response was horror and fear. I had nightmares about her. The story was that she killed more than 50 people during the ten years that she owned the 108 Mile roadhouse (1865-1875).
Her victims were men returning from the Cariboo gold mines as well as sex workers she employed in the roadhouse. I first wanted to write about her as a way of trying to understand what turned her into a murderess (I love how scary that word sounds, with the hissing “ess.”) How did she become so evil? How does anyone?
As I researched her story, I learned that it’s highly unlikely Agnes ever existed. She and an accomplice were supposedly caught and sentenced to hang; the accomplice was hanged and Agnes committed suicide. But in spite of the fact that there were newspapers and police and a court system at that time in BC, and, of course, many people who would have written letters to friends and family about this horrible event, there is no record of any of it.
There is a photo of Agnes in the heritage site brochure that is labelled as coming from the BC Archives, but the Archives don’t have any photographs of anyone named Agnus MacVee (as the brochure spells it), Agnes McVee, or any other spellings of her name.
Once I was sure that Agnus MacVee was a fictional character, my understanding of Agnes McVee’s life began to develop. It felt like I spent years trying to find her and learn about her, even though I was creating her and making decisions about her. I still wanted to explore why she committed murders (in my book she only commits three) but I also became interested in other aspects of her personality—her loneliness, her rage, her desire. She really haunted me—and still does, in fact. She seems like my creation in some ways, but often she feels like someone I found and am trying to understand.
What themes do you explore in this book?
The most important one for me is the experience of loneliness, of feeling like you’re unlike everyone else and therefore unable to make friendships or find romantic love. Where does that feeling come from? What does it do to a person? And evil—are you born evil, without a choice, haunted by your heritage? Or are you evil because of things that have happened to you? Or do you choose to be evil? I also thought a lot about colonization—Agnes is a white settler who thinks of BC as an empty new world. She arrives full of fear and greed, imagining that she can escape the old world and find a new life here. Like other settlers, she has little knowledge of the Indigenous Peoples who live here already, or the fact that they have millenia of their own history. The land is only new in her imagination. Her beliefs about Canada are a large part of the story.
What kind of research went into Agnes, Murderess? What was it like for you to write a book of historical fiction?
Research not only helped me answer questions about the characters and world I was depicting, but it also influenced the shape of the story as I came across events or people or ideas that I wanted to include. This is particularly true of the reading I did about the history of BC. I read a lot of settlers’ accounts of coming to BC, as well as books and articles about the role of women and Indigenous people in the province’s development, and about the impact of racism, sex work and, mining for gold. I wanted to understand how Agnes might have fitted into the newly-formed colony. I read and reread Catharine Parr Traill’s account of coming to Upper Canada, now Ontario: The Backwoods of Canada. This book features in Agnes, Murderess as an essential part of Agnes’s decision to go to Canada.
Reading about the Hebrides and their folklore helped me imagine Agnes’s childhood and imagine her grandmother. The voices of novelists like Wilkie Collins and Mary Braddon echoed in my head as I wrote the London scenes.
Basically I read a lot and took a ton of notes. I followed a lot of trails that weren’t necessarily relevant to this project or that only figured in one or two pages. Like I read a lot of detailed accounts of conditions for passengers on transatlantic voyages, and firsthand descriptions of the Highland Clearances. I don’t regret it, but it’s part of why this took nine years.
I also spent a lot of time in the Cariboo. I went to Ruth Lake in Forest Grove, about 20 minutes from the 108 Mile Heritage Site, every summer for seven years. I spent lots of time at the heritage site and drove up to the Barkerville heritage site as well. I also spent hours absorbing the beauty of the Cariboo landscape, sketching and making notes and taking thousands of photographs. Last but not least, I reached out to historical societies and historians to ask particular questions about places and events.
Can you describe your process?
My process is different for every project. With this book, the images came to me first: Agnes’s murderous face, the bodies of her victims. I had nightmares and drew them. Then, as I was exploring and figuring out the story, I drew small sketches of people and animals and trees, accompanied by pages and pages of prose. I had the idea that the story would be told through Agnes’s journal, found after her suicide, and the sketches would be hers. Then there would be two other narrators, and their story would be told in comics. Through various drafts I got rid of the other narrators and rejected the idea of the journal, deciding that the whole book would be comics. I kept working in prose and developed a new draft. I then drew about 60 pages and inked them to use as a sample to show my agent and publishers. These pages took me forever, because I was using a dip pen and ink for the first time. I ended up getting rid of these pages because the story still needed work and because I decided I wanted to use brush pens and draw in a looser style. Anyway—it’s a long and slightly torturous story, but I ended up with the whole story thumbnailed to show my editor, with all the captions and speech balloons filled in, even though some of the drawings were little more than scribbles. Then, after my editor went through the thumbnailed draft, I realized that I needed to write a script in order to rework the story and incorporate her excellent feedback. Then I went from that script to thumbnails to pencils to inks. So my process was a bit backwards—usually you’d start with a script, then move to thumbnails, pencils and inks.
In 2010, you wrote the graphic memoir, Tangles. How was the process of writing Agnes, Murderess different?
It was a huge change from my first book. Tangles kind of poured out of me in pictures, without much planning. I did many revisions, for sure, but the story was basically there from the beginning. It was my own personal experience, so of course I knew it well, even though it still needed shaping. The drawings in Tangles were much simpler, and I didn’t know much about how comics worked. Also, I used a font made out of my handwriting in Tangles. In Agnes, Murderess everything is hand lettered. This is harder in some ways, but I always knew that’s what I wanted. It blends better with the drawings, and it’s also important to me to know that I created each bit of every page by hand (I mean, aside from some areas of black and some corrections that I did in Photoshop.)
How has graphic literature changed in the past decade?
There’s more of it! More and more comics that push the boundaries of what the form can do, more and more comics by—and wider recognition of comics by—women, queers, Indigenous people, and people of colour. It’s extremely exciting. I’d love to see more incorporation of comics in literary festivals, more awareness of comics among literary folks.
Recently, there have been many esteemed graphic novels with strong feminist undercurrents. What does Agnes, Murderess add to this body of work?
My main goal with Agnes was to write a story about a murderess. I love horror comics and I love complicated/ “bad” female characters. I was most interested in constructing a suspenseful, entertaining story. I hope I succeeded at least somewhat. And if readers find that there are feminist undertones to Agnes, Murderess, that is a sweet bonus.
My feminism and my queerness have certainly shaped the story, as well as my commitment to social justice. Agnes is a single woman whose sexuality is fairly complicated. She’s not beautiful or kind or, for the most part, interested in pleasing others. She’s also an unrepentant murderess. She’s a strong character, though certainly not any kind of inspirational role model! I have empathy for her, but I don’t like her or approve of her. Maybe I would say that she’s an example of a flawed, unsympathetic female lead, and we can always use more of them. She’s surrounded by other strong women who are flouting convention: Ruth, living her uncorseted writer’s life in London with a married man; the sex workers in the Cariboo; Edward, who (spoiler alert!) carries a secret underneath his manly attire. The sex workers, Cora, Annie and Len, share strong bonds of friendship as they support and look out for one another.
As I researched the story of Agnes coming to BC, I was most interested in information about women, queers, people of colour and Indigenous individuals who lived here at that time. I wanted these characters in the book, but wanted them to be as nuanced as possible, not tokenized or stereotyped. This stemmed not only from my political beliefs but also from the historical reality of this province. At the time Agnes came to BC, whites were still in the minority.
White male settlers and gold miners, usually the focus of stories from this time, were just some of the people making history.
—♦—
Sarah Leavitt has earned international acclaim as a writer and cartoonist. Her first book, Tangles: A story about Alzheimer’s, my mother, and me, was published in Canada, the US, UK, Germany, France and Korea and a feature-length animation is in development. In 2010, it became the first work of graphic literature to be a finalist for the Writers’ Trust Non-Fiction Prize. It was also a Globe and Mail Top 100 Book of 2010, the winner of the 2011 CBC Bookie Award for Best Comic or Graphic Novel, a finalist for the 2011 Alberta Readers’ Choice Award and a finalist for the 2011 Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize. Her book, Agnes Murderess, won the $10,000 Vine Award for Jewish Literature, was nominated for a Joe Schuster Award, and was shortlisted for the Doug Wright Award for Best Book. It also won a 2020 Alberta Book Publishing Award in the Speculative Fiction Category. Her prose and comics have appeared in anthologies, magazines and newspapers in Canada, the US and the UK. Sarah teaches comics classes in the Creative Writing Program at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.
*All drawings are excerpted from Agnes, Murderess (Freehand Books)
© Sarah Leavitt, 2019.
All images courtesy of Freehand Books.
Sarah Leavitt 
Published: Sep 07, 2019 by Freehand Books
ISBN: 9781988298474
Sarah Leavitt 
Published: Sep 01, 2010 by Freehand Books
ISBN: 9781551111179
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