By Samantha Pak
NORTHWEST ASIAN WEEKLY
Kathy MacLeod (Credit: Aaron Joel Santos)
When Kathy MacLeod was just learning to write as a young girl, she would often draw pictures next to her words and create little storybooks.
She always enjoyed drawing, creating comics for her father.
“They were always funny, but airing out grievances,” she said with a laugh—grievances such as being jealous of her older sister.
For MacLeod, these comics were a more effective way for her to talk about and process her feelings. Decades later, the 39-year-old is continuing to use her drawings to tell her story with her first graphic novel, “Continental Drifter,” which was published April 2.
The middle grade memoir tells the story of the summer when MacLeod was 11 and her family traveled from Bangkok to Maine to visit her father’s family. While this wasn’t their first time visiting Maine, it was the first time she and her sister got to go to summer camp. In the story, a young MacLeod shares her experiences of growing up in Thailand to a Thai mother and American father and her feelings of not being Thai enough or American enough—of being caught between two cultures.
Kathy’s McLeod’s parents: Yupin and Walter (Photo provided by Kathy MacLeod)
This is MacLeod’s first graphic novel with a publisher, but she has self published her work independently. MacLeod, who now lives in Berlin, also spent some time writing and illustrating a weekly comic for a newspaper in Bangkok, showing her work in exhibitions, and doing commissioned work such as comic strips to mark special occasions like weddings and birthdays.
“Continental Drifter” is an expansion of a story MacLeod wrote, called “Bullseye Queen,” which focused on her experience learning riflery at summer camp (something she turned out to be pretty good at, at the age of 11). The story went from about 20 pages to more than 200.
“There was just so much that came to my mind,” MacLeod said about when her editor, Robyn Chapman, suggested she expand the story for middle grade readers.
‘A collaboration with my younger self’
The idea of writing a story for younger readers really resonated with MacLeod. The memories you make as a kid stay with you, she said, so writing a story about her younger self felt really meaningful and “sounded really challenging and fun.”
Writing for younger readers also meant being gentler with the tone and story, as well as with herself. This was because revisiting that part of her life was difficult at times as MacLeod wrote about things such as feeling like she and her biracial family didn’t fit in wherever they went and wanting to be closer to her parents and sister, but not knowing how.
“It was almost like a collaboration with my younger self,” she said about the writing process.
Spending time with her younger self, as she described it, wasn’t always easy. There were times when MacLeod would get mad at her younger self. Her inner critic would get pretty intense and whenever she felt triggered and got upset while writing, it made her realize that she needed to practice self care. This included taking a step back from the story and turning to therapy.
The book may have been difficult at times, but MacLeod said there were also joyful moments as she recalled fun memories from that summer, such as the time they spent at her aunt’s house in Maine and the happy times she had at camp. It was also an emotional, but also nice, process because it felt like bringing her dad—who died when she was 18—back to life.
“He would be proud,” MacLeod said about what she thinks of her father’s reaction to the book.
MacLeod did tell her mother and sister about the book ahead of time. She’s shown her mother a few pages of the story and said her mother is proud of her and has told her friends about the book. MacLeod also added with a laugh that she had to tell her older sister that she read her diary when they were younger, since this is revealed in the book.
While “Continental Drifter” is geared toward a younger audience and MacLeod is gentler with the story than she would be toward older readers, she also didn’t gloss over her experiences. She said sometimes, really good reads are just morose. She said growing up, some of her favorite books were Beverly Cleary’s “Ramona” series, which follows an 8-year-old girl with some very intense emotions. Cleary, MacLeod said, took Ramona’s emotions very seriously and that’s what she wanted to do as a writer because she knows how meaningful that can be to kids.
Samantha can be reached at info@nwasianweekly.com.