TheBeaufortDiaries_20100406100407
On Saturday, Left Bank Books hosted a reading at Mad Art Gallery for New York author T Cooper (author of The Beaufort Diaries), which was held in tandem with an exhibit from St. Louis artist Alex Petrowsky (illustrator of The Beaufort Diaries). Kelly Moffitt spoke with Cooper before the reading about everything from the writer-and-artist collaborative process to Dollywood. Even if you missed the reading, don't miss the book.
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There’s an Inuit legend that speaks of polar bears that walk upright and can shed their fur to become human. Turning this legend on its furry ear, T Cooper and St. Louis-based artist Alex Petrowsky have taken on global warming; Hollywood politico Leonardo DiCaprio; and a slightly depressive polar bear in their debut graphic novel, The Beaufort Diaries. Using illustrations and collages that play off sharp prose, the novel is striking despite a seemingly simple framework of themes. Ranging from sardonic to startlingly perceptive, his comments prove this isn’t just a funny story about a polar bear in a melting world: its a story for anyone who has ever felt they don’t fit in their own skin.
SLM: How did this story begin for you?
I don’t really know. I woke up one night and I couldn’t get this idea out of my head about this polar bear in a human world. I tried sketching some polar bears, and it was God-awful, but I kept seeing these polar bears doing “Hollywood” things: Kabala, Scientology, you know, I wanted to get across the ridiculous thinking that Hollywood can do things to completely solve eco-problems with, say, polar bears. I wanted it to be an epic story–something akin to the Inuit story about polar bears shedding their skin to become human. I’m really interested in ideas of passing and transition, so there’s a definite taste of that. It’s a story of immigration. It seems I’m just totally incapable of writing something that isn’t crazy.
SLM: Why did you decide to make this a graphic novel? How did you connect with Alex Petrowsky?
Well, I was jotting these ideas down from the start, I knew it was going to be a graphic novel. But my drawings were crap. So I knew I had to enlist the help of someone who knew what they were doing. So I did what any rational person would do: I posted a really detailed ad on craigslist.com looking for artists. I posted that they couldn’t be uptight or need to know exactly where this project was going or how much it would pay because that just wouldn’t work with me. I got about 50 responses and Alex was one of them: we really hit it off. So we talked it out, and he sent me a sketch of a polar bear in the car with Leo DiCaprio, and I knew that’s exactly what I wanted. It’s funny because once Alex came on, there just started to be a structure and the collaboration is what really made it come together.
SLM: What do you think you've achieved in this novel that you haven't previously?
I don’t even think of it as an “achievement.” For me, it’s been very interesting to collaborate with a different medium. I really learned how to play with imagery and language, play them off each other. It was a lot more fun and less depressing than some other projects I’m researching right now. Its not 600 pages long. It was fun to pull back and relax with it.
SLM: Does your knowledge of this bear-eat-bear world come from firsthand experience growing up in L.A., and then moving to New York?
I have a lot of friends in that world, both successful and trying to make it–that definitely inspired me. What’s funny is I have recently been working on some television opportunities that came after I worked on this book–and that world is totally like what I wrote! You take meetings instead of having them. Beaufort had to go to Hollywood to get wrapped up in that ridiculousness.
SLM: Beaufort, at one point, feels as though everyone missed the point of his movie, Bear. What do you not want readers to miss from The Beaufort Diaries?
I hope readers can take whatever the hell they want from it. Everyone feels misunderstood. I want everyone to feel it is cool to look at–I’m psyched that people can blow up the images and hang them in their house, they’re that good. People can open it up and experience what its like to read a pretty book. I want people to take away its visual stimulation. Now, for blind people, that will suck. Maybe we can do an audio version of it: insert image here. Think that might work?
SLM: With Beaufort, all I could think of was how innocent he was when he first arrived in Los Angeles. What do you think your book says about outsiders trying to reconcile with the fact that they aren't "in"?
In some ways, outsider status will never be shed. Beaufort is only going to be happy while inhabiting his own skin: he has to fully inhabit his own difference. There’s a black President in D.C. right now, but I think it’s hard to say that difference doesn’t matter any more. Our whole system is based on difference.
SLM: That is a serious theme. But the book doesn't necessarily read that way.
That was my plan. As a novelist and short story writer, you get so in your head with the world of history and ideas, it gets a little too serious sometimes. I wanted to have some fun. I went with this really cliché idea as a framework and I wanted to see where I could run with it. It still has that depth though. You can only watch so many images of baby polar bears drowning while trying to get back to their mothers. It’s pretty f------ brutal.
SLM: It seems like it got pretty political for you at times.
You just see all these news stories of bears who are ransacking villages because they are so hungry. And then Palin comes on shooting Polar Bears from her helicopter and there’s all this support for protecting the rights of the Alaskan frontier, and the oil drilling. Perhaps it was because I was writing this during the Presidential campaign, but I just couldn’t understand all this rhetoric using polar bears. Its just such a barometer of our times: just this one creature, the polar bear, is so politicized. I started thinking about what polar bears are going to do when they have nowhere to live. So I made Beaufort come into the human world.
SLM: So I hear you're a Dolly Parton fan. Do you plan on making a detour to Branson while you're in Missouri, to see her magnum opus - Dixie Stampede?
I wish I had the time: I’ve been to Missouri many times but I’ve not gotten down to see it yet. I don’t see how it could be better than Dollywood, though.
SLM: You have to see it to believe it.
It would be my pleasure to, it really would. It’s actually my dream to have her join hands, nay, paws with me to help lower humanity’s carbon footprint. She would probably have to lay aside her ozone damaging aerosol hairspray to join me in saving the polar bears.
SLM: Some of her body parts seem to be recycled...?
Yes, yes, I think she would really be interested in a giant benefit concert with me called something like Polar Aid 2011 to benefit some center of biodiversity. If you’re out there Dolly: lets unite to save the polar bears! You see, now I’m going Hollywood too.
