Roger Sutton: This is your first graphic novel, and it’s also a story from your family. So what came first, the desire to tell this story about your father or the desire to make a graphic novel?
Daniel Miyares: This all started about twenty years ago when I had just moved into my first apartment after graduating from college. I had like one lamp, because my stuff hadn’t arrived yet. I had a lamp. I had a phone that you plugged into the wall and a sleeping bag on the floor. So there I was in a new city, waiting for my furniture to arrive, and I got a call in the middle of the night. It was my dad. He was just checking up on me, just wanted to see how things were going. Our relationship had been kind of strained and distant over the years because he and my mom had divorced when I was in elementary school. But he was just checking in with me because he went into the military when he was a young man, so he knew how hard it was to leave home for the first time. And we just started talking. He started in on how he left his home country when he was a boy, and I was like, “You know, you never told us these stories. I never heard anything about this growing up.” I just kept asking him more and more questions. I picked up a little steno notebook that I had lying around and I feverishly started trying to document things. Because I thought that night if I didn’t write everything down, it felt like it was going to evaporate, like it would turn into smoke and the stories would be gone. So I started writing everything down. And that’s where I left it. I had three notebooks full of stuff that I just kind of sat on. I would go back every now and again and reference it. And then I would give my dad a call and say “Hey, you told me this, I was wondering if you could elaborate a little bit on that.”
RS: Prior to this connection, or reconnection, what did you know about your Cuban background?
DM: I just knew that my dad’s side of the family was from Cuba and that they got out when he was a kid. And that was about it. I didn’t know anything about the circumstances under which they left. I didn’t know any details. It was a little bit of a mythology that I don't think my dad wanted to lead with when we were growing up. He was very much: “I’m a businessman and I’m an American. I have assimilated and do everything as everyone else does.” He didn’t want us to be different. He wanted to be like everyone else. I felt like, in one way, it was a shame that he didn’t speak Spanish in our house growing up in the eighties and nineties and didn’t tell these stories. It’s a shame in one way, but I think he just wanted us to have every opportunity we could, like other suburban American kids. And so, yeah, most of his story was brand new to me. I couldn’t believe the things he was telling me. I was like, “Oh my gosh, are you serious?” Half of it I couldn't even put into the book because a lot of it was stuff he learned later on, afterward.
RS: You wanted to stay with twelve-year-old Carlos through his own experience.
DM: Telling it from his perspective as the narrator seems like a great way to help readers connect with him. I even aged him up slightly in the final book so he could, one, have more agency in what was happening, and two, so that readers were able to identify better with the choices he had to make and the way he had to navigate friendships and all those things. But yeah, I had to keep to his perspective. It's interesting because that allows you to have a little more of an inside feel to the story. But it also limits what you can or can't share because everything has to come from the character’s reactions, his interactions with people, not what is observed outside of that.
RS: Except for those brief interludes between chapters where you tell us what’s going on with Castro’s revolution and the Bay of Pigs invasion, which gives us some historical grounding.
DM: That seemed critical to me from the beginning, because what my dad shared were his memories, bits and pieces that weren’t necessarily linear. He would tell me little episodes from what he recalled from his childhood. And so I had all these snippets, and at first I thought they would work best as a collection of short stories--I would introduce each one with a page of historical context. That's how I began the whole idea. But in talking with my editor, Anne Schwartz, it just felt like it needed to be tied together, and crafting it into a linear narrative was going to be the best way to not break up the reader's flow—not pull them out of the story so much. And so when I started to do that, running the historical track against the narrative that I was trying to build was really important. Figuring out how do they intersect, at what points do they line up. And still trying to keep those historical headlines as part of the end product. We batted around the idea of just lumping all the historical information in at the end of the book as back matter. But it just didn't feel useful at that point. I felt like I wanted it read right along with my father’s story.
RS: And the nonfiction inserts are contemporaneous with the story that you’re telling, right? That while we see what’s happening in Carlos's life, elsewhere on the island, this is happening.
DM: Yeah, and part of that is a symptom of me being his son retelling these stories from my perspective. I’m running it through my filter. And my purposes in telling it are a bit selfish. I’m trying to get to know my father better. And get to know my grandfather, because I never met him. Trying to investigate all these angles to this story allowed me to get to know my dad and what he was going through at the time. Especially reading the history. I can't relate on many levels to those experiences because I grew up in relative safety. But when you read the newspaper articles of the time, it’s some pretty harrowing stuff. Giant swings in the fortunes of this island nation happened in a short amount of time. Learning the history made me able to get at what would motivate a father to uproot his wife and kids and put everyone's lives in danger, to go somewhere else. And now I’m a father. What would I do? |
RS: How do you even know, “Oh, I’ve got to pay attention to the height of the heels on the shoes!” How do you even know that’s something you need to think about?
DM: Some of it's just keeping my antenna up, but also as I’m reading other anecdotal evidence, someone would talk about a Cuban-style shoe or a Cuban heel and then I’m like, “Wait a minute. In the early 1950s, was there a prevailing style of footwear that Cuba was known for?” Things like that would tip me off. And I had whole notebooks of those little “need to research this more” notes, and I would double back later and say, “Okay, now that I’m drawing it, I need to understand the clothing here. The pants. Why that, not this? Why this shoe? If I have a closeup of the shoes, what kind of shoes would the boys wear? Did they even have access to sneakers? Because in the 1950s and 1960s in the U.S., certain sneakers were a thing, but did they have them in Cuba?” So if anything seemed out of the ordinary but could be relevant, I made a note of it. You get in this obsessive mindset after a while of “no detail too small.” Hairstyles, necklaces, utensils, dishes—everything was important. Because I never knew if I would have to draw it or if it would be relevant.
RS: If this interview does nothing else, at least it will disabuse people of thinking that illustrators just sit in front of an easel, la la la la. Painting a picture. You have a responsibility to certain truths when you illustrate something.
DM: I do feel a huge responsibility to try to be as truthful as possible in what I represent. Not just because I don't want to misrepresent something, but also because the story becomes so much more relatable if a reader’s like, “Oh my gosh, my grandma had that same couch,” or “Those tiles remind me of the kitchen that I used to run around in when I was a kid.” It opens the door for so much more connection if you get the details right, or at least rightish—because of course we weren’t there. I don't know what the cigars smelled like that my grandfather would smoke, but I could research how they rolled them and how they looked and what kind of materials were used to make them. I could research that. But you can’t get everything. There are reasons why I'm sometimes sheepishly emailing my editor asking to extend a deadline. I don’t sleep well if I know I’ve knowingly left threads unaccounted for. Maybe it makes me a little zany, and I should probably be medicated for it. But I really can’t let those things go. And I’ve always felt that way, so much so that I’ve had art teachers be like, “Okay, we are going to take this art from you now and say that it’s done.” “Oh, no, no, no, no, I’ve got to get this right.”
RS: “One more change. One more change.”
DM: “Then it will be perfect.”
RS: And you’re hand-doing everything, right?
DM: Yes, ink and watercolor on paper. Maybe I was foolish, but to really get into the form of graphic novel, because it was new to me, I felt like I wanted that connection in my hands to understand things like “Why do you draw a box this way? How do you plan out these panels? When do you break from the conventions, or when do you need to lean into the conventions?" All that stuff was extremely liberating in one way, but there are a lot of guardrails. So doing it by hand allowed me to say, “Okay, here I think I need to be more expressive,” and then you can let your brush kind of splay out. You don't have to sit there and try to conjure up the right brush in a digital program and then have to figure out how to make it look like a human made this versus a machine. It was all human. It was all me.
Before doing this book I never really thought, Oh, sequential art, that’s me. But I love drawing with ink. I do a lot of illustrations with ink. And so this form really grew on me, and I thought, "Wow, 240 pages to develop a narrative versus only forty!" For character development, that's great because you can have that character go through so much—triumphs and failures, doubling back and revisiting things, emotional turmoil—that gives you a richer landscape to explore than a short picture book. I enjoyed that part of it a lot.
RS: But it's still 240 pages as opposed to forty. And each page has to relate to the other 239.
It’s a lot to keep in your head at once, I would imagine.
DM: Yeah, it can be maddening and very unnerving, but it also forces me to think about my artwork in a way that I don’t normally. And I do have a few ways to try to simplify things to a degree. By default, if I set these six bottles of ink in front of me on my desk, no matter what I do today, just because I limit myself to those six bottles of ink, it's gonna have some continuity. I also used a single size of pen nib for all the black-ink stuff that I was doing, and I used just two brush sizes so that the marks those brushes made were consistent. |
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