This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Craig Thompson, whose graphic novel Ginseng Roots is out today from Pantheon. Ginseng Roots recounts the story of Thompson and his siblings, who spent their childhood summers weeding and harvesting rows of coveted American ginseng on rural Wisconsin farms for one dollar per hour. Thompson interweaves this lost youth with the three-hundred-year-old history of the international ginseng trade and the many lives it has braided together—from ginseng hunters in ancient China to industrial farmers and migrant harvesters in the American Midwest to his own family still coping with the aftershocks of their difficult past. Ginseng Roots charts the rise of industrial agriculture, the decline of American labor, and the search for a sense of home in a rapidly changing world. Library Journal calls Ginseng Roots a “visually rich, emotionally resonant work of true ambition and sophistication from one of the most sensitive storytellers currently working in any medium or genre.” Craig Thompson’s previous graphic novels include Blankets (Top Shelf Productions, 2003), for which he received three Harvey Awards for Best Artist, Best Graphic Album of Original Work, and Best Cartoonist, and two Eisner Awards for Best Graphic Album and Best Writer/Artist; Goodbye, Chunky Rice (Top Shelf Productions, 1999); and Carnet de Voyage (Top Shelf Productions, 2004). He lives in Portland, Oregon.
1. How long did it take you to write and draw Ginseng Roots?
Eight years altogether. I conducted the first interviews in the fall of 2016 and started writing a first draft in December of that year. Writing and research quickly consumed two years of my life. In October 2018, as part of the “Inktober” challenge, I sat down to finally begin drawing the book. Drawing, editing, and book design took another six years until completion. Ay-ay-ay, graphic novels take forever.
2. What was the most challenging thing about creating the book?
The endings of my books are always a challenge for me, but this one more than any other because I chose to truly uproot myself (pun intended) and move from the West Coast, Los Angeles and Portland, to Minneapolis, near family and the ginseng agriculture I was writing about. I’d hoped that moving towards the source material would help me solve the finale of the book. In fact, I only lasted four months in the Midwest before retreating to Portland. Ever since, I’ve been living out of a suitcase, hoping to find a place to settle when the book tour is wrapped.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write or draw?
When a book is rolling, I draw every day, a page a day. But when a book is finished, a year (or more?) goes by before I can pick up a pencil again. That’s the space I’m currently inhabiting after touring with the book for four months in Europe and setting out now for a two-month tour in the U.S. It’ll be a while before I have time and quiet to sit down with a sketchbook and begin dreaming on paper again.
4. What are you reading right now?
Currently reading Jonathan Lethem’s Cellaphane Bricks: A Life in Visual Culture (ZE Books, 2024), poetic essays/short stories inspired by the visual arts, including Nan Goldin’s photography, Chester Brown’s comics, and his father’s painting. Lethem’s a great inspiration and I’m honored to be doing a talk with him and Jordan Crane at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. I’m also rereading Patti Smith’s M Train (Knopf, 2015) because of the fiftieth anniversary of her album Horses.
5. Which author or artist, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Most of them! Lee Lai and Tessa Hulls are two cartoonists I’m excited about lately. But I’m wondering if “old school” cartoonists like Tom Hart, one of the first creators to get me excited about comics way back in the nineties, is getting the recognition he deserves. Street Noise Books just reissued his masterpiece Rosalie Lightning (St. Martin’s Press, 2016) about processing the death of his two-year-old daughter. That book is so profound and heartbreaking and necessary. It needs to be in the graphic novel canon.
6. What is the biggest impediment to your creative life?
My physical health. In Ginseng Roots, I document the deterioration of my drawing hand, from problems that started at age nine to an injury that happened in China at the beginning of my ginseng research. Hours spent in doctor offices, physical therapy, recovering from surgeries, and paying the bills for all of it is the greatest detractor from getting to the drawing board.
7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you?
My editor at Pantheon, Lisa Lucas, talked me off the ledge when I was at my most depressed and discouraged. I doubt I’d have had the will to complete the project without her encouragement. Sure, she bolstered my faith in the book itself, but it was more broadly human connection that reinvigorated my creative drive.
8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started Ginseng Roots, what would you say?
I would tell myself to not move around so much. When the pandemic started in early 2020, I moved out of my apartment in Portland, Oregon, to spend a summer with my brother in Minneapolis. That was an amazing opportunity to weather lockdown and foster closeness with a sibling in adult life. But it set into motion constant moving, back to Los Angeles, then back to four locations in Minneapolis, then two more apartments in Portland before I finally got stabilized enough to finish drawing the book. Each chapter was drawn in a different location, different cities, different states—constantly buying drafting tables on Craig’s List and setting them up in bedrooms, living rooms, basements, and garages. I would have finished the book two or three years earlier if I hadn’t moved around so much. The pandemic made us do crazy things.
9. Outside of writing and drawing, what other forms of work were essential to the creation of Ginseng Roots?
Ginseng Roots is primarily documentary. I interviewed nearly eighty people for this book and spent months transcribing hundreds of pages. The dialogue in the word balloons are all direct quotations from audio recordings. It was important to me to be as faithful as possible to the interviewee’s words, and to also be transparent, in the notes section, about any creative license I used in splicing and editing those interviews.
10. What is the best piece of advice about writing or drawing you’ve ever heard?
I’m not sure about “best,” but the most recent advice that inspired me was from the genius cartoonist Chris Ware. Regarding drawing, he said that drawing is a form of thinking. Regarding writing, he urged storytellers to PLAN LESS. Stories that are planned are boring and flat and unlike life, which is messy and has its own logic. Trust yourself to make stories instinctually. Drawing comics takes a long time, so the writing and editing can unravel during those long hours at the drafting table. While I think Chris Ware has a unique brilliance that allows him to craft such complex compositions directly on the page, I’m also inclined to agree with him that creating a graphic novel should be less like storyboarding a screenplay and more like making a painting where the process itself is the point.