People who recognize cartoonist Navied Mahdavian’s work are used to seeing it one panel at a time in The New Yorker.
Mahdavian, who lives in Salt Lake City, has put his drawing and word skills into a long-form work — a graphic novel memoir, “This Country: Searching for Home in (Very) Rural America,” that chronicles his journey of identity and belonging as a Middle Eastern American in the West. (The book, published by Princeton Architectural Press, is set to be released Tuesday.)
“I was initially writing a story about my parents,” Mahdavian said recently. “They’re Iranian immigrants, moved here right before the Iranian Revolution.”
As he started working through that story, he found himself becoming the main character, much to his “parents’ chagrin,” he joked.
Part of that shift reflected a change in his own life. Mahdavian and his wife, Emelie, visited rural Idaho on a whim. They found themselves completely charmed by the place, he said.
“It just seemed like there was this freedom and possibility that it offered,” he said. “The Bay Area was prohibitively expensive. We both wanted to be artists. We could own land for very cheap there, build a tiny house and at the time, it sounded incredibly romantic.”
Then, he said, the world shifted. Moving from San Francisco — what Mahadavian called “the epicenter of liberalism” — to deep-red Idaho, “Trump country,” as a Iranian American was challenging. But, he said, “I think that there was something really valuable in that experience.”
Except for a few moments in the story, Mahdavian said he hopes his book shows he’s sympathetic to the place and its people.
“For the most part, people were very welcoming,” he said. “They were kind and if even in the end, there was this cultural gap that caused me to want to leave, I still feel like I was able to glean some insights about the people there, about the place that I think is helpful in a time when political divisions have only increased between red and blue states, rural versus urban.”
Transferring his drawing and writing skills from single-panel cartoons to a graphic memoir, Mahdavian said, was a natural fit.
“The graphic novel lends itself to memoir,” he said, adding that graphic memoirs are more immersive than prose memoirs. “There’s something to the visual medium where you can present yourself as the sort of the narrator, but there’s this avatar, this way that you’re representing yourself and guiding the reader through the story.”
Writing the memoir, he said, was also an experiment in capturing — and keeping — readers’ attention for longer than it takes to scroll past a cartoon on, for example, Instagram.
“The medium requires something slightly different, right? The single-panel cartoon, you’re telling a story in one image, but there’s the image and then the punch line,” he said, “where the arc of a graphic novel is extended much longer.”
While writing the book, he said, he developed the skill of navigating the relationship between the narration of the story arc and the humor in the individual panels — figuring out what is happening in the story and how to express that in a funny way.
Along the way, Mahdavian said, he learned other skills, like how to represent himself and loved ones in cartoon format.
“As a reader, you’re going along on the journey with the avatar, Navied, and that was an interesting process — in terms of thinking about both myself and Emelie, as characters,” he said. “How do I represent myself? That was a very fun thing to have to navigate.”
(He admitted, though, that neither his wife nor his mother liked how their cartoons came out.)
The story Mahdavian tells in “This Country” includes his becoming a father. “Our daughter is born in the third part of the book,” he said, adding that she was 2 when he started writing the book, “and she’s just turned four.”
Spending that time writing about her and getting to know her, not just as a “lovable potato” but as a character, “felt profound,” he said. It allowed him, he said, to understand his daughter in a way that he wouldn’t have been able to otherwise.
Mahdavian said another character in “This Country” — “if not the main character” — is the location, and he hopes people will pay attention to the book’s nature illustrations.
“One of the things that my character experiences over the course of the book is this deepening relationship to nature,” he said. “So there are these extended sequences with no words, of just the avatar Navied observing and growing, more and more enmeshed with the natural landscape.”
