Cartoonist Seth has built a career on writing about the quiet march of the everyday. In his new book (originally serialized in the New York Times Magazine), George Sprott: 1894-1975, he tells the story of a minor legend in (fictional) Canadian broadcasting history. In advance of his reading tonight, we chatted with him about nostalgia, tiny houses and why boring can be exciting.

JM: How did the story change, going from the New York Times Magazine to a book?

Seth: I thought the easiest way to tell the story in the magazine would be, especially since you don’t really know who’s reading it week to week or whether they’re really following it, to try and make each chapter or each page self-contained, yet linked of course to all the other pages. So that people could read a page and if they never picked it up again they would still have some sense of beginning, middle and end. But of course when you sit down to do a book that makes a very different reading experience. The good thing about it is, was that it was easy to add material in between because everything was already like a series of standalone pieces or roughly standalone. And once I decided it was going to be fragmented like that and basically allow the reader to add it all up themselves, that made it actually fairly easy to expand it out into a book.
JM: That fragmentary nature also lends it a documentary feel.

Seth: It does. It’s funny, having characters interviewed of course immediately makes you think of a documentary but the funny thing is like, I’ve had a few people comment or I’ve read a few things about it, where someone will say, they’ve wondered who’s doing the interviewing and who are these people speaking to. And that was like a thought that never even occurred to me. To me it’s almost like more of a ghost experience where you as the reader are sort of like a ghost floating into his world, sort of looking at the figments of his life.

JM: I was wondering about who was doing the interviewing. There’s the one part, kind of early on, where one of George’s colleagues from the TV station mentions there’s a lost video tribute to George. So I assumed that was where the interviews came from.

Seth: Oh, OK, that’s an interesting concept. I like to hear that sort of stuff because that never occurred to me in the least. But I like that idea. That’s actually pretty good.

JM: Well, good work.

Seth: Thank you. Sometimes people tell you stuff and after a while you do start to think you did it on purpose, but that’s just a good interpretation

JM: It seems like all of your books are really character- driven, you like to write about these single characters.

Seth: Yeah, actually I have a hard time even considering plot, to tell you the truth. It’s like I don’t think in those terms. Automatically, when I think of a story, like if I was to start planning another book, it starts immediately with I start thinking of somebody’s life and more that sweep of their life rather than a particular incident in it. I really think it all just relates to the simple fact that both my parents were very…they talked to me an awful lot about their lives. And they were both much older than me. They both were born like in the ’20s. so I grew up listening to these old stories all the time. And they were both storyteller types. And I think that kind of impressed itself in the back of my mind. I don’t think I realized this till about maybe 10 years ago, but I think that’s kind of why every story I do is sort of an old person relating their life, it’s my idea of what a story is.

JM: That’s interesting.

Seth: But sometimes I do feel restrained by it. I am planning a new graphic novel that I’ll probably start in a couple of years, and I immediately decided it’s got to have a wider range of characters, so I’m going to try to do a bit more of an ensemble piece with 6 characters, or 5 characters, but I have to say already they’re all old people. So it’s already in the same camp, I can’t get away from it.

JM: So you’ll start in a couple of years, is that because you’re working on something else now?

Seth: Yeah I’m finishing up my Clyde Fans story, which has been taking forever. I’m going to spend the next year and a half finishing it and that should put an end to that and then I can move on.

JM: That ought to feel good.

Seth: It will feel good. I think I might have a party at the end. It has taken so long. I think I’m actually going to have a banquet and invite a bunch of people. Sit down and have, like, a retirement party.

JM: That seems to fit in thematically with your…

Seth: Exactly.

JM: Reading about what people say about your work, there’s always this sense that your work is exploring nostalgia for decades past. Do you think that it’s nostalgia?

Seth: No, I don’t. I hate the word nostalgia, actually, and I see it every single time there’s any reference to my work. I’ve grown used to it but it always gets under my skin because I think nostalgia has a bad connotation. It always implies a sort of sickly sweet looking back towards a golden age of some kind, even if it’s in your life. Now I certainly think there’s a lot of longing for things in my work or, like, under the surface but it’s not necessarily for the past. And, you know, nostalgia’s tied up with longing for the toys you had when you were a kid or being interested in old TV shows or things like that. And that just seems so hopelessly shallow. Not that we don’t all do it. but it does seem like a shallow thing to be an artistic theme. So it does kind of wear me down at times.

JM: And you can’t really be nostalgic for 1935, you weren’t alive…

Seth: Yeah exactly. You could have, I’m not sure what you’d even call it, but you could certainly be looking at the past with rose-colored glasses. And I do have my own crank theories about what were better time periods and stuff like that.  But it’s mostly just based on aesthetics. I do think that 1925 is probably, in my mind, somewhere around there is like the aesthetic peak of our culture. And it’s been kind of rolling downhill since then. But that doesn’t mean I think everything was even aesthetically was better back then. Some things got better, some things got much worse. But I certainly don’t think 1925 was a better time to live necessarily, especially if you’re not like a privileged white person.

JM: Throughout the book there are these sort of cardboard models of the building which I thought were gorgeous; can you tell me a little bit about how that happened?

Seth: Yeah, they’re part of a city I’m building actually. I have about 50 of them at the moment. I was planning a story, a graphic novel that actually will probably never happen. It was going to be set in the city of Dominion, which is where George lives, and it was going to be a bunch of characters with separate chapters on each one. So at some point I decided I needed to make up the history of the town. I thought 100 or 200 pages on the history of the town, before you get to the characters, would be kind of interesting.

But then I was like, how am I going to start that? So I thought I’d make up a business in my notebook and then roughly figure out some ideas about that. And for some reason I made a little model of the first or the second business maybe I was working on. And I liked the process. I just did it for fun. And I liked it because it gave me time to think what the building’s history was while I was building it. And so I made another and another. And after I had about five it just seemed like an idea to just keep going and so I did. (And the funny thing is that that plan actually really did work out. Now it’s like 9 years later, I know this town pretty well. At some point I eventually reached a point where a map developed and a history.

JM: And now they’re touring around as an exhibit; do you think that’s the extent of it then?

Seth: It’s hard to say. I go back and forth on it. Every once in a while I do think maybe I should just do the history of the town as a big book. Like just sit down and just pour out, try and come up with a quick drawing style and try to do it, like 6- or 700 pages. And just let it stand almost like those kinds of books you’d buy, like a town history. It crosses my mind. I like it because it sounds kind of boring, too. I am kind of interested in things that are boring.