Something, Not Nothing

Sarah Leavitt’s book Something Not Nothing, is as intimate as reading someone’s diary, albeit with their permission. It is a beautiful and gut-wrenching pictorial and verse of the depths of love, grief and a semblance of recovery, or life 2.0.

At the beginning of the book, Leavitt, an artist and cartoonist, states in the last weeks before her partner Donimo’s death that the multitude of questions and sought answers could only be recorded in small booklets of folded scrap paper.

The notion of all the forbidden thoughts, darkness, distress and yearning in one bound book was overwhelming. Thankfully for readers Leavitt used art to document the journey over the two years post death to come to the realization that both Sarah and partner Donimo both began their solitary journeys at the time of Donimo’s death “to lands that neither of us knew about.”

At the beginning of the book the panel boxes of the comics are black and white, separate and distanced from each other with very distinct and heavy lines containing each box. Like the individual pieces of folded scrap paper, each box tightly containing one image, one overwhelming thought.

Through the course of this beautiful book, Leavitt’s journey, healing is witnessed in the introduction of colour, animals, nature and loved ones. The containing lines of the panels soften, panels bump up against each other, images cross panels and grow into pages. Readers heal with Leavitt on this journey of creativity and love.

We are lucky that Sarah will be joining us at this year’s Denman Island Readers and Writers Festival, July 18-20.