I won’t go too deeply into what last year was like. It was an extreme year, marked by both real hardships and real gifts. There were intense highs and lows and moments of scarcity, but also the grounding presence of family, friends, creativity, and a surprising amount of travel. The artist’s struggle is alive and well, yet I feel more hopeful this year than I did during last year’s extremes. There is still a lot to navigate, but the ground feels a bit steadier.

Highlights of 2025 included the release of my debut graphic novel, Salt Green Death, along with attending festivals and traveling as a result of both the book and family connections.  The year also included time in Stockholm, Toronto, and New York, alongside several community-based work and collaborative projects.

Salt Green Death will reach its one-year anniversary on May 20. I want to thank Andy Brown of Conundrum Press for taking a chance on me. Even though it hasn’t technically been a year yet, it has been a busy one for the book. I’m now drawn (pardon the pun) to revisiting the work through workshops centred on working with archives using visual narratives. Next week, I will be an online guest in my friend and mentor Julian Lawrence’s class at Teesside University in the UK. I’m calling the session When a Story Finds You: Passion, Metaphor, and Staying in Creative Process.

Since Fall 2024, I have been working on my second graphic novel, Full Bleed, which is in its last stages after an intense and exciting year and a half of development and execution. This project is a collaborative one with the brilliant writer Christy Ann Conlin. It is a real honour to work with Christy Ann, who not only wrote the short story but also masterfully shaped the visual narrative script and helped build the gothic world of the book, which is set primarily in Nova Scotia.

The project is challenging but it is also deeply rewarding. I am trying to stay true to how I work, to release my go-to comparisons to other people’s books, and to focus instead on what I genuinely want to express on each page as I stay true to Christy Ann’s extraordinary script. The book is entirely hand-drawn on newsprint, much like Salt Green Death. I have come to think of drawing like handwriting a very long letter. Over time, handwriting changes but still uniquely the writer’s style. In that sense, my visual language is a form of writing, and my mark-making is an organic narrative language.

The current stage involves completing the final pages then returning to each page to review, hand-letter the dialogue and narrative blocks (which are currently planned out with typed placeholders), and add colour. From there, the work will be scanned and delivered to the publisher for review and revisions. The book is set to be released in Spring 2027 through Conundrum Press.

Once Full Bleed is complete, I will be diving fully into creating my personal project based on my teen diary: Potato Nose: 1977, the prologue (a 16-page comic) and an eventual 150-page graphic novel. Running a Kickstarter for Potato Nose: 1977 in the Fall of 2025 was a valuable/invaluable experience. It helped refine the message and direction for the project. I want this project to feel unique and new in its visual language, while returning to the experimental storytelling approach that shaped much of Salt Green Death. 

Potato Nose: 1977 is truly a therapeutic experiment as well as I explore its graphic medicine elements. It contains the original diagnosis after finding a parotid gland tumour in my left cheek. It is strange how little I addressed this event in my diary, even though it marked the beginning of a seven-year journey through surgeries and radiation treatments. Health-wise, I am currently on the waitlist for a needle biopsy on my parotid gland, as several tumours have returned. I met quickly with a fabulous ear, nose, and throat surgeon/specialist in January, and this is the next step. Whatever comes next, I don’t see it as a hindrance to the work. If anything, it feeds directly into Potato Nose’s creative process and helps me navigate however the journey unfolds. Fingers crossed on a grant application.

Another major project in development is Occupation: The Long Shadow, a long-term research and graphic novel project based on a manuscript my paternal grandfather wrote in 1948 about his experiences as a prisoner of war. He served in the Norwegian Air Force, was arrested early in the war, and spent the remainder of it in various camps across Europe. As I spend time with this manuscript, it is hard not to feel the project’s relevance in the present moment. The realities he describes no longer feel distant or abstract.

Interpreting this manuscript visually will require extensive research, but the project has also deepened into questions of archival haunting and memory. I foresee the visuals will go deeper and more experimental. I feel incredibly honoured to be collaborating with my niece, Emma Varley, anthropologist, on a larger project beyond my grandfather’s manuscript. What began as our parallel paths has now become an intertwined and much larger project. Fingers crossed on our grant applications.

I am currently working on an arts-based research project with Dr. Ching-Chiu Lin and Hannah Robertson, Simon Fraser University, alongside my amazing brother, Fredrik (Fred) Thorsen, filmmaker and facilitator. This project is an arts-based community inquiry focused on storytelling, dialogue, and creative practice as pathways to personal and community resilience. Together, we are working with community members in Maple Ridge on a project called Your Story Matters. It is a five-part introductory workshop series that offers “taste tests” of different storytelling approaches, from screenwriting and editing to mind mapping, drawing, and graphic novels, centred on the idea that everyone’s story is worth telling.

And finally, a small but meaningful sign of change: the herons are returning to the rooftops here in Vancouver’s West End. In winter, they sit alone on chimneys, but now they’re beginning to pair up, perched a careful distance apart. Yesterday I saw a gang of three hanging out pretty close together. Nesting season is near. Spring is just around the corner, and that feels good.