Sarah Firth

Voice Over (00:02):
This show is sponsored by The Comics Shop. Welcome to Tuesday Chinwag with your host Lee Chalker, writer, artist, and creator of the Comic series Battle for Basel.

Leigh Chalker (00:25):
All right, good day and welcome to another episode of Tuesday Chinwag. I am Lee Chalker and I’m the creator of Battle for Bustle. Now, battle for Bustle is available in the Comex Shop. The best thing is about the Comex Shop is there’s over 100 Australian independent creators in there. It has a $9 flat rate, so you don’t have to buy my comic, go and buy somebody’s comic book, help support them, make them feel good. And it just adds to all the love that we like to spread on the show and through Comex. Now, for all of those people out there that have not seen the show, it’s a fluid show based on who, where, how, and why. I try to cover all of those things. We just talk. That’s how we like it. It’s just how it is, man. It just flows. So best thing you can do is like and subscribe and share Comex anywhere you can find them.

(01:18)
And that just helps the algorithms and the Tree of Computing and all that sort of jive reach so many people that we can build this community of like-minded people and we can just share the love of creativity and comic books and Jive talk and really and all be in one because that’s what it’s all about. And that I am going to introduce tonight’s guest because I feel like in a strange way that Sarah and I have met multiple times, but just via email because we have been bouncing backwards and forwards for probably 12 months and today’s the day the universe has brought us into the same location via the Wonder of the Internety. So Sarah, first, how are you? Yeah, I’m good, thank you. How are you? I’m alright man. I’ve had a good week. I’m filled with the joys of sheer existence at the moment, so I dunno what else to say about it.

(02:22)
It’s just I’m excited. I’m trying to stay cool, calm and collective. I’m feeling bright, I’m feeling, I’m feeling chippy and I am excited to yarn to you, man, because it’s like it has felt like you and I have been trying to get this chinwag happening for a while. So I’m just thankful to have you on the show, man. And I really appreciate you being on Chin Waggon. Welcome to the family. So yeah, so that’s me. And over to you. I’m just kidding, I’m out of here. No, I’m just joking again, it’s all yours. So basically I’m just going to get straight into it, Sarah, with the bang of the show. Who

Sarah Firth (03:15):
Was that? Me? I think that was a calendar invite to say put out the bins

Leigh Chalker (03:19):
Maybe. Maybe. Well, there you go. That’s a start to the question who I am as someone that needs to put the bins out this evening. Yeah, who

Sarah Firth (03:28):
Am I? I’m the bin caretaker. I put the bins out. Who am I? I feel like, well, who am I? I feel like I am. I’m going to actually show a page from my graphic novel that we’ll talk about. I would say that I am, I’m this of all the different influences, jostling together to make a person is me and one of those is Bin Take a Router.

Leigh Chalker (04:07):
Do you have that mentioned in that diagram there at all? Does it have its own segment?

Sarah Firth (04:12):
I should have put it in. No, I don’t. Next time, next time.

(04:21)
I’m Sarah Firth. I live here in Melbourne on waring jury country, right by the Mary River, sorry, Mary Creek. I don’t actually know technically the difference between a creek and a river, but it’s a creek and it’s funny. Who are you? I feel like I am a creator. When people say, what kind of artist are you? Are you a writer? I’m always like, I don’t know what to say because they’re all a bit narrow to me saying I’m a creator makes more sense. I was originally trained as a sculptor and then I had a really bad car accident and got an acquired brain injury and couldn’t walk for six months and that made me turn to comics and animation. I could do them from bed and if I hadn’t had that car accident, I might still be making sculptures right now. But now I make comics and animations I have through making more and more comics and through writing this book kind of learned how to write.

(05:26)
Prior to making this book, I feel like I didn’t know how to write and I’m sure some people read this and argue, I still don’t know how to write, but me identifying as a writer still feels kind of new and I still feel a little bit fraudulent. Like yesterday I went and taught at a Swinburne University creative writing class, and I just said to the students, I’m like, I don’t really feel like a writer and you’re all here to learn from writers, but I don’t really feel like a writer. And everyone said, every writer that comes and talks to us says they don’t feel like a writer. So maybe that means I’m a writer, but I like stories, but I also just noticing things. One of my favourite things in the whole world is to get up and go and have a coffee and just sit with a notebook and just look at stuff and write down or draw or notice people, birds, the crumbs on the table different sounds like I like looking at and noticing stuff. And I find if I don’t have time to do that, I feel really constipated.

(06:46)
I just love noticing stuff and taking notes. And this is just top of mind for me because I was teaching this class yesterday. We were talking about writing process and a lot of my writing process is I’ll be out and about walking and I’ll see something and I’ll write down a little idea or a story in my notes app. And I know that a lot of writers and cartoonists do this, but I often write when I’m out, out and about rather than sitting at a desk, if that makes sense. I find sitting at a desk a bit tedious, which is funny because drawing, you need to sit really. But yes, I feel like I’m a creator. Who else am I a person? I am lots of different people with lots of different roles and there’s lots of me that I don’t even know yet that I won’t know until I interface with different relationships and situations.

Leigh Chalker (07:42):
I think that’s a pretty good answer, mate. I like that fact that you’re obviously very obviously observant who you are and such. I think that’s a lovely answer. It’d be good if a lot more people in the world had a little bit more awareness, I guess, of who they are and such. So mate. Now you said you’re a sculpture, a sculptor. I did not. You personally, being a wasn’t sculpture. I was going to say like, man, you’ve got a lot of movement for a sculpture, but nothing

Sarah Firth (08:26):
Sculpture.

Leigh Chalker (08:27):
Yeah, yeah. Was that your number one love when you were creating, because you said you were a creator, so I’m going to assume that that’s not something you’ve just become, that’s something that you’ve always, one of the things you that you’ve always felt like you were. So what attracted you to that?

Sarah Firth (08:49):
I think I’ve always had the creative impulse. I’ve always made stuff or made messes and I always just like, it’s actually funny when I look at my drawings that I did as a child, they’re not terrible, they’re just fricking weird. I did some really wild weird drawings as a kid and then when I see equivalent drawings done by kids that I know now, they’re beautiful. They’re really talented children. Whereas I was not particularly talented, but I just loved pen on paper. And even now when I write and draw, I love the feeling of pen on paper. It’s just that simple thing. And I use a lamby fountain pen and I just love that juicy ink on paper. So I’ve been doing that. I think my mom said the first artwork I ever did was drawing on a toilet with lipstick that I stole from her bag

Leigh Chalker (09:47):
Draw on a toilet.

Sarah Firth (09:48):
Well, you know how people have to go to the toilet with their kids and they’re like, just stand there Jimmy. And then the kids licking the floor and they’re like, oh, I

Leigh Chalker (09:59):
Was there. That might be what was wrong with me mate. Mom

Sarah Firth (10:03):
There, she’s going and I’m rifling through a bag and obviously got a lipstick and I’m there drawing on the toilet and ruining her lipstick, unfortunately. But yeah, so for me, I’ve always just loved creativity. It was never one thing I’d paint. I would wear costumes and dance around. I’d make stacks of rocks, I’d make mud pies and just making and playing with stuff. And I think that I ended up going and doing sculpture because I felt like I wanted to extend my skillset. And I think in my mind I was like, if you become a sculptor, you learn a classically trained sculpt rather than a conceptual sculpture. You learn all the fabrication techniques of welding, carving, smelting, all that kind of stuff. And I thought if I do this arts degree and then I can’t get a job, at least I can be a welder or I can fix a fence or whatever.

(11:00)
And I was actually going to go and become a welder for carriage works in Sydney before I had my car accident. So I was going to go on that welder path. To me, welding is really fun, it’s dangerous, hot glueing , and that’s really fun and enjoyable and satisfying. But I think I also really enjoyed making kinetic sculpture. So I’ve always had this thread with dance. I love dancing. I am a terrible dancer. What I mean by that is I enjoy dancing, but it’s like, and I think it’s because I’m neuro divergent dyslexic, I’m not very good at remembering or learning steps. I’m good at flailing around and doing awkward, weird stuff that people kind of go, oh my god. But there’s something about movement that comes through my sculpture. So I did kinetic sculpture for a long time, so I’d pull apart. So I’d use polarity switches from cars, which is the mechanism for a windscreen wiper, and I’d use that into this machine I would build. So I made these drawing trees, so they’re giant, black, naked trees with limbs that move, that hold pens and they draw pictures. So in a way I was kind of outsourcing my cartooning to a machine, but now I do the work myself, so I’m not exploiting anyone’s labour but my own now. Yeah,

Leigh Chalker (12:26):
Well it’s like, mate, you got to do what you got to do. When you’re creative, you, it’s like the ingenuity of it’s, it just sounds like you’re like just man, it just sounds like you got a voice early on and you just want to get it in.

Sarah Firth (12:41):
Yeah, I’m really lucky to have had supportive parents. My dad’s an architect and my mom’s a landscape architect and they both have artists practises on the side. So my mom does a lot of abstract textile work and my dad does landscape painting and stuff. And so they’ve always been really encouraging of my creative exploration, which I feel so lucky for because I know so many people who had the same impulses that I had as a child and their parents were like, stop that. You’ll never get a job. Quit mucking around, knuckle down, all this kind of thing. But they were like, oh no, we want to encourage this. So they’ve always been, they don’t always understand what I do or why, but they’ve always sort of respected the creative impulse.

Leigh Chalker (13:32):
Yeah, no, I get that too, man. I was very lucky, as you said to my family was split sporting and I guess and creativity as well. So I’ve always been lucky like that too, with encouragement. I do have to say though that the sheer tactility of a pencil on paper is something that I find very therapeutic. I am a traditional penciler and Inca just because there’s something in the therapy of it to me, not to suggest to anyone that’s listening, but there’s anything wrong with any sort of digital drawing or anything like that. It’s just purely something that attracts me to the creative process of drawing. But man, it’s like, wow, you sort of caught me off guard a little bit there because you’re so just straight up and I’ve done this and I’ve done that and I’m like the welding, that’s really wow that you have such a feel for welding and that’s where you wanted to go because I could only imagine from what you’ve described, what you would’ve been welding in your spare time and your creativity, you know what I mean? So it’s pretty amazing. Now, when you were talking previously in the show about your creativity, when you decided to, you had your love of sculpture and your thought processes with that, and you’ve said you had an accident, which we don’t have to discuss things and out of details obviously, but that pushed you off ever so gently into another area, which it

Sarah Firth (15:39):
Was more like a punch to the face,

Leigh Chalker (15:44):
Rather

Sarah Firth (15:44):
Gentle. It was more of a like, stop, go this way.

Leigh Chalker (15:51):
And what were you, obviously while you were healing and stuff, you would’ve, I guess you would’ve been trying to find an avenue to express yourself as well, I presume. And this led you to drawing and you seem to have had many steps as we’ll get into it. What attracted you other than the tactile nature of pen and paper? What was it that you felt when you realised that that was an avenue for you to express yourself after?

Sarah Firth (16:38):
I think I should clarify. I’ve always drawn before, even with sculpture, you always draw before you, well, that’s not true. You typically will draw before you make. So there’s a lot of planning and drawing and sketching that’s involved. So I’ve always drawn, it’s more that sculpture is big and expensive and typically you need to stand well for the kind of sculpture I was doing, I needed to stand and that was not feasible at the time, so I just had to pack my world down. And the reason I turned to drawing is just because it was there and I was suffering and I needed to make sense of things and also feel agency. And so drawing and writing was part of that. And I mean, I’ve always been a really avid journaler and note taker about life and things and feelings. So it was naturally part of that.

(17:33)
I guess for me, animation was a step in the same direction as sculpture, particularly kinetic sculpture, because with animation it’s making magical moving pictures. And I guess for me, part of making animations in bed was entertaining myself. I got bored and that’s when I got onto social media as well. And for anyone who’s got chronic illness or disability or who’s isolated for whatever reasons, social media is a really important way of connecting with community for expressing yourself, for connecting with ideas and other people that you otherwise wouldn’t connect with and stuff like that. So I also really kind of got the internet bug and I really enjoyed using the really early pre 2010 Facebook and messaging people and sharing my art there and stuff like that, quite old days. But yeah, a lot of it was around self-expression, processing trauma I guess, and advocating for myself and connecting with people and entertaining myself with drawings and animations.

Leigh Chalker (18:51):
Yeah, no, that’s very nice, man, because I think that we will travel down the path we were talking about before the show later on, but anyone that’s watched this show, good day. Ray, how are you mate? Hello, fourth monkey stew. Woohoo wagging the chin. Good day, Lee, welcome Sarah. Thank you for watching guys. It’s always great to have you. And do feel free anyone to throw out some comments or some questions for Sarah, and we will do our best to share them with her and we’ll find out some answers for you throughout the evening. Drawing creativity, we touched on it earlier before because we obviously both share a similar need, I guess requirement compulsion for lack of a better word, to create to deal with such things as you just touched on. Then trauma stresses, varying things that are brought on some underlying, some sudden. And sometimes I guess we were lucky because we found our little voices to try and help us. Your work looks amazing, Sarah. Well done. Jeffrey beats good on you, mate. And yeah, I just like to encourage anyone that’s listening and a little bit nervous or scared and may not be sure of themselves with their creativity, their creative process or anything to just give it a go. It does make you feel good sometimes. Some of the most beautiful moments are with yourself when you’re creating things, you know what I mean? And realising getting in touch with yourself. It’s a good thing. And I also

Sarah Firth (20:42):
Feel like making bad work bad. I was saying before, I’m bad at dancing. I feel like doing things badly is actually whatever the hell that means is actually really important because it’s, in my opinion, you only ever get good at something by doing it badly for a long time. So it’s like, and maybe this is delusional, but just in my mind I’m like, the more I do the thing, even if it’s a bit disappointing, I know that just by doing it, I’m getting closer to something. It’s not about getting better, but it’s more as like I’m getting closer to figuring out what it is I’m really trying to say or what it is I’m really trying to do or the way that I really like to work. And coming back to your point about digital art making and tactile paper comic making, I love both for different reasons. And part of it is, for example, with my graphic novel, I also have a funny story about, I have the two different versions of it that I want to tell the story about, but with this, when I first started making it, I wanted it to all be hand drawn ink watercolour. And then after doing one chapter of it, I just went, this is going to be such a pain in the butt to edit. It’s going to be like torture. And so I went digital and I loved it. It was great.

Leigh Chalker (22:18):
Was that the first time you’d ever been digital with your work?

Sarah Firth (22:23):
I do a lot of my graphic recording work digitally. So that’s what I do as my profession is my work, which is graphic recording, is live visual note taking at events. And I’ve always done that, or not always digitally. I do it on paper as well, but I do it digital so people could project it large on screens. So yeah, there is something about digital that I like. This is the first time I’ve done a long form work digitally, but it just meant that, yeah, it was a way easier to edit because otherwise it’s just so painful.

Leigh Chalker (23:01):
Oh man, no, I see the beauty in it for me, I don’t think anyone can do anything wrong creatively. Sometimes you get questions up on the show and it’s like, what’s your creative process? Sometimes, man, you just got to, were saying how you just dance, you just got to feel that energy, man. You just got to do it. You just got to get it out. And sometimes it’s not the image that’s in your mind’s eye, but sometimes it can be better. Sometimes it’s not what you want, but it’s still there. It’s still a representation. So I’m definitely with you, man. I believe that myself with all the shit that I’ve been through. You know what I mean? One of the things that I’ve realised and what’s helped me through process of art is realising myself and realising that I’m not wrong with anything I do. You know what I mean? First it’s got to be for me and the process and understanding what I’m feeling. And if as you said you can connect to people out in the world that feel the same way, then that’s a really cool feeling. But first of all, I guess it’s like a blanket for me, man. Do you know what I mean? First I worry about getting it out there later, but by all means, whatever it takes for you to express yourself is a beautiful thing. So anyone else? I feel

Sarah Firth (24:43):
Like people make books for different reasons. Some people, it’s actually interesting. This book for me was very much a passion project. It’s a weird book and people are like, why did you write this? And what is it about exactly? And exactly to your point, I come back to, it’s the book that I wanted to read that I could not find anywhere. And so I was like, right, I’m going to make this thing that talks about and touches on and send me answers some of the questions that I have, and I want to understand what I actually think. And to me, writing is part of a process of understanding what you think and feel. And yeah, so this was absolutely an exercise in that. And so it was always very intrinsically motivated, so motivated from inside of myself rather than extreme, musically motivated. And it’s really interesting because a book like this that’s not easily definable can fail.

(25:41)
This was always fail. What does that mean? A book like this is always a potential risk if you want to get it published in the mainstream context because mainstream publishing is an industry, it’s a business. They want to know who’s the audience, what’s the market fit, blah, blah, blah. And what I’ve found really interesting is since making this book, and this got a lot of rejections, it didn’t fit anywhere. But since making it and talking to different editors and agents and publishers, they’ve said that again and again. They get people talking to them, pitching them books where the author is trying really hard to fit into a particular market niche that they think is really popular. So that could be whatever kind of stories just so hot right now. And they say that again and again. When people write books that aren’t from their heart for themselves, you can kind of tell. And even if it’s a potential blockbuster, it’s always a little bit kind of dead. And so there needs to be some aliveness, and that can only come from whatever unique story, flavour setup that you have. And that’s been really validating for me as well. From a style perspective, I’ve had some criticisms from people that my style is very, what’s the right word?

(27:06)
Not spacious enough. I dunno what the right word is, not

Leigh Chalker (27:09):
Spacious enough,

Sarah Firth (27:10):
But that my style is very intensive. It’s got a lot of detail on the page, and it’s all kind of squashed in together. And that for some people they’re like, oh, that should have been spread across three pages, not just two because it needs more breathing room and all this formal stuff. And for quite a while I was a bit anxious, like, oh shit, am I really bad at page layout design, et cetera. And then I’m like, hold on a minute. What about Linda Barry? What about Sam Wallman? Their stuff is amazing, and it’s really cramped as well. And then I’m like, maybe I’m just one of those people. Maximalist, thank you, Jeffrey.

Leigh Chalker (27:55):
Maybe I’m

Sarah Firth (27:55):
Maximalist, and maybe that’s okay. And it’s like the criticisms that I’ve had around the stylistic stuff, they’re valid, but it doesn’t mean that what I’m making is wrong. It just means that it is different and maybe that person doesn’t like it, and that’s okay.

Leigh Chalker (28:13):
Yeah. Yeah. I think, man, that’s a very healthy attitude, Sarah, I think because man, look, my experience is obviously not as high level as yours with mainstream publishing, but I just think as, again, as long as you’re true to yourself and you found your voice and what you want to say is what you’re putting down, it’s like if you get criticism, mate, if we listen to everything that everyone told us we couldn’t do, we wouldn’t get anything done. It’s just, I just, I dunno, man. I’m just at that point now where I just, yeah, it’s cool. It’s whatever. It can’t make you like it, you know what I mean? It’s like, just let it go, Don tick. There’s

Sarah Firth (29:00):
Some things you’ve got to fight for though. So I’m going to jump in and tell this story about the different covers.

(29:07)
Funny. So this is the Australian edition. That’s a hard cover. And this naked picture of myself, I didn’t actually want this, but my editorial team were like, people need to know that this is a book for adults. How do we know it’s a book for adults? A naked lady will scare away the children. And so that’s why they did that. And I was like, okay, I guess that makes sense. When the book was being pitched in the us, they were like, no, no, no, no, no, we cannot have nudity. We are the us. We can have guns and all kinds of weird stuff, but no nudity. So the US cover had to have clothing.

(29:50)
And also when they were pitching it, the first chapter of the book deals with mundane activity, and it has a bunch of stuff around scooping kitty litter that’s quite meaningful. It’s not just arbitrary poop stuff, but they were saying, for the US market, we can’t have poop. Can you get rid of the poop? No one will publish this if you have poop in the first chapter anywhere in the book. And I just thought, actually, no, the poop is really important for the story, so we’ve got to keep the poop. And so I had to fight tooth and nail to have three pages of cat poop in the book. Yeah.

Leigh Chalker (30:34):
What sort determination does it take, and what’s the level of fighting? Is it like angry emails backwards and forwards about keep the poop? This is the justifiable scientific reason and marketing labour intensive work that 27 people on the desks have decided that the P’S got to go, but what’s the backwards and forwards of that conversation? It’s email, emails

Sarah Firth (31:04):
From the agent in New York saying people like the manuscript. We have had repeated comments that the poop is not appropriate, and that for someone to publish it, it would have to go, are you open to that? Because if you are, this person might be interested in publishing it, this person might be interested. And my email back was, no, it’s a really important part of the book. The whole premise of the book begins with shit. We cannot get rid of it. And then him saying, okay, well, it means that this thing won’t happen and this thing won’t happen. And so it just meant me going, no, it has to be there, but if I was a different person, and again, it’s not wrong, or other people might’ve gone, yeah, okay, cool, whatever, I’ll cut it. That’s fine. But I was like, no, it’s really important because it symbolises the shit that we have to deal with every day as organic human beings, and I’m not going to get rid of that. Sorry.

Leigh Chalker (32:03):
Yeah. How did you feel when you got that email when they were just describing that from your agent? And were you as determined at that moment as you seem now with your name? Or did you have a few seconds of, if I get rid of the poo, I could get this out into America? You were obviously very, it stays. Yeah.

Sarah Firth (32:32):
I was literally just like, why is this a problem? Are these people, not people living?

Leigh Chalker (32:38):
Yeah. No, man, I respect the determination, man, and the belief in yourself for doing that, because I’d be quite surprised if there weren’t a number of people that would’ve rolled over on that one, man. Yeah, this

Sarah Firth (32:52):
Felt like a really important fundamental part of the story. So I was like, I just can’t cut that out. There’s no equivalent,

Leigh Chalker (33:00):
Obviously, starting as you said with the book, we start in the shit because I’m sure we can expand on that as we go through the show, but my understanding of everything is that, and from already what you’ve said here tonight is that it is an existential search for oneself yourself through the act of this story and creativity and in your own way telling your story and all the battles you’ve been through and all your successes, and as you said, all of the sums that make up the part, mate. So I applaud you for standing up for it, man. And I’m looking at you now and seeing where it’s going is like, mate, you made the right decision success, so it’s good on you, man. We’ll

Sarah Firth (33:57):
See. We’ll see. But it’s like when you say that the book is about that, oh, what’s this,

Leigh Chalker (34:04):
People, yeah, that’s shawny. Yeah, my mean, people’s heads can be quite crowded. Why can’t that be represented in books? The world needs variety. Well said, Sean.

Sarah Firth (34:16):
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah, that’s so true. And I feel like, yeah, trying to narrow things down too much. I don’t know. People like simplicity, people like clarity, and I think that that stuff is important, but if you just aim for that, you can also miss out on the kind of messy complicated stuff. And if anything, this book is about how does a person deal with the messy, complicated stuff of life, like the shit of life or the fact that yes, I’m a person, but I also exist in networks of people, and am I a good person or not? And what does that even mean? How do I be a better custodian to the land that I’m on rather than just extracting and polluting and these difficult questions? And I feel like also for me, and I’m going to be a big nerd for a second, but it’s science week in Australia, and my Trojan Horse secret mission with this book was that in my mind, this book is secretly a book about science communication because it is full of animals, organisms, other life forms, other creatures, very much the more than human world.

(35:37)
And for me, part of being a person is something that’s been really radical for me, is thinking about myself not as an individual, and not even just as a human, but as a organism that is part of nature, and that all of this is nature and that I’m always in relationship with all of the things around me. And in every thing that I do, I have different choices to sort of honour or not other creatures. And I don’t mean that in a kind of superficial way. I mean that in a very kind of real and brutal way. Actually, I’m going to take a very weird tangent right now, but it was very meaningful for me. So I have a friend who lives on a farm and she raises sheep. And we had a special occasion for her 40th birthday two weekends ago where we actually ate her Dear, dear Ram called biscuit.

(36:34)
The reason why we ate him was because he developed some behavioural issues and he was becoming really violent, so they had to kill him, but she wanted to kill him in the most ethical way she could. So it was like she didn’t send him to the abattoir. He was on the farm, he had a lovely breakfast, and then he was shot in the back of the head, and then she used every single part of his body, all of his organs, his bones, she turned his skin into a pelt. She kept all of his meat. And we as a birthday group, we all partook in eating biscuit. We all knew biscuit as a sheep. He was a lovely guy until he turned. And I guess that’s what I mean is it’s like life is full of really complicated relationships of love and challenge, and that whole experience of eating a creature that I’d known who was killed with care and love for really complicated and upsetting reasons, that to me is just so difficult and also meaningful.

(37:41)
And so a lot of my work is trying to make sense of things like that. And when I’m eating biscuit at this party, I’m there and I’m like, it was literally one of the tastiest meals I’ve ever had in my life. But I had this intense cognitive dissonance of like, this is biscuit. This is biscuit, and I’m there touching his pelt. That’s now a beautiful fur. And I know that it took four weeks to cure, and I’m aware of all the processes that went into butchering him and how full on and hard working with meat is as well. So that’s what I mean by dealing with the shit and that being a fundamental thread through the book,

Leigh Chalker (38:35):
I would say. Would it be incorrect with me to suggest that you’ve possibly had a spiritual awakening at some point in your life?

Sarah Firth (38:47):
Well, I don’t know. I was actually in a cult that I touch on in the book, but I actually don’t feel super good talking about, but during that time, I had some very profound experiences, but then also am very aware of how spiritual stuff can be twisted and used. That’d be complex and weird. So I don’t know how to answer that question. And I feel like if you say you have had any kind of spiritual enlightenment, you’re probably deluded and you haven’t, I don’t know.

Leigh Chalker (39:25):
I would think that an awakening is enough just with the sheer fact that you begin to ask questions such as you are asking and having realisations that we are not individuals, we are all connected, as you suggest with your book. I think the road down, that is something that probably can’t be put into words. It’s something that every individual has to go through, whatever the inspiration is. But you are right there. I hate, look, I really do hate using awakening. I would possibly suggest that my eyes became far more opened to a lot of things when I went through some pretty hectic trauma over the last few years, and I started feeling disconnected from people and everything around me, and through time and much work, I felt that connection stabilised and become a pretty big foundation in myself due to several circumstances. But I was going to add to a random story about an animal the other night.

(41:15)
This is probably about a month ago, and this is my studio, and it’s separate from the house. The house is about 20 metres that way. So this is my little zone, and there’s an antenna on the back of the house, the studio, and I was having a cigarette, it was about one o’clock in the middle of the night, and I could see something sitting on this antenna. It was big. It was like a blanket was hanging off this antenna. And I was like, I having a second there, man. I was like, what? This is not cool. The dogs weren’t with me. It was just me in the silence of the night, and this blanket was moving. And I was like, oh, man. I started having a full on. And so I walked, I’ve got a little ho outside, the granny flat, and I walked to the end and I was peeking around and there was this big creature on the antenna.

(42:21)
So I turned on my phone torch. I thought, right here we go. I’m sitting there with a cigarette hanging out in the bed. I flicked this cigarette to the phone light on, and man, it was the biggest owl I have ever seen in my life. This thing was the size of, oh, man, it was huge. And it had a minor bird in its floor, and as I put the torch on it, it flicked its head. It looked at me and its eyes fully went fully like a camera and came back and it looked at me, and it seems really weird. It threw the minor bird, flicked it off. So it landed maybe a foot away from me, and then it jumped down under the ground, came and got it, and it’s beak. I’m freaking out. I’m half freaking out, I’m half looking at this thing.

(43:15)
I’m wondering, why don’t I have other people around me to see what is going on? I must be out of my mind. And then it just looked up at me and gave me this really weird look of like, Hey, dude, I’m trying to have some dinner. That’s what I picked up out. And I started talking to this guy, man, like, mate, it’s cool. I’m going to go back over here. I’m going to leave you to it. It’s all right. And man, I don’t know. And then off we both went, but I just have weird moments like that with animals and shit too. So I don’t know what you call that either, man. I guess it’s just the connection. So it’s a healthy thing.

Sarah Firth (43:58):
I used to live on a farm out in Niter be, and we had issues with hairy nose wombats that are endangered, and they would come and dig under the house, and they were ripping up the stumps of the house. It was a big issue. And we would have to get the wildlife guys to come in with cages to remove them, and then they’d come back and stuff. And so like you said, I ended up just talking to them. And so this wombat would be, they’re going, and I’d be like, hello, I know you want to dig here, but this is our house and we live here. Could you dig over here? This is really nice over here. And it didn’t really work.

Leigh Chalker (44:38):
I was like, oh, magic.

Sarah Firth (44:42):
Actually, I have good success rate talking to flies. If there’s a fly in the house, I’ll be like, Hey, you need to leave. Go out the window. And quite regularly it will go out the window. This is not scientific. I’m sure there’s some kind of heuristic bias here, but

Leigh Chalker (45:00):
No, no, man, I’m with you. I met a dude in a pub once, many, many years ago, moons ago, and he was an old fellow. He was an old bush fella, and he was just randomly talking about mag pies one day, and he said, do you know if you ever walk through a lane of trees and mag pies that just hammer ’em on people? He said, stay at the end before you go in there and let the first magpie just say, Hey, I’m just passing through. I mean you no harm. And I’m looking at this dude going, I would’ve been maybe 18, 19 at the time. I’m thinking like, wow, okay, no problem. So anyway, I’ve got to this point where I hit this lane of trees and there’s cyclists going through with zip ties on their helmet, basically in suits of armour, and they’re getting bomb dive, man.

(45:53)
I thought to myself this day, yeah, right, okay. And there’s one, and I’m like, Hey, I’m just passing through, man. I don’t want any trouble. I’m just zipping on in. And then I had, and man, I’ve got straight through. I do that all the time. There never been hit by magpie since. And absence minded gade mate, spiders, listen, at least Huntsman spiders do when I ask them to leave the room. So there we have a kindred spirit. Hey, look at that. That’s good stuff. The fluidity of the chinwag, Sarah, Hey, you know what I mean? Not

Sarah Firth (46:30):
Talking about animals all night. So

Leigh Chalker (46:33):
Yeah. Yeah. No, that’s cool, man. That’s something cool. Alright, so now let’s get to, I’ve met, where’d you start? You’ve said that your book is the biggest thing you’ve ever done, and you started at traditional, then you veered off into, you discovered digital was perfect for you because it allowed a little bit more time to, I guess go back and fix things up as you saw them and you wanted them and things. But that would not have been your first work, I’m assuming. I would assume that you would’ve dabbled in a few smaller comics here and there. Can I touch base with you on that at all? So

Sarah Firth (47:20):
Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, I’ve made many, well, I’ve been quite happily making small comics for since 2013 is when I first started really making them and sharing them, going to zine fairs, making mini comics, submitting to anthologies, all that kind of stuff. And also just making comics and sharing them online. I just really enjoy doing that. Some people are like, why do you give your work away for free? But I’m like, I just really enjoy being able to put stuff up and people can read it straight away for no money. I don’t know. It is fun. So yeah, I’ve made a lot of small work, even now, I love short form pieces. I find them a really satisfying length. The only reason why I made this longer work is I heard about the Comic art workshop. I think it was like 2015. I saw a call out that Pat Grant put out on social media and email saying, if you’ve got an idea for a long form comic pitch to us, and if we like it, you can come along. And this sounds a bit stupid, but I was like, oh, all those guys are so cool. I want to go and hang out with those guys for two weeks. So I was like, there’s nothing

Leigh Chalker (48:34):
Wrong with that at all be That would be awesome. Yeah,

Sarah Firth (48:40):
It’s just really frivolous, right? Because I was like, oh, it was fomo. I was like, oh, I want to go and hang out with these cool comics people on an island in Tasmania. Oh, that’s so cool, but I need to make a graphic novel. And so I think I found out about it the day before the closing date. So I then spent a whole night in my hallway on a little table with post-it notes and pieces of paper coming up with a really half-baked idea for a comic, and then writing an application letter and sending it in just because I thought, look, if I don’t throw my hat in the rink, you never get in. And I was a little bit embarrassed because it was just stream of consciousness stuff. But lo and behold, they liked it and they invited me. So then when I went to the first comic art workshop, other people have turned up with printed manuscripts that have got everything thumbnailed and blah, blah, blah.

(49:39)
I turn up with a bunch of loose, a four paper with some scribbles on it and a bunch of post-it notes, and I’m there going, I don’t know how to write. I just have some ideas. I think it could be a book. And people are very nice, and this is not quite how you write a book, but there’s some good ideas in there. And that was very validating and looking at how other people make longer form work. I was like, oh, that’s how you do it. Oh, it’s like Chris Gooch. Oh, he writes a whole screenplay, then he thumbnails, but then he inks it. That’s smart. I don’t work that way. I do not work that way. But seeing how other people make their work was so enlightening because prior to that, I was just like, I was happy. I probably would’ve still just been making short work forever, because to me, a longer work is not necessarily inherently better than a shorter work. But then going and being involved with Comic Art Workshop and then going, so this book took eight years to bake, so very hard.

Leigh Chalker (50:49):
It’s finished when it’s finished, mate. That’s the process.

Sarah Firth (50:53):
Yeah, so I’ve workshopped it with the common car workshop four times. So 2017, 2019, 2000 15, 17, 19 and 22. And I really feel like I could not have made a longer work without that workshopping support to just get people to read it and be like, does this make sense? Does this work? And at some of the workshops, people said, no, this makes no sense. What are you trying to do with this book? What is this?

Leigh Chalker (51:26):
What were your thoughts on that? What were your thoughts on that at this particular point in time? How did you react to people asking you those questions?

Sarah Firth (51:34):
So I think it was the second comic car workshop, which was in Jock Jakarta in Indonesia. At that point, I had just almost like someone on drugs. I had just typed out pages and pages of stuff and gave that to everyone to read. And so I didn’t have thumbnails. I didn’t have anything to kind of make sense of the work. And so the feedback that I got made sense, it just was a little bit incoherent drug fugue

(52:07)
Seeming. And so the feedback was valid. And it was also painful at the time because whenever you workshop stuff, you feel vulnerable. You don’t want someone to tell you that it sucks, but sometimes it sucks. And for I think six months after that workshop, I was all like, boo-hoo, terrible. My work sucks. I should give up now. But that was important because I went through that phase of give up, give up, but then the desire to make it wouldn’t go away. It kept knocking on the door being like, you’ve got to keep trying. You’ve got to try and make this. If you don’t try and make this, you’ll always regret it. Just keep going. And so in a way, it kind of helped me make it through. I don’t know. It’s a weird, yeah, no,

Leigh Chalker (53:01):
That makes sense to me because I guess it’s perspective man too. You got to take the good with the bad, and you can certainly get good out of bad. Do you know what I mean? Depending on the situation and how you feel about it. You don’t just have to necessarily look at feedback or negativity as the be all and end all you can learn. That’s the adaptability of the creative process for me, I find. But what you were just sort of talking about there, about picking up the vibe, riding high, and then someone comes and oh, and then you felt like you had six months where you flowed back down. I would say that the strength of the idea is in the fact that you maintain through that feeling of, am I good enough feeling? But the strength of the story itself and what you wanted to say in your voice obviously kept you buoyant enough to get to that point where you realised, Hey, I can do this. I want to keep doing this, and I’m going to, yeah,

Sarah Firth (54:18):
I never thought I can do this. Because there was six years of just repeated mucking around and not knowing what I was doing, and then finally getting an agent and them going, you need to have one completed chapter so we can pitch this. And so me making that, and then finally getting a publisher and then making the whole thing in eight months. So two years worth of work in eight months, even in that time, every morning I would wake up, I was in full production robot mode, like an animator where it’s like, I have to fully ink, draw an ink, eight pages today. Even at that point, I was just like, I do not know what I am doing. This is potentially terrible. And even now, I think now that it exists and that some people have said that they’ve enjoyed it, I’m like, okay, okay, it’s, but that feeling of just not knowing what I’m doing was there the whole time.

Leigh Chalker (55:28):
And

Sarah Firth (55:29):
The whole thing was an active persistence and just talking myself off the ledge every day, and it’s like my own internal sabotage stuff and fear would come up so much that I would have to spend an extra half an hour in the morning before doing my work, just journaling where I’m like, I’m scared that people will hate my book and I’ll get cancelled, and that my voice is crap and I should shut up. And I then have to be like, you are allowed to write your stories. It’s just a book. Lots of people don’t even care. Just do it. I’d have to journal about this stuff every day because the fear would just come up and stop me, and I’d be exhausted and couldn’t do any work. And so just emotionally managing myself was a lot of work, but I know it’s like that for a lot of makers. So

Leigh Chalker (56:25):
I would say persistence and perseverance to qualities there that have kept you going. But I like the fact that you talk about journaling too, because I do a lot of, I dunno, I don’t really class myself as a writer per se. I mean, I write my comic books, and yet I find pages and pages of notes and paragraphs of thoughts and processes and things, and around my room and in all my art books and stuff like that, some of them are, yeah, I reread them sometime later and it’s like, wow, okay. That was rather intense. You know what I mean? I was chastising myself quite heavily that day or whatever it is. But obviously journaling has been very important to you, which is something I guess I’ve realised. I don’t have a book per se, but I like to get things out as well, man. And I find that that brings me back into a moment of at least calm before you strike a page, because man, when you got a blank page, I don’t know, man. I think having a blank page is one of the most terrifying things. You can have a face man. You know what I mean? I don’t run with deadlines. I’m like an independent comic book guy. I dunno, man, I tried a deadline once. It didn’t work. So I guess you just pick your lanes. But yeah, no, the journaling thing’s cool, man. And the managing yourself,

Sarah Firth (58:12):
I love deadlines. I’m going to be your alternate and say, I love deadlines because without a deadline, I just spin my wheels and I overthink and I overwork and I blah, blah, blah. And the thing that I love about a deadline is it’s a constraint of, it has to be done by this point, and near enough is good enough. And so to me, deadlines are a way around perfectionism. And that’s also why I like making comics for social media because you have a really firm constraint of 10 panels on Instagram or under two minutes, or those have changed now. But again, you have these constraints where it’s like you cannot make a 300 page magnum opus for Instagram. It’s like, what’s this idea that I can get out in 10 panels that kind of, and to me, that’s operates in the same way as a deadline, and I find that helpful for making stuff. Yeah.

Leigh Chalker (59:10):
Yeah. No, that’s cool. That’s cool. I don’t disagree with whatever makes you feel comfortable at all, mate. Sarah. I’m very much with whatever works for the individual in the process of creativity, man. So yeah, I’m

Sarah Firth (59:31):
Different. Everyone’s different.

Leigh Chalker (59:32):
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I started off as a painter. I used to drawing as a kid, but my great love is painting, and I sort of came into a drawing a bit later on due to varying things. And I don’t know, I wondered, I went through a process of I wasn’t quite getting the same satisfaction out of drawing as I was painting. And then I realised that I enjoyed inking more than pencilling. And then I sort of incorporated the fact that inking is painting and I grey wash and I do lots, use different techniques and stuff like that. And so I guess I just take my time with it that way. I enjoyed that process of adding to it and negatives and positives and things like that. So again, everyone’s different, man. This is why I like, I just like getting talked to like-minded people. Man,

Sarah Firth (01:00:29):
It’s interesting what you say there with how you liked drawing, but then you painting more. But then inking was another option that just makes me think about for me, why I’ve kind of moved more towards riding and away from fine art, aside from having the car accident and stuff is that as much, and even now, I still make art, so it’s just kind of pictures, paintings, drawings, installations, dance. But the thing for me is I always want it to be a little bit more literal or precise or something. And I am not saying people can’t, but I personally can’t get that through just the art. I need words, because to me, words do the kind of precise, clear communication of an idea or a concept, and then the pictures give the feeling or the tone or the mood or all the other stuff that you can’t quite do with words. And that’s for me maybe why comics is my favourite medium is because it does both in really interesting ways. And when I’ve gone back to just images, I always feel like it doesn’t say enough what I’m trying to say.

Leigh Chalker (01:01:54):
I understand that too. My favourite medium now that I’m so involved in it is comic books. Like people that have seen the show a number of times know that my introduction to comic books was my dad and I was a little boy. And it’s not that I couldn’t read, it’s just that I didn’t take to reading as quickly as the other kids. Because apparently when you’re a child, you’re supposed to have certain deadlines that you’re supposed to assimilate to. You know what I mean? They don’t allow you to be yourself and just grow. I mean, anyway, don’t get me started.

(01:02:39)
It’s the whole idea of you can keep drawing until you’re 11 or 12, and then at 12 you need to know what you want to do for the rest of your life. What? It’s wild. Is it? Yeah, I know. It’s like they encouraged that sort of stuff, but then they just snap it on the head and you are childish if you create and you are childish if you want to express your emotions and what’s inside of you and things. I’ve never understood that. And that’s probably one of the things that affected me the most later in life through my processes, which we will get to. But it is eight essays on uncertainty. So for anyone out there that’s not aware of Sarah’s book, it’s eventually everything connects. So it is eight essays on uncertainty. So your essays, obviously over the eight years that you were writing it, did you have the eight titles, the eight subjects of the essays in mind, or did you have two and the other six followed as you proceeded through the creative process? Or

Sarah Firth (01:04:07):
It’s kind of funny because a lot of it was this kind of maximalist, I have all these ideas and they’re like this, and intuitively I know that this goes with this and that goes here. But it was like, what, how? And a huge amount of the years I spent working on this was just sitting down and interrogating how does this fit with this? What does this actually mean? Huge amounts of research. I got a government grant to do six months of really intensive research on a lot of the things in this book to make sure that I had the most in depth understanding around what was happening. But a lot of the process of this was kind of a whittling down or a whittling a way of what was extraneous to get to the core question or the core flavour. And with the themes and the titles, some of them were different titles. So with this chapter that’s about loss and death called, we were here originally that was called Memento Maori, which is a very literal memento. Maori just means remember that you will die. And it’s an old philosophical stance.

(01:05:42)
But over time I realised that the title of this needed to change to we were here. And to me what we were here means is the kind of scroll that you see on a toilet block or somewhere that’s like James was here, or Sarah was here. And what was so interesting to me in the research is historically, if you look at archaeological sites throughout history, humans are being graffitiing. This same thing of I was here and Mildred’s got great tits, that stuff hasn’t changed. And so as I was working on that particular chapter or that essay, it just became clear to me that it was less about, remember, you will Die. And it was more about remember that you existed or how precious it is to have existed at all in this huge expanse of time. And so yeah, the title of that changed, but there are other chapters. The first chapter in the book is called Viv, which is French for kind of living with gusto. So imagine the guy who eats his scrumptious meal and is beautiful and this desire to kind of savour living, but then the things that get in the way of that, as soon as you love something, you fear that you’re going to lose it.

(01:07:21)
But the title for that chapter was always Squa Viv. And yeah, so each chapter is slightly different in the way that it came together. This other chapter, state of Emergency, which is about the complex climate mess that we’re in, the title of that was always going to be State of Emergency because to me that’s a pun, which is state of emergency is the language used when it’s a crisis, you have a state of emergency. There are certain protocols that come into play, but also state of emergency to me also hints to state of emergence. And this idea, I think it’s like a Chinese parable of opportunity and danger as sisters. And it’s this thing of when things start to break down, you can have breakthroughs. When things start to crumble, new things can come, and that even though we’re in this really dire planetary situation, there’s still all these opportunities for rehabilitation of people of places in complex way. I don’t mean that to sound kind of Pollyanna, but it’s not just all doom and gloom or it’s not just crisis.

Leigh Chalker (01:08:51):
Yeah, yeah. I was actually thinking when you said live life with gusto and you said if you love something enough, you’re scared to lose it. But then, I mean, as from our conversation, this is just how my mind goes, then you can go down the old philosophical track. This is how it got me thinking. Just you could go down the philosophical track of if you love something enough, you’ve got to let it go. You know what I mean? So there’s so many questions and one of the things that I like thinking, and I probably think too much, Sarah, it’s probably, I have to say probably one of my greatest weaknesses that I spend hours and hours contemplating. Sometimes nothings, you know what I mean? But they can turn into many things, but I guess it is what it is. But obviously different things have affected you greatly over your time because it’s a personal work. It’s something that I can already see with the title. Eventually everything connects, and we were touching on it earlier, so how the state of emergency type of thing, what we’re doing with the world action reaction, yin yangs perspectives, all those sorts of things, I guess, and to me, from what you’re speaking about already is it’s thought provoking and it clicks people into gear from it clicks me into gear to provoke my thoughts, to thinking from outside, to think outside myself about others. And that’s the connection that we talk about as well. Yeah, that’s

Sarah Firth (01:11:08):
Kind of my hope as well is these are big questions that I come up against all the time, and they’re my explorations and also other people’s ideas woven in there. It’s very intertextual, lots of other theorists or writers or dancers, other people speaking in there. And my hope is that when someone reads it, that it’s both confronting and comforting. And what I mean by that is it’s confronting and then it’s like, yeah, gosh, how do I live with the fact that none of us are getting out of here alive? That is a fundamental reality that is just really hard to grapple with, and everyone has to deal with it in different ways at different times. But how do you live with that? And rather than just being nihilistic or doo me, it’s like how do you live with that in a way that is generative and meaningful?

(01:12:04)
And so for me, this is very much about questions and my approach and kind where I’ve landed, but it’s always provisional in that this book doesn’t have answers. And so my hope is that you can read it and it will tickle your brain and get you thinking about this and that and give you some ideas or some courage or some other perspectives to weave into your world without me giving any answers of how it is or whatever. But even though I deal with heavy topics in this book, it is also full of humour. And look, anyone who’s dealt with crappy stuff in life tends to have a really good sense of humour because you were the lifeboat of dealing with stuff. And so I try to make it as relatable and funny and enjoyable as possible as well, because I personally hate work that’s just like, everything’s terrible.

(01:13:08)
Did you know this and that and this? And you end up just feeling so hammered by just the horrors that it feels so inescapable. And I’m like, that’s, I like thinking about stuff. But I think for me, I have this utility mindset which is like, this might be true. This might be the facts, this might be how it is, but what is actually useful here? What do I do with that? Not just mucking around with ideas for no reason. It’s like there’s always a utility. And so when I’ve written the utility factor for me is it’s like, how can I walk with a reader through this stuff together so I know that I’m not alone? And they know that they’re not alone in thinking about or being concerned about this stuff. I really hope that when people read it, they’re able to touch on and navigate some hard stuff and think about that for themselves, but then also feel like we’re holding hands. And it’s just like, I see you, bro. Life is real. Stuff is hard, but we are here together and we’re sharing stories and people care. So that’s kind of my hope there.

Leigh Chalker (01:14:30):
I think that man, look, to be honest with you, Sarah, I think that the best forms of work, man literature, comic books, anything that I’ve enjoyed most in my life are things that have asked me questions that have made me scared, angry, happy, laugh that have provoked a reaction. And I’ve always enjoyed really personal works from people. Man, it takes, I mean, essentially it’s like when it comes to creating, we touched on it earlier. I mean, there’s so many opinions out there, man. Do you know what I mean? They really don’t just want to let it be and they don’t want people to, it seems like people having self-expression to me just seems like something that others don’t want people to do. And if you express yourself too loudly, there’s a whole pack of people that want to say, nah, man, you can’t do that. Get back in line.

(01:15:35)
And I appreciate people that have the guts too, express themselves, man. And it took me a long time to I guess have the courage to know that that was something that I was lacking to an extent, I guess. I suppose we spoke about this earlier in the show previous before we came on, and it is something that I want to talk to you about, and I know you are comfortable with it. We did discuss it and it’s something that we are, and we both have used creativity to help us deal with many things. But the first time I became aware that, look, I’m an alcoholic for anyone out there doesn’t know, I don’t shy behind it. I don’t speak about it all the time because sometimes it’s like, can’t fire off like a machine gun. I mean, vulnerability is vulnerability because it’s brought out, can’t be used like a weapon.

(01:16:56)
But I feel like I want to talk to you about that because one of the things that, I didn’t know this about you until probably I guess 12 months back when we started emailing and trying to organise the show, and you popped up on my Facebook feed one day and you were there really happy and you had five years on a post-it note from memory and straight up. I was like, you are like five years. I just recognised what you were suggesting, and I’ve wondered for a time and then a little, I think in your comments later on, someone had asked, anyway, it doesn’t matter, but I recognised, okay, righto. So one of the things that I like to advocate on chinwag, and I always do this gently to people, and it’s not often I get the topic anyone either that’s watching or listening that I get to talk to someone who has this in their life and also has creativity.

(01:18:18)
But I guess one thing that I always do try and advocate is that creativity, and I will say this openly has saved my life. There’s been very dark moments where with no one around creativity has seen me through things. It helped me through sobriety. It helped me get off drugs. It’s helped me express myself in ways that I had absolutely no idea I could express myself. And I guess I want to touch on this subject with you, Sarah, because I know as much as you are willing to talk about, man, what was five years? I’ve only just met you, man, but proud of you. That’s a hell of an effort. Oh, thank you. That’s good. That’s a big effort. Five years and longer now, you’d be coming up to nearly six, I assume.

(01:19:15)
How was our journey, mate? What was, before we get started, I’d like to just say too, just so I don’t want this to be a question that makes you feel uncomfortable, because when I tell people I’m an alcoholic, people always ask me, did you know what was the first thing that happened that made you stop? What was the thing that you did? And for me, there was a numerous amount of things that went on for a long time and just there was something that brought me to a stop, but I don’t want to tell the world what that one moment was because it was something that is deeply personal to me, and I only share it with my family and my people. I’ve got a very small neck of people that, well, I love men and I tell ’em as often as I can, and they know that part of the story. So I don’t want you to feel like you have to delve into that part of the story, if you know what I mean.

Sarah Firth (01:20:27):
Yeah. I think it’s nice though that people, when you tell people that you’re sober, they go, oh, how did you know dah dah? Because the unfortunate thing for me is when I tell people that I’m sober, it’s usually because people are foisting drinks on me going, mate, have a drink. Come on, come on, let’s party. And I have to be like, no. And they’re like, come on. And I’m like, no, come that whole thing. And I’m like, no, seriously, quit it. I’m an alcoholic. I can’t drink. I am sober for very serious reasons. Stop it. So actually, unfortunately, even with my own family regularly in situations where I have to escalate and be like, this is not a joke. I cannot drink anything. And sometimes I’m like, I have to leave. Everyone is so drunk and it’s really not triggering, but it’s just too hard. And I have to just, and the thing for me is that the strength I have around that is that my drinking has got so bad that I don’t ever want to be in that situation again because I will. It would kill me. And I want to live and I want to be functional. And that matters more than the opinion of someone who’s having a fun time and thinks that I’m being a party pooper.

(01:21:50)
The people close to me know and they understand, but I feel like unfortunately, I don’t have a lot of alcoholics or colleagues that are sober around me who get what it is. And I think the interesting thing for me around becoming sober is that in becoming sober, maybe for the first two years was, and I was very, very serious. And it really sucked because part of why I drank was because I didn’t realise that I was neurodivergent and that I was using drinking particularly as a way of self-medicating, and managing my neurobiology because I have all kinds of stuff going on that makes raw dogging real life quite challenging. And I didn’t have any other strategies or ways of dealing with difficult internal stuff, difficult sensory stuff, difficult interpersonal stuff, and drinking. Even now people are like, oh, do you hate alcohol? I’m like, no, I love alcohol too much.

(01:22:55)
It is so magical for me. It is a brain holiday. It is the best. And even when I first became sober, I would have friends go, I miss drunk Sarah. I miss drunk Sarah. She was so fun. She was so great. She was so easygoing. She was up for everything. Whereas realising that and getting diagnosed, I’m like, oh, I actually can’t handle loud noises. I actually get freaked out by people and extended eye contact and just learning all this stuff about me that makes me a less fun, easygoing person. But again, I care about my wellbeing as a person and don’t want to just like self-medicate my way through life and also drinking just unleashes the beast, the insatiable beast, and that’s not going away. So I just have to not feed the beast basically.

Leigh Chalker (01:23:57):
I totally get it. I’ve made it. One of the things that I found that was difficult for me in my first period was that people thought once I recognised what I was, because you live in denial for a long time, I did just man, fuck up after fuck up that you somehow justify as being someone else’s fault. And then there’s the moment, but there’s many moments I can touch on this. About six months ago, I ran into a very old friend of mine called Rob. His name’s Robert, but we all used to know him as Bob. He’s a 70-year-old rock climber mate. That’s an incredible dude. But we used to drink together and I ran into him at the shop and the first time I’d seen him in a long time, and he said to me, he goes like, man, where’s you counting a beer?

(01:25:11)
And I’m like, whatcha talking about? He’s like, where’s your beer? I’m like, man, I haven’t been drinking for three years. And he is like, man, that’s amazing because do you know 10, 12 years ago you were talking about giving up drinking? I never thought you could do it. And I sat there and I thought, really? I guess back then I was aware, but it’s so socially acceptable that you do get, that’s the other thing that people don’t realise for you, I guess people like yourself and I is you do get those dickhead that come and jam drinks in your face and go, I had a drink, mate. It’s like, no, man. You know what I mean? I can’t do that. I just remove myself from situations, man. I’ve been at friends’ houses and stuff I can handle when they’re three or four, you know what I mean? That’s all right. When that’s sort of like, man, I sit there and go, how did I used to sit around? Listen to this, bye.

(01:26:10)
It’s just what it is. But I’ve got a lot of friends that respect it too. But did you find that early on you were, and adapting, and I’ll bring this back into the art because I want to get your thoughts on this. I found that I isolated and the isolation was healing, but I was also learning tools to be able to navigate this new life that I’d put myself on. And this new life cost me an awful lot. I can tell you I’ve lost friends. I’ve lost relationship because they wanted to keep drinking. I did not. I made the choice I feel to save myself, and I’m thankful I did all that aside when I was isolating myself and I was going through this trauma, I found that slowly over time, things creatively started meshing and I was clear and I was like, wow, man, that’s what I wanted it to be, and this and this and Clara, and just things just slowly piecing together. And then being, because addiction is an obsession, I guess I became obsessed with artwork. You know what I mean? So I would never leave the studio because creating, how did you find, I guess, creativity helped with your healing? I’m going to assume it would have. Certainly, yeah.

Sarah Firth (01:27:55):
Well, my answer to it is kind of like a stupid sports bro answer, which is like, yeah, but weightlifting was more important for helping me adjust and move into a sober space. But I will say that part of what helped me to get real about the fact that I was an alcoholic, that I alcoholic was actually reading comics by alcoholics, because I touch on in this book the troubles that I’ve had with drinking, and sometimes people message me and they’re like, oh my God, I can’t believe you shared some of this stuff in your book. Aren’t you terrified? Like, oh, people are going to judge you. What if you lose clients? They think you’re incompetent and blah, blah, and my, that could happen. My position is that I consider this kind of sensible story sharing. I’m not talking about just gushing, I’m not talking about oversharing recklessly.

(01:29:02)
I’m not talking about just having no boundaries or anything, but people sharing honestly their stories and battles in a way that is careful and that is meaningful to them. I feel like that is a kind of story medicine. And for me, reading other people’s stories of them dealing with battles that they’ve been through with addictions, with domestic violence, with abuse, with mental illness, all these kinds of things have been so helpful for me to read and engage with, to realise that I’m not alone. Because sometimes those conversations are really, really difficult to have face to face. And there’s something about the way that comics can hold stories of trauma, stories of your internal world that, and then you can share that I feel like comics can do something really special there. That just really helped me realise that I was in denial. I was lying to myself, I was hiding, I was hurting myself. And also just realising the very slippery slope that I was on and where that would end up.

(01:30:18)
And I think I said to you earlier, before we went live, one of the big things that I did, which was a little bit reckless, but I think I needed to do it, was one night when I was absolutely plastered and barely holding things together. I was really pissed off with myself. I’d promised no more drinking today. Okay, today we’re going to not. And then by lunchtime, half bottled tequila, I dug into my savings. I said I wasn’t dig into my savings. I was hiding bottles in the bin again, the bottom of the bin, so housemates wouldn’t see all this crap. And I was just like, I’m doing it again. And so I am there and I’m drunk and I’m disappointed with myself. And I put out pen and paper and I start drawing a comic of going, today I was supposed to not drink, but I did. Again, why am I like this? What am I doing? How much am I actually drinking? Why are you pretending you’re not drinking? And I did this comic that’s like me kind of just calling myself on my own lies.

(01:31:25)
And I ended up posting that online. And there was something in that kind of disclosure or actually coming out as an alcoholic like that, that was shocking enough to me where I knew that other people could see what I was doing and that I wasn’t hiding anymore, that it made me really have to go like, is this who you are? Is this what you want to be doing? And the thing is, if it is who you are and it is what you want to be doing, freaking go for it. I also feel like I’m not anti drinking or anti-drugs because I think for some people they have such a hard time of life that they just need that. And I would never judge anyone for being a active alcoholic because they’re a complex reasons for stuff, and I totally respect that. So I just want to put that caveat in.

(01:32:21)
But for me personally, I needed to make a change and I needed to do that kind of holding myself accountable. And the way that I did that was through a comic, and it was very interesting because I got so many unsolicited messages from people saying, you should this and you should that and blah, blah, blah. But at the same time, I got all these messages in my dms from people I didn’t know very well, saying, holy shit, mate, I am an alcoholic too. I had no idea that you were. And I was like, I had no idea that you were. And now people saying, oh, I’m a sex addict, or I can’t stop shoplifting. Just all this stuff. People going bang, bang, bang. And all these people that you would never tell from looking at them that they had this stuff going on. And it was such a, I guess you could say a beautiful moment of me realising that, wow, you never, I know it’s really corny to say, but you never know what battles people are battling. People have got stuff going on and you cannot tell.

(01:33:22)
And so I think that that has emboldened me to share a lot of the stories that I have in this book because that feeling of not being alone in the messy, weird human stuff to me is a really important kind of lifeline because I feel like a lot of that stuff kind of festers when we have shame where we don’t tell anyone, hide it away, all this kind of stuff, and it can just make things worse. Yeah. But coming back to has creativity helped me, I feel like I’ve said journaling, making comics, thinking through things, that’s just always there. So it’s always helped. But from a neurobiological perspective, the thing that helped me transition from drinking to not drinking was weightlifting. So I do Olympic weightlifting, which is a very intensive kind of weightlifting. They have it at the Olympics at the moment, why it’s Olympic style weightlifting. And there’s something about it as a sport where it’s really technical, it’s really repetitive, and it’s really explosive kind of shock to the body. That actually gives me a very similar physical response as drinking spirits, which was my thing, was drinking heavy spirits was the thing that just took the edge off my nervous system to make me feel functional. Interesting.

Leigh Chalker (01:34:51):
That’s the dopamine hit. I guess

Sarah Firth (01:34:55):
It’s the dopamine hit, and it’s also, so I’ve done a bit of research into what is it that drinking and weightlifting does to the nervous system? And it helps with downregulating, the vargus nerve. And so if you have anxiety or various kind of sensory issues, you are often in a heightened arousal state of flight and fight and drinking can help calm that down. Similarly, weightlifting can help calm that down, but it helps calm it down because you’re having such intense nervous system experiences, weightlifting, that everything else seems really chill. And so that’s my current drug of choice.

Leigh Chalker (01:35:36):
Yeah. Yeah. That’s amazing. Well, mate, there you go. Because whatever you need to do to do your thing, man, I appreciate that story, man. Thank you for sharing that, Sarah. It’s what I’m hoping to one day be able to do in my own work. It’s so important for people to know they’re not alone

Sarah Firth (01:36:05):
Once

Leigh Chalker (01:36:06):
Shawnee, and it seems as though you’ve touched someone else there too, Sarah, it’s, and Thomaston, I find making comics about yourself as a way to reflect that hits really differently than other methods of reflection. Yeah. Yeah.

Sarah Firth (01:36:25):
It’s really interesting.

Leigh Chalker (01:36:26):
Yeah, it is, man. It’s, see, when I did the first chinwag, it was an ego thing. I’d just gotten sober and I wanted to meet people. And then randomly through the processes of doing so many of them now, I found that through the fluidity and the conversation and just being in the moment that there are so many people that truly are going through lots of different stuff and they deal with things differently every day. And there were a couple of episodes previous to this that inspired me to come forward because the people that I was talking to, I guess taught me some things that I needed to hear at that stage as well. And I’ve got a lot of work to go. I know that I’m not where I want to be, but I’m starting to get that way. And I recognise that recovery for me is every day.

(01:37:44)
It’s something I can’t drop either. You’d know that as well for yourself, and it’s a matter of managing things and everyone goes through different stuff. I’m like, you, Sarah, man, if people drink, they drink. If people do drugs, they do drugs. Some people don’t have the coping mechanisms or they just haven’t been able to reach out or had the courage and stuff. I come from far north Queensland and now that I’m sober, it makes me fucking sick. The fucking toxic masculinity. And the bullshit goes into, you can’t walk down the street mate without someone telling you there’s something wrong with you because you don’t want to drink, or it’s just bullshit, man, people, people leave them alone. But I guess in a roundabout, what I’m trying to say is thank you so much for sharing, man, because I feel good that you are also part of a creative process that as well as your weightlifting, because that’s something I’d never thought of or realise that there is a connection for you or maybe other people out there may in past future present that may tweak something in them that they go, Hey, that’s something I should try.

(01:39:10)
Another thing for me, and I don’t harp on about it all the time, I know some people can be a bit odd with it, but it is me and I study and have studied transcendental meditation, and I practise that twice a day and have done for a long time now. And I found that over time, it doesn’t just happen like bang, you don’t just sit down and wow, I see the light. It’s a process like anything. But again, I guess with your book, it all connects to every individual and it works for me. It may not work for other people, but it does for me and my creativity and stuff, and keeps my anxieties and my traumas and my post-trauma and stuff like that all at a level where I can now recognise them, where it starts to flood in and it can come on man, and just chilled sit with it. So it’s helped me things too.

(01:40:13)
Have you found, obviously you’re having those moments too, we’ll push past this now that’s cool with you, but into, you’re obviously having some doubts when you were about yourself and wanting to be a better person when you were trying to heal yourself and come to terms with things. Have you found that in the last, let’s say six years from my memory and yours, I guess it would be quite close to six years, have you found life art? Have you found you’re not so serious anymore? Have you found that your, you are finding yourself, I guess, bursting out of the blocks at the moment and things?

Sarah Firth (01:40:59):
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it’s an ongoing process and I feel like I definitely don’t get up to as many risky antics as I did when I was a drunkard, probably good because some of them were really dangerous. But I do definitely have a danger seeking thread to me. And I always feel more alive and calm when I’m doing vaguely dangerous things. So I need to wholesomely build that into my life. So taking risks, doing things that are scary, doing weightlifting, that’s intense, doing scrambling and rock climbing where there is an actual physical risk of fall, things like that. And I love jumping off cliffs into the ocean and stuff like that. Much to the chagrin of my husband who’s always there going, please don’t die. Please don’t die. But just building in kind of healthy things like that. And to me, they’re kind of awe inspiring.

(01:42:14)
And that’s something as well that’s built into the book is I’ve found connecting more with nature and the night sky and awe inspiring experiences help me to feel connected to myself and to life and to my own resiliency and feel alive, I guess. And even just jumping into a cold River, it sounds a bit silly, and it’s not some kind of like, oh, it’s whim hof, it’s good for you. It’s more that it just makes me feel alive. I dunno if I’m a bit of a masochist and I need some level of discomfort and pain to feel okay, I don’t know, but, and a part of it is also just knowing that that’s been a huge thing of knowing that, that I process the world differently to other people and I need to be a custodian to myself differently. And that I can’t always tolerate stuff and that it doesn’t mean that I can’t do hard things, but that I need to think about accommodations.

(01:43:29)
And I have a pair of earplugs that I bring with me everywhere to put in because I get really bad panic attacks from particular types of sound. I have issues with LED lights, I can see LED lights flashing and s strobing, and then I get panicked. So I have sunglasses in my bag, just all this kind of stuff instead of making myself wrong and that I’m difficult and bad or whatever. It’s just that I’m a different organism to a neurotypical brain and there are certain things that I need and that I’m going to look after those so I can have the best time that I can.

(01:44:05)
And yeah, the main thing I feel happy about not drinking and doing drugs is that I have more energy for doing the stuff that I want to do. So making artwork, going places, seeing people doing things, and then when I’m actually tired, I feel tired and I go home and I rest instead of staying on and being drunk and then coming home at two and feeling like trash and then being tired and wondering why. So I don’t know. I don’t know whether it’s more or less fun, but to me it’s like I don’t care about that anymore. It’s more like I just want to look after myself so I can do the stuff I want to do and that I actually enjoy.

Leigh Chalker (01:44:50):
Yeah. Yeah, I think that I understand completely now that I don’t never will let my guard down. I’ll say that I won’t ever put myself in a position to risk my sobriety. That’s the most important thing in my life right now. Because much like yourself, man, I dunno. I just see, I wasn’t lying to you today when you asked me how I was at the start of the show, and I told you that I was just simply, I guess, feeling this joy of life, man, because it’s like there’s so many cool things out there that you miss when you’re not at full faculty or you’re on the strength or you’ve got things that are taking you away from that moment. And I realise now that I’m seeing things, just little things like bird bang on a tree and you can sit there for a couple of seconds. That’s cool, man, I saw that. Did anyone else see that? You just see things. I had this moment where I was on a walk the other day, and this will sum up how I think it’s made me feel, and I don’t want to ever give up on this.

(01:46:30)
And I was walking and there were people all around me and they were all walking, exercising in their varying gear and shit, man. But they were all faced down in their phones, like fucking walking, not even saying hello. So one of my little things now, I like to do it for shits and giggles. Sarah is like, I’m a bit of a pet sometimes to have fun. And so I walk morning as much as I can and I count anyway. I count the responses I get just because it’s just fun to me. And so I was on this bridge going across this river and there’s all these people walking backwards and forwards. And I stopped because I saw this hawk being followed by these three birds. And then this hawk just man wings back, just boom into the water. And all this spray came up and I’m like the other birds around it. And I’m like, that’s so cool. And I’m looking around not a single person watching this thing. And then the next thing, this bird, this hawk boom, wings out, water flicking everywhere, just starts spinning man up in the air. It got this fish in its claws level gone that way, and these other birds racing after it. And I’m just standing there going like, man, that’s the most fucking cool. 15 seconds. And I’m looking around and everyone says down in their phones, man, and not a single thing. They like 30 people saw it and

(01:48:03)
And that’s what I don’t missing those things. So I’m thankful that I’m in the moment now. So that’s what helped with me. It’s helped fundamentally with all things in my life. So I’m glad to hear it’s helped with yours as well.

Sarah Firth (01:48:17):
I mean, look, there are times, if I’m honest, there are times where not numbing myself really sucks.

Leigh Chalker (01:48:27):
And

Sarah Firth (01:48:28):
That’s why I joke about raw dogging reality. And I know that’s a really gross way of putting it, but it’s like there are times where I’m in the city and there’s jackhammers and there’s a dude abusing, verbally abusing someone on the tram next to me and smelly, and I’m stressed and it’s a lot. And the fact that I have no way of really numbing that stuff annoys me because life was easier when I was not as sensitive to that stuff. I was checked out, but I also didn’t exactly what you’re saying, I missed all these beautiful, joyful things. I wasn’t paying attention and I wasn’t awake. And so what I try to do is in really beautiful and joyful moments, I’m grateful like you are. And then when things suck, I just remind myself that I would prefer to have to deal with the shit rather than miss out on the aliveness. I think, again, it’s different for everyone and whatever, but I think for me it’s just being okay with being really uncomfortable and also having strategies for helping myself when it’s too much, et cetera. And those strategies are just a little bit healthier and don’t harm me. Yeah,

Leigh Chalker (01:49:59):
I get that too. And it’s also on the path to discovering your own uniqueness, man, because instead of being sedated and shit through life, you get to experience all these other things, like the little things that you have to do to get yourself through those moments or the mindsets, the tools, the health, whether it’s food or all of these things or the weightlift thing I’ll say

Sarah Firth (01:50:21):
To that is nothing thing I say to that is with self-medicating. And if you do have trauma in the mix and that trauma is too hard to look at or touch or feel, I think that

(01:50:44)
Being prepared, I guess for me, I didn’t realise that I had some stuff there I didn’t realise, I didn’t know. And then when I took away the self-medicating, it came up and it was full on. I wasn’t ready for that. I didn’t know what to do and it felt too hard and too scary and all this stuff. But I feel like that was the doorway that paint. Again, I keep thinking of all these stupid quotes that are, the door you fear to enter is where the treasure lies and all this kind of stuff. But it’s like, I feel like until you confront some of that stuff, and again, for some people that stuff is so hard that maybe they don’t confront it, and maybe that’s okay. Sometimes the stuff’s real bad. But for me, it was scary and shocking and I went in there, but I feel like I would not have found myself as I am now if I hadn’t gone there.

(01:51:51)
And I was also at a point in my life where I felt safe enough, I had safe housing, I had employment, I had all of these structural things there that meant I was physically safe so that I could afford to deal with stuff. And again, sometimes people don’t, and it’s not the right time, and that’s okay. You can’t force or rush this stuff. You have to have to take care. But I think I feel really grateful and proud of myself for removing the numbing that was allowing me to hide from the thing, and then having to confront the thing and having to realise that I needed to change my life and be honest about some stuff with myself that meant I had to fundamentally change some really hard things. Yeah, it was just hard. It was just hard. But I’m glad I did it.

Leigh Chalker (01:52:52):
Yeah, no, I completely understand everything you’re talking about there, man. That moment where it is just you and there’s no escaping, it’s just, and it can happen to anyone at any different point. And man, it fucking terrified me, man. I was living in this ego thinking that I was fucking, yeah, just another reality man. Do you know what I mean? And you got to break that down. And it’s some pretty hectic shit to look at. You got to you, and it can be a whole thing

Sarah Firth (01:53:39):
Of you dunno how to, and so you’re there going, what is this? And then you’re like, I don’t know how to deal with this. How can I live with this thing? I don’t have the skills or the ability to do this. And then you go on a journey of like, well, how do you deal with this stuff?

Leigh Chalker (01:53:57):
Well, I guess that’s the journey to reclaim yourself, man, and become your unique self because I very much believe that. Honestly, man, I know people think I’m crazy talking like this man, but people have the capacity to be so fucking beautiful, man. You see it every day. And I just, and unique, and I think that’s such a, just, it’s something that people should pursue, but everyone does it in their own way, process, create every day, create your life, create your artwork. It’s up to you. It is what it is. But man, now you’ve been one of the things. Thank you very much for sharing, Sarah. Hey, that’s okay. Thank you for sharing. That’s cool. Yeah, it’s weird. No, it’s not weird. It’s just that I enjoy sharing Now, to be honest with you, Gary, Shauna, what’s the response to your book been like? Sarah, any surprising or unexpected reactions?

Sarah Firth (01:55:14):
Oh, thanks, Gary. That’s a great question. Yeah, look, just keeping on the theme that we’ve been talking about, I’ve had messages from people that just took me aback of people saying, I have felt so unwell for the last five years that I wanted to kill myself. And then I read your book and I feel less like killing myself. And that is, to me, the most profound praise and the fact that someone would contact me and tell me that. And I’ve had a few messages like that of people saying, I’ve been so trapped in feeling so there’s no hope for me or the world. And I read your book and I was like, you know what? I want to stay with the trouble. I want to stick with this. I want to stay here. I love this place. I love these people. I want to fight because I care and I love, and that has been so moving to me.

(01:56:14)
And I take those messages really preciously more broadly. Having the book come out in Australia and then also in the UK and Europe, it’s been really interesting how in different cultures, it’s been read really differently. In Australia, a lot of the feedback I got was around, this is really feminist, this is really autobiographical, this is really about, it was very much about gendered lens, which I thought was interesting. And then going to the uk, the readings that I got and those discussions I had with readers, they were much more picking up on the philosophical elements. So this is a book of philosophy. It’s really great to see a writer playing with these ideas in a kind of lived sense, blah, blah, blah. And in taking it on tour to the US in September, I don’t know what that will be like, but so far I’m going to SPX on the 14th and 15th of September, and I’ll be part of a panel that’s talking about science communication. And that’s been something that’s come up a bit recently is people looking at this as this is really important kind of science about behaviour, about ecosystems.

(01:57:35)
And you’ve done it in such a relatable and interesting way. That’s really valuable because a lot of science writing people never read unless they’re already interested in science. Whereas people pick this up thinking, oh, this is memoir and a comic, and then suddenly they’re getting all this science education. And so yeah, it’ll be really interesting to see how it goes in the us. I’m just trying to think if there’s anything else that has been surprising. I’ve been surprised at how, I mean, of course there’s criticisms, of course there’s stuff, but I’ve been really surprised by how positive the reactions and readings to the book have been. And one of my favourite things is people who are not normally comic readers reading the book and being like, oh, I didn’t know I liked comics. I’m now going to go and read some comics just because of that prejudice that people have of like, oh, comics are young people. And then realising, oh, you can have big adult ideas in comics and comics can do many things and have many different genres just like movies. And so that’s exciting to me. I really enjoy converting people to comics.

Leigh Chalker (01:58:55):
Keep going. That’s turn them to comics.

Sarah Firth (01:59:01):
So that’s been really fun and I really get a kick out of seeing it outside the graphic novel section in bookstores, seeing it in cultural studies or philosophy or other sections. That’s really fun. That’s all I can think of. I know there’s more, but that’s all I’ve got off the top of my head.

Leigh Chalker (01:59:24):
Yeah. I’d like to bring you to theatrical side briefly because am I correct in seeing when you launched it in Australia at some particular point? Oh yeah. Long back, you and your friends had created a story of dance and stuff to go with that. What was your thought process behind that launch, mate, and what? Yeah,

Sarah Firth (01:59:59):
Look, so I had the launch for this book in Melbourne at the Science Gallery. So the Science Gallery is a interdisciplinary gallery here that a friend of mine is the head curator for. And they do really interesting shows that cross merge science and art and exploration. It’s really fun. So I love it there. So I said, can I have a launch there? And I really wanted to bring the book to life and have it be more than just a kind of author sits down reads from the book science, some books, that’s it. I was like, how can we make this more dynamic and spectacular? And I was just driving along one day and I got this idea of I know I need to be a moth because moths, boong moths are a really important theme throughout the book. To me, they’re kind of story messenger, their nourishment, their history, their pattern, their oscillation and pulling away. They’re also incredibly sophisticated. They’re also incredibly stupid just like us. So I like the Moth as this metaphor for human fallibility. So myself and two of my friends who are professional clowns dressed up as moths, and we did this quasi erotic dance around a fake campfire where we danced around and then humped the fire because you know how moths get tricked by lamps, fires, and end up dying. So it was asking like, Ooh, it’s a fire. Yeah. And then none of us died. So that was nice. Oh, lucky.

(02:01:37)
And then I did the entire book launch dressed as a moth. So I wore my moth outfit the entire time and it was great, and I just felt like it. So that’s why I did it. And all of the costumes were made from repurposed cardboard, leftover paint, it was all recycled stuff. And even my friends who have their farm, they gave us their logs. So as soon as we finished the dance, we rolled the logs off the stage onto their ute and they drove away. It was a team effort to get that, but having opportunities to do fun stuff like that, I just love, and it was very memorable. A few people said that when they came to the book launch and they sat down and the theatre that it was in is completely pitch black. And so when people were sitting there, it was pitch black and they could hear the sound of adas and the wind. So it felt very natural. And then suddenly there’s moths dancing and they actually thought they’re in the wrong place. They were like, oh, I’m meant to be at a book launch. This is some kind of dance. Where am I? Oh. And so yeah, it was a bit of a surprise and delight thing. People had no idea that it was going to happen. And we actually spent two months working on the costumes and the dance and everything. There was a lot of effort for four minutes,

Leigh Chalker (02:03:02):
Man. But I guess with the journey you’ve been on going on with it and the success and that it’s reaching so many people, man and connecting and people are reaching out to you and saying Thank you for helping them out and stuff like that. It seems like a really cool way to start just the moth that begins the journey. Sarah, you’re saying you’re quite serious before it all ties in because you were saying most of your writing and ideas come from you being out and about with your notes and you were driving and suddenly it’s like, oh, I’m moth. And then it’s very cool. Yeah,

Sarah Firth (02:03:52):
It was really fun. And I was a little bit nervous about the launch before I had the Moth dance idea. I was like, oh, book launches, who will come? And is the book terrible? But when I had this performance of being a moth as the thing to focus on, I was just so excited because it was just really stupid. And we’re all dancing badly. We’re comedians, we’re not dancers. So it was just really fun. It felt like I was doing school play or something. It was just exciting and bit stupid and felt really good. And I was actually saying to someone that I think I mentioned to you that I’m not actually a very good dancer and as a child I always kind of wished that I was a good dancer and I could be on stage and dance and stuff. And I think for me, having this kind of bad comedy dance on stage, it was almost like living out my childhood dream, but in a way where it was low stakes where I didn’t actually have to be any good at dancing. It was, and that felt really good in my heart for my inner child or something where I was just like, yay, I did a bad dance and people clapped and it was fun,

Leigh Chalker (02:05:07):
Man. It sounds like this book journey you just mentioned during a child there man, and that’s the one thing that the suggestion is that we’re all running from. And when you connect with that inner a child, it’s a good thing, at least the personal freedom. And it sounds like this whole journey man of eventually Everything Connects, has brought Sarah not really sure what she was doing after the unfortunate incident that changed your life and brought you all the way around to find out from me talking to you now, I would suggest that eventually everything has connected. So I think they do,

Sarah Firth (02:05:58):
They just do. Yeah,

Leigh Chalker (02:06:00):
Well life has a funny way mate. Fun

Sarah Firth (02:06:02):
Ways and also not fun ways.

Leigh Chalker (02:06:04):
Well, that’s the shit you got to go through that you were talking in the first chapter, mate. Sometimes you got to go through it to get to it. It’s the peaks and troughs things, man. We all look at the fucking peaks, but we don’t worry. No one ever thinks about the learning in the troughs and it’s the best, but going through the shit can teach you the best lessons, man. So when you do get to those elements of success or whatever it is that you individually set your success on or achievements, you know what I mean, when you’ve gone through the effort to get there, man, you can appreciate that moment and you can

Sarah Firth (02:06:40):
Oh, totally. Yeah. And I feel like writing books and particularly writing a longer book writing, I don’t know, some people like writing, to me, writing is so hard. Writing is the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but there is some real pleasure in having done the hard thing and at the end you made something and you’re kind of stuck with it hard and then you’re, there’s just the satisfaction of making it through the thing and it’s that simple and it’s like anything else on top of that, it’s really nice, but the fact that you just manage to, because like when I write, I just dunno what I’m writing for 90% of it and then towards the end it finally comes together and it’s like even so I have this on my wall here, this is my first academic comic that I’ve ever written. And I decided, I don’t know if I really like writing academic work, but it was so hard. This was so hard and I really struggled with it. I wouldn’t say I hated it, but it sucked. It really sucked. And I, so

Leigh Chalker (02:07:53):
I wouldn’t say I hated it, but it sucked.

Sarah Firth (02:08:00):
But I feel really satisfied that I didn’t abandon it and that I finished it and it exists and it’s got problems. It’s not perfect, but I gave it a go and it exists and I feel happy and satisfied in that. And that thing of you’ve got to go through it to get to it that you said, I feel like a lot of things have that element of pain threshold that if you just stop straight away, as soon as things get difficult or inconvenient, you miss out on these, I dunno if it’s success, but just the joy of knowing you did some hard work and it turned into something other than yourself. I set myself a challenge. I didn’t think I could do it. It was really hard, but then I did it and it’s like hooray.

Leigh Chalker (02:09:01):
Well that challenge in itself I would suggest for the way I think is growth, man. Oh

Sarah Firth (02:09:10):
My gosh, I just noticed that it’s nine 40. I haven’t had dinner. I need to go have dinner.

Leigh Chalker (02:09:16):
No, no. Alright, well on that note, Sarah,

Sarah Firth (02:09:20):
I didn’t realise it was so late.

Leigh Chalker (02:09:23):
The, on that note, Sarah Firth, what would you tell young Sarah if you were sitting at your book review and young Sarah said, how do I get to be you? What would you say?

Sarah Firth (02:09:41):
Oh, I would say write and draw a lot and share it a lot and keep learning a lot and just keep going.

Leigh Chalker (02:09:58):
Perseverance. Alright Sarah, where can the people out there in the universe find your books? Man? Where can my concept, so

Sarah Firth (02:10:06):
The books are online.

Leigh Chalker (02:10:09):
Thank you. Absence has just said, Alison, thank you for the beautiful discussion Sarah and Lee, absent. That’s incredible advice. It’s hard taking that first step.

Sarah Firth (02:10:20):
It is. Yeah. I would actually say that the more it’s like I’ve going to talk about muscles. Sorry everyone, it’s like a muscle. The more you do it, the stronger it gets. And so it’s like the more you make and write things and share them, the more you build your confidence and the more you figure it out, even though it’s really scary and it sucks. Yeah,

Leigh Chalker (02:10:44):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Lovely advice mate. From someone or where we get it

Sarah Firth (02:10:52):
At most bookstores, if they don’t have it in stock, they can order it through Alan and Unwin distribution so that everyone can get it. And you can buy it online as well. You can order it through my website and I can send you a signed copy. But yeah, you can buy it from most retailers and yeah,

Leigh Chalker (02:11:17):
Very good. And for anyone out there that is eventually everything connects eight essays on uncertainty, depending on where you are in the world, you can buy a naked coverall one with clothes and you can watch the interview back. There we go. And Sarah’s got both of the versions of the cover on show for you there. If you buy

Sarah Firth (02:11:42):
It directly from me, I have both versions in boxes so you can choose which one you want.

Leigh Chalker (02:11:49):
Well, where do they find you, Sarah, if they want to get it directly from you, mate, because it sounds to me like you don’t mind people reaching out and saying gday and Yeah,

Sarah Firth (02:11:57):
So my website is sarah the.com, so that’s S-A-R-A-H, Sarah, the THE Firth, F-I-R-T-H. So it’s just Sarah and Firth with the in the middle and then.com.

Leigh Chalker (02:12:13):
Very good. Hopefully

Sarah Firth (02:12:14):
That’s yeah.

Leigh Chalker (02:12:16):
Sarah mate, before I go into the end of the show, mate, I want to thank you for coming on Chinwag tonight. I would like to thank you for being coming part of the Chinwag family. It does mean a lot for me for you to speak about what we’ve spoken to tonight. I’m glad you felt comfortable enough to do that and thank you for making me feel comfortable enough to talk about that sort of stuff with you as well. I wish you every success, man. I think pretty much everything you set out to do from the start of that book man to the very title, eventually everything Connects. It seems to talking to you tonight, needing it tonight, man, that it has come together. And congratulations on your sobriety. Continue on you too. Yeah, I’ll try man. I will definitely. Oh, not a try, I’m going to do it.

(02:13:11)
So it’s like how life is now and thank you so much. Alright, everyone out there now, just as we get to the end of the show, everyone knows that I like to have a little bit of a say. So the most important thing on Chinwag and the message that we like to send here is mental health. So if any of you know someone or are suffering from any mental health issues, there is a number at the end of the show. Lifeline have been generous enough to give us all of their and allow us to show all of their numbers and websites. If you ever need to talk to someone 24 7 because I have, and it’s gotten me out of some pretty dire scenarios in my lifetime. So don’t be embarrassed. They are there to help and the world is a much more beautiful place with you in it. Don’t forget to like and share, subscribe to the Comex network because we want to see this tree grow and we want to be able to continue to have more conversations and share basically everything we can with like-minded people. And we want to be able to keep Chinwag going long enough so that we could have Sarah Firth back on Chinwag for par two, somewhere down the track. And look, community is unity, chinwag is and always will be made with love. So see you next week. Thank you Sarah. Take care. Thank you. Bye bye-Bye.

Voice Over (02:14:51):
This show is sponsored by the Comics shop. Check out to Comics shop to pick up a variety of Australian comics from multiple creators and publishers. All for one flat postage rate. We hope you enjoyed the show. I.