An extended conversation about grief, family memory, and the physical process of making autobiographical comics

Transmission 294: Interview with Carol Tyler

American cartoonist Carol Tyler has spent over 40 years creating intensely personal, emotionally impactful visual stories that have defined the alternative comics world. Her latest work, The Ephemerata (read our review of The Ephemerata here), published by Fantagraphics, confronts grief and loss with the same unflinching honesty that has characterized her career as a pioneer of autobiographical comics.

Tyler began her career in the arts by pursuing a Bachelor of Fine Arts at Middle Tennessee State University and later a master’s degree in painting at Syracuse University. Her transparent, witty, and creatively adventurous work quickly gained recognition when she started publishing in the late 1980s with the underground comix book Weirdo. Influential publications including Wimmen’s Comix, Twisted Sisters, Zero Zero, and Drawn & Quarterly soon featured her work. Her early works, such as The Job Thing and Late Bloomer, examined ordinary life with compassion and understanding, establishing her singular voice. Tyler’s multi-volume book You’ll Never Know, eventually collected as Soldier’s Heart, garnered widespread recognition for its potent examination of her father’s experiences as a World War II soldier and the generational effects on her family. Her work has received eleven Eisner Award nominations, the Cartoonist Studio Prize, and the title of Master Cartoonist at Cartoon Crossroads Columbus. Fellow cartoonists like Chris Ware and Robert Crumb have praised her talent, which combines expressive line work, vivid color, and unique emotional depth. She was married to fellow pioneering graphic memoirist Justin Green (1945–2022), and their life together was the subject of the 2023 documentary Married to Comics. In addition to her creative work, Tyler has taught comics and visual storytelling and remains a vital influence on generations of cartoonists.

She continues to produce evocative graphic memoirs that illuminate the intersections of personal history, grief, memory, and resilience. We had the honor of talking with Carol Tyler about her latest book, which touches on the theme of grief and loss, an inevitable event in the life of every living being. Being born means dealing not only with one’s own death, but with that of those we love. Plutarch, in his moral and philosophical writings, used the metaphor of the sea to express the contrast between death at an advanced age, which he compared to a ship reaching port, and untimely death, which he likened to a shipwreck. One seen as the natural completion of a long journey, the other seen as a ship in a storm. Not all ships reach port, and death finds everyone unprepared. There are no fixed and constant answers for everyone; every loss manifests itself as a unique event for each individual. I recommend reading her book because it reflects profound thoughts on loss and the end of the life of a loved one, and it expresses a perspective that can also be helpful to young people who have not experienced bereavement and perhaps do not think about this event that everyone must face sooner or later.

Can you tell us about the creative process of your last graphic book? Did you sketch ideas and let them sit for days or do you create a path? How did the concept progress from the sketchbook to the final artwork?

I don’t work that way. I literally hold things in my head until I can figure out what they are and how I can make them beat, come to life. There are generally some large concepts that come along. For example, I knew I wanted to write about… I knew that I had suffered a lot of losses. So, it took me about five years until I figured out exactly how to talk about that in the way that I wanted to, that was not like what I’d done before. So, what I did was I just stayed with it and I listened.

I listened to what it was about. And I took notes, yeah, I mean, I had little things I would write, little bursts of thought and a great deal of it I just was never going to forget. So, it became a matter of organizing it, organizing these clusters of thought, mostly writing. I don’t sketch in advance. I hit the paper. It’s like on this page, I want to talk about when my head caved in. So, how do I want to show that? And how many pages do I think it’ll take to get that idea across? And is there anything connected to that that I need to prepare the reader for and maybe set up a little bit?

So, it starts to take shape that way. But I don’t do a lot of preliminary sketches. It’s all done on just plain old paper. It’s this size an 11 by 14. It has a 10 by 13 image size. I do it the way that I’ve been doing it for my whole life. I don’t use computers or anything like that in the making process. And then I do make little maps for myself.

I make little schematics and diagrams so that I know that, okay… So, what just came out was this thing about my head falling off. So, where does that fit? Because that truly happened. And it’s crucial to the story because it was from that idea or that thing that happened. It was real. It just felt like I had a stroke or something. It was from that, that all of these concepts and all of this understanding of what was going on became clear. And what I wanted to do mostly was not just relay what happened to my family.

I wanted to talk about what it felt like to lose people. I wanted to know where that put me. So, it was more like the experience of something happened, describing what happened. And the particulars of what caused me to have that came secondary in the book. It came in the second spot because there’s three main chunks. The first chunk is, oh, this is an odd feeling. This is mourning. Okay, the second part was, well, why am I mourning? Because I lost these people. And then the third part became, under what circumstances did I have to go through all of this? So, my home life was kind of kooky. There was an addict living in the house. So, it wasn’t like [Hums]. It was like, chaos, chaos, chaos, constant chaos, stress, problems. And yet, I was trying to be comforting to those who were passing. “There, there, you’ll be fine.” That’s why there’s an image of me holding up a shield at the same time serving a bowl of soup.

The Ephemerata

You artistically represent a psychological collapse in the episode of “The Calving,” where part of your head falls off. Can you tell us about the importance of using graphic body surrealism to translate psychological trauma into something visually and physically direct for the reader?

Yeah, that was the fun part. Finding a new visual language to explain what it was. Because I could not… and I think I said this in there, I could not find connection with what normal society had coughed up and what they provided for grief. None of that fit. So, it’s like I had to make it all up. It is similar to what people say out there. But to me, it was like I found when I had that revelation, my head fell off and I saw things. I knew that this was presenting some sort of visual language of understanding. And so to organize and interpret that would help me sort through where I was at and what the feelings were, maybe where that was going.

A lot of that, I was glad to say that I was… I started out in cartooning 40 years ago. But before that, for about 10 years, I just did fine art. I understood about abstract and representation, all the… I took art history and I learned all of that. So, it comes in handy when I do comics, because I don’t necessarily use 100% traditional comics style. There’s always a sense of how can I make this flow? Or how do you make this thing feel like it’s falling off? Or how do you make this feel like it’s just being discovered? Or isolation, how do you show… how do you really, how can I show that without saying, “I feel isolated from the world”? So, how do you show that? And often that has to revert or go to symbols and strategies and moves that I found when I did painting many years ago.

Your drawing visual style is very tactile. How does the physical act of drawing, the pressure, texture, or imperfection, shape the emotional truth you’re trying to share and evoke?

I still work with pen and ink. I have them over here. I use ink, and pens. I use pen points. Stick them down into the pen. I think that, for me, I’m very oriented towards texture and the real physicalness of the real world. I do sculpture now. Make things. I just build things around the house. I do construction, light construction. I’m not a… well, I can do concrete if I had to. I do all kinds of construction.

I come from a family of people who just, when I was growing up, everything was very physical in that sense. It was a very physical world. You had to make stuff from scratch and sew your own clothes. Nowadays it just seems like we’re removed from that. But what I like about doing the work that I do, I like the nature of spending the time physically taking the pen, dipping that pen into the bottle of ink. And it might seem like, well, that takes so much time. You could just have a Cintiq. You could just go around.

And I was like, no, I’m sitting, I’d be sitting at a screen. If I’m doing comics the way I do them, there’s wood nearby and paper and ink and it gets on my hands and I get rags. I’ve got rags, they’re great. They’re great. So there’s a physical nature to it. You know, you dip the pen in the ink, you do something, I got to clean it off.

And you might think, like I’ve talked to my students, because especially today, because of the internet, our brains are going at hyperspeed. And the act of thinking about, “Okay, I need to write this here, dip it in the pen. Shoot, I got to clean off the pen. Okay, how many seconds? Let’s time this. Okay, all right, wait now. I’m going to cap off the ink, dipping it in, putting my hand on the paper, taking a look. Okay, I want to, it’s going to fit like that, writing it out, taking a look at that, going like this.” There’s little gaps of time between the actual act of putting that ink in there on the paper committing to that, because this is permanent ink. Those little gaps of time allow my brain to find the next.

So I’m thinking while I’m doing this, cleaning it, cleaning off a pen or looking for… oh, and I got to fill the little jar with this big bottle. So these kind of tedious little, or not even tedious, these tiny tasks in between the ink strokes are critically important for the brain, I believe, to process and get right in your mind just exactly… like more than half the time, I know what I want to say. So it’s like, it’s almost like preparing a line for an actor to then go ahead and deliver. And I have to think, “Okay, I want to say then that the flow that came through the abyss… after the abyss… wait, do I want to say after the abyss? After the abyss came the flow.” I’m just using that as an example. “After the abyss,” it starts with an A, so I’ll make a nice cursive A. “After the abyss, comma, comes the flow.” So that’ll be two lines. All that thinking, all that measuring mental, all that seeing eye in hand, I think that’s everything in my work. It’s based on rhythm.

It’s based on a concept of space. It is rooted in just a natural sense of timing. It looks at, it knits… I’m aware of what happened before, what speed I need to go at now, what needs to come after. So it’s more of a… it’s not merely a physical… it is a physical act, but it’s also emotion, it’s timing, it’s movement, it’s architecture. Because when I’m setting up a page, I look at, “All right, so on the page before something happened here, I need to set up this page because I know what’s going to come after.” So this is a bridge page, and how do I make this feel and set up the connection to that page, to the next idea, whatever. So there’s architecture. I don’t just make grids and fill them in. It’s all about the page in relationship to the next page.

“It’s either you’re going to the dumpster or you’re going to the archive. Which one is it going to be?”

The Ephemerata © Carol Tyler

**Your artworks connect personal memory with family trauma and the search for the truth. Is there a moment during the creation of the book when you can feel those two layers ‘click’ together, when the past and present suddenly speak to each other and you need to draw and talk about it? **

Well, time… physics will tell you that time now is discovering new modes of thinking about time. And I do think about the past, but it doesn’t feel that way. Memory is selective, and it’s… since it’s in the realm of soft tissue, it’s bound to have weak spots and strengths. I think about how to honor people, mainly, because if I want to talk about how somebody died, how far can you go and not have them…? And I never want anybody to be humiliated or angry about, “Oh, you make me look so terrible,” especially the deceased, because they can’t fend for themselves. I have to think about what is it exactly that needs to be said here.

So in the case of, in the book with my sister, the feeling about her passing differs tremendously from my mother. They’re distinctly, distinct entity. My mother was in her 90s, my sister was in her 60s. Therefore, being closer to my sister as an adult, I had to figure out how to make that feel different from just telling about what happened to her. I had to help, I had to make the audience feel the tragedy of her, just like that death sentence, ovarian cancer, and how shocking it was because we all depended on her so much. She was the family rock.

Well, in order to do that, you don’t know my sister, but you may have had a sister or sister-like relationships. And it would be helpful if I knew a little bit about that person. What made that person have meaning for you? So that’s when you have to go back and explain stuff that happened in the past. When I was a kid, she was reassuring, but she was also a pain in the ass. Why? And then, as an adult, we had good times, but she had a lot on her. So explaining some real details about that, so that in the moment when I’m in the room with her and she’s really at her worst, dying, you feel a little bit more like you know her. So it’s my job as a writer and an artist to show that.

In her case, I used the rock, the image of the rock, because she was called Sister Rock. And then the rock being, of course, steady. And if you know on the front part of that chapter, “The Servant,” the servant refers to her. And I’m standing on a rock doing this. [Tyler cries] What was it? Serving in care. So that was, that that was gone. I’m so unworthy to take her spot. So the emotion I’m feeling now, I had to try and put that into that part about talking about how important she was. I can’t do this job that you do. I’m not a big sister.

Anyway, I hope I conveyed that. I know some people have, when they read it, they get confused. They think that that part is my mom. It’s like, no, I… I said it several times. [laughs] I made it different. I talk, I say, “Now let’s talk about my sister.” So it’s really confusing to me that I confused some people. Maybe they didn’t understand the part of…, because, okay. The point is, older people were used to it, they were pretty comfortable with the fact that they’re going to die. It seems to be in the old people realm. But when we’re in our sixties, it doesn’t seem like it’s right or fair. We’re not done yet. Especially, and then early adulthood, youth, that’s terribly tragic. But when somebody is really, really old and suffering, and they don’t want to die. My parents didn’t want to go. They were both in their mid nineties. They still felt vital and… And all of that. But my sister was a dynamo. Losing her before they went down was like, no, it was too shocking. So that, that was the heavy weight for me in the book was to… How can I get people to that? The reader to understand, how tragic that was.

It’s because it was framed within the context of, well, we think death is okay for old people, but for younger people, it’s not. But here’s somebody who, no, wait a minute. That’s not true. It’s going to come whenever it comes. And then you have to deal with it. And I didn’t deal well with it. Because of that, it became my job to do the heavy lifting that she just did. So, I was grateful for her. So grateful for her. And then I showed the metaphor at the beginning of that segment of having to bury somebody’s dog, because it’s like, that’s the kind of stuff that people who are rocks, people who are considered dependable, or you turn people, there’s certain people you turn to. And this lady, they would, they would have put her in jail for, for dog neglect. I guarantee you. So I just didn’t want that drama going on at the time. So I was like, I’ll just bury the dog. But the fact that it almost made me slide off a hill, I grabbed that rock, grab a hold of the rock. That’s all just metaphor.

For what was coming, I was jumping in, trying to help. But it was really, and I explained that it just about wrecked my physical body. I suffered a lot of physical ailments, stress ailments. I mean, that didn’t mean I wouldn’t do it. I’m going to do that. Somebody needs my help. But I didn’t stop for a minute to think about it. I’m like, “Oh, I gotta go. I gotta go take care of this. Gotta take care of this. Gotta go, gotta go”.

So you had asked about memory and how you do that. Well, memory serves a purpose. We have to go to those things we remember, and it’s those things that we do, like sometimes you’ll say, “I’m going through a phase where it’s like, what’s the point of having all these things that remind me of people in these photographs? What’s the point of all this? It’s just a bring down. I’m not going to read this stuff.” But there’s a point where it shifts. It’s not a burden. It’s not a bring down. It’s a reminder that these people gave you something. They gave you who you are now. They helped to make you. And maybe I wasn’t spending a lot of time with them, but those early formulations, that early family you have and all of this, makes such an imprint. It’s undeniable. And so today, even though I’m not actively grieving like I was, my sister and my parents and all that, I’ll still say, “Oh, man, my sister would have said this.” I know how my parents would have reacted to this or that. I have an uncanny sense of what, and I see it in myself. So that’s the gift of being able to look back, is to know that they lived their lives. They suffered. They had, just like me, suffered through losses. Somehow managed to get through. It’s encouraging.

Autobiographical pieces of art often ask the artist to re-enter painful spaces. What personal doors or rules have you developed to protect your sense of self fragility even being open on your artwork?

Protect myself? No, I have to use whatever I’ve got. Is that what you mean? Like, I don’t hold back. There’s nothing that I’m not going to talk about if it’s relevant or needed. So in this next book I’m doing, you know, I have to talk about the joys and the pain between me and my husband, Justin. And I go into some hell realms with this one.

I think for me it has to be the right time to do it. I would not have been ready to tell certain stories in my career until it was time and I felt like emotionally equipped to deal with it. Because if I need to pull out something difficult, I will. If it belongs in the story. If the goal, like my goal with the story coming up, is to resolve a universal question, which something fell into my… I don’t want to talk about that book too much, but something fell in my lap that was almost too much to bear. And I have to resolve that question in order to get on with my life and to prepare myself to die. Because believe me, we all have to do that. And if you’re not at peace with what’s going on, who you’re with, what happened, and get yourself into resolution, you ‘ve got that kind of stays with the memories that people have of you. “Oh, she was grinding the axe. Oh, she had this problem. Oh, she never let go of that.”

I am trying to get to a better place with all of that. Because there was a lot of surprises and unresolved things between me and Justin. So I have to address that. And I started working on it. I have some of it done. And I know I’m the type of person that finds what’s the hardest thing to do, jumped in and do that first. Take my most positive energy and my best shot and figure out where to, when to jump in. I can’t have a loaded head either. So if there’s like, oh, I got to get the car fixed or roof leak, you know, if I have too many things of real life that are harassing me, like they do everybody, noisy neighbors, whatever, I got to kind of figure out to make the conditions right. Because once I go in there into this dark stuff or the hard stuff, I wear it 24-7. I walk around here in the house, walking and talking like a crazy lady because I’m talking out the dialogue. I’m thinking, “No, I need to say it this way. Well, what happens if this happens?”

I think that’s, it’s common for artists to find a way, their way in. But to protect myself is to just make sure that I’m ready to go in and get ready for it and be prepared. Because I know it’s, I don’t know what it’s going to do to me, ultimately. But I know the things that will be harmful would be to not get good sleep or fight through the wrong materials or some pen that don’t work, you know, just try to, or if it doesn’t work, bludgeon it so that it will, because maybe it’ll give me a new mark, a new way of putting it down and just trying to figure out. As far as self-care, I’m 74 now. I know what, my clock is ticking. I have no time to waste. Either my brain will go or I’ll get a disease or something will happen. You know, it’s going to happen. It’s more likely to happen now ever than in my career. So all my things that I used to do, a little procrastination, a little of this or that, I can’t afford to do that anymore now. Once I get this book done, I have another one. So these are my bargaining chips. “Oh, wait a minute, can’t die yet because I got this book to do. And then I got another one. Leave me alone.” [Laughs] It doesn’t work like that. I just have to self-care, good food, exercise, all the best I can do, that’s all.

You’ve talked about how your parents closely guarded personal tragedies, a secrecy you attribute to generational differences. Given your commitment to not shying away from truth in your art, how do you balance the drive to “write it down and draw it out” with the act of revealing sensitive, guarded family history to a public audience?

My mom used to say, “I have you to tell everybody our business.” I said, “Well, it’s kind of late for that. I’ve been doing that my whole career, Mom.” I just make sure when I tell a family story, because I’m dealing with somebody else’s life and their dignity. And I never, I’m not in it to humiliate people. I don’t pick fights with people I don’t like. So, for example, in this story, I was talking about my sister being sick and dying. And I left out the part about how some of her family members really misbehaved and caused pain. Because I thought, oh, that’s all I need is for somebody to pick up the book and say, “You made me look bad” and start some kind of beef. No, I had to think what really is the most important thing here? It’s not picking a fight with this kid or why do you have to behave that way or blaming. I’m not in it to settle a score.

I’m in it to find the dignity and the humanity within the experience that the person is going through that I’m trying to communicate about. I have to put forth in such a way that it carries the dimension and weight of pain that I’m not naming that was present. And I did talk a little bit, if you want to look for it, you can see the little places where I peppered it in. But I didn’t get into a diatribe. I just think that takes away from, it takes something away. I don’t think it removes the dimension.

That’s going to be trickier when I talk about Justin in this next book, because there are a lot of points that are extremely difficult. There’s a lot of upsetness places. But yet I’m not in it to excoriate him or myself or show myself to be like, you know, in this final analysis, 30, 50 years from now, if someone were to pick up the book, they need to read about these people in such a way that it doesn’t seem like my personal vendetta or that it was personal for me and I got to get this out. So it’s like a diary page. There’s a big difference. I know, here’s the story of these people and finding out just exactly what’s essential to tell the story of the pain that they carry without being judgmental or just nasty. I don’t want to be nasty. If I got a beef with someone, I have to find out what my part of the beef is and what’s really at stake, because it’s never what you think on the surface.

I go back and I wrote down some arguments I had with Justin back when we were in our first part of our marriage, and it’s like, I would never talk like that back and forth. We wouldn’t be that way with each other now. But that’s part of the being when you’re, I guess, when you’re young, full of fire and passion. A lot of bad stuff happened, but then so much good happened. Let me just say, when we write in our journals, we tend not to write when we’re feeling great about things. We tend to go to our journals when we’ve got all these over-the-top emotional states, but we never go to our journals and say, “I am extremely happy because today was lovely.” It’s kind of boring, actually.

I know in my journals, every now and then, I give an update page. Today, what’s the price of gas? What is the price of eggs? What’s the happy thing going on? What’s going on in the world? So I give kind of a cheerful update, but those pages go by pretty fast. I like to get it down and see what we were, grinding the ax, let’s call it, just really getting in there, the tough stuff, and then figure out how we got out of those places because people can’t stay there.

“I didn’t know shit about death and mourning till he died.”

The Ephemerata © Carol Tyler

**The Ephemerata is built from fragments, different moments, deep emotions, and ephemeral lines. How did the creation of this book help you to understand the importance of preserving this larger mosaic? **

That’s a beautiful way to put it, as a mosaic, because it is. I see, here’s a picture, just fell out of something, of some lady called Gladys Wilson from 1939. I don’t know where this picture came from, but I know the name Wilson means that that was my grandmother’s kinfolk. So maybe that was one of her sister’s kids or something. I look at her and I think, oh, she looks like she’s not stopping to get her picture made at one of those automats. Maybe she worked in the city. Wonder whatever happened to her. Is she remembered? Then I start to think about these bigger things. Did she have children? Wouldn’t it be awesome if I could get this to her child, find out if she had a kid and say, “I found a picture of… you don’t know me, but I think you’re one of my second or third cousins.” That would be so thrilling to them. “Oh my God, you found a picture of my grandmother. Oh, we don’t have any pictures. We don’t have very few. This is so amazing.” And see, I know she’s some kin to me because I can tell by the shape of her face.

That will probably end up floating around in my studio indefinitely. And let’s say I’m gone and somebody comes through. Well, they’re not going to have a connection to that. They’ll toss it. If I don’t find a place for it to be in the mosaic of my story, it will be tossed. Just like an old electric bill from 1947 or my stuff from 1965, my Beatles stuff or anything that’s around is meant something to me. But I know that it has not as much relevance to my kid. She wants the things that remind her of her life with me and her dad. And I get that.

It’s that way throughout history. Kewpie dolls are not selling right now because they’re not popular in culture, but SpongeBob is because the kids today know that. I don’t know what happens, you know, whether the popular items or at what point they become obsolete. Slips of paper, Warhol kept his trash cans full of garbage because he thought that every piece in there might have a new meaning in the future. Things that we discard, that’s so true. I don’t throw my garbages away. Let me put it this way. In the kitchen, I have kitchen garbage, which is food items, you know, discards. But in my studio, it’s paper, it’s all paper. So I toss things into the cans and the cans, I leave them go till they’re almost overflowing. And they can be three and four years old and I’ll open them up and think, “Oh my God, there’s that thing. I was gonna throw that away. Oh man.” You know, and most of it is trash, but it’s all trash, really.

Because what’s gonna happen? What can happen? One time, a lady at the hospice place, I was telling her, talking this over, she said, “Everything will end up in a dumpster.” And it’s hard for people to accept. It’s all gonna go. It can’t all be preserved. Especially for people who, I mean, they’ll keep the stuff that belonged to the people of significance out there. But most of the stuff, it’s just the oddest thing. I had this weird thought that, because I saw that happening with my parents, I thought, man, I’ve always thought that their house, their stuff, their lives were extremely important because they valued it. And, you know, it was, my mom kept the house cleaning and they both worked to have insurance to protect the stuff. And they had friends, they had a good life. I thought, they’re gonna die. I thought this a long time ago. They’re gonna die in that whole era, this whole era that they live in. All these World War II vets, it’s just gonna be gone. Everybody will be gone. All the things they cared about, their stuff.

It was heartbreaking for my mom when we had an auction, when she was like, I guess about three years before she died. I said, “Let’s look at what we can get for this stuff.” They were ready to thin it out a little bit. They had a lot of stuff. And she was just heartbroken that the thing that she cared the most about, you know, pretending it was this thing. “Oh, here’s a paper cup.” Iit only brought what? She had it valued. They had their stuff appraised at one time. She thought this was gonna bring like at least $200 and maybe they got $25 for it. And I’m looking at her sitting in the chair, just dumbfounded. Because they had put a value on the stuff for, well, they lived to be so many decades that they sat with their stuff. And it was so disappointing to her that it wasn’t gonna bring what they thought it was. So it’s like their stuff was a little, like they’re working class. That was their investment, the things they cared about.

And I found myself after she passed away, what I wanted to keep of her, I couldn’t keep her. So I kept the little shirts that I would change. Her little shirts. Every day or so we’d put a new shirt on her, her little patterns. And then it got to be where I had to downsize that. So I put squares of her favourite shirts that reminded me of her. And then I saw them not long ago. I hadn’t seen them in 10 years. And not long ago I saw them and I thought, “I don’t associate these with her at all.” It was so weird.

So time makes it easier to discard when you lose that connection. Or that emotional memory. And nature’s way of making sure that that’s possible. As you get older, you have to get forgetful. That’s certain. And I think that’s nature’s way of helping that process of letting go. Because ultimately you have to let go of your mom’s shirts, the idea that this was valuable, and your own life. Coming to terms with that is the business of getting older. And it’s my business as a storyteller to explain and let people down gently with these heavy concepts. Some people say, “Oh, I don’t want to read a book about death.” It’s like, no, it’s not. It’s about affirming the connections that you’ve had and trying to get through it. Because nobody can avoid this.

The term “ephemera” refers to items of short-lived purpose. How does this philosophical concept of limited duration have influenced how you approached documenting such a long, intense time of sorrow?

Well, sorrow comes in various flavors. And at times it’s more intense than others. And so I’m not full of sorrow all the time. I have a lot of joy in my life. And there’s a lot of funny things that come, go. And there have been times of heavy sorrow. And I don’t do anything. I don’t expect myself to do anything during that. It’s like, I’m going to allow myself to just be sad.

So I don’t want to do that anymore. You know, I kind of pay attention to that. You have to kind of be ready, especially the way I do it. I have to be ready to handle it, to approach it. I have to be ready to tackle it. But I think I should, I said a couple things here that I think are important to remember, that I need to remember them to get this into the next book about how, in the next book, I do talk about stuff. And I do talk about the ultimate dumpster moment, coming to that moment. But I think that we’re just unprepared. We’re in a culture where there is so much stuff. We’re overloaded.

When my grandmother passed away, my mom was shocked because she had a blue dress and her purse, that was it. She lived a simple life. And she said, “There’s something to be said about that.” And I feel like it’s my part of the process of doing this. It’s been my responsibility because when my parents died, I had a lot of their stuff come here, my sister’s stuff. And I’ve been kind of going through it, not in a big way, but I have gotten rid of stuff. I have all my dad’s tools. Most of them, I should say, a bunch of this and that. And some of this, as I’ve gone through, I think, “Oh gosh, why is this my job?” But the truth is, this thing belongs in a museum. And then it’s like, “Are you gonna drive this to the museum? What museum? Who wants this? Why is this your life’s job?”

It’s like, well, some of it belongs in the historical record. Not everything goes in the dumpster. So like my dad was a pipe fitter. And during World War II, at the army base where he was at, he drew up plans for the pipe system. So I have a map, an original map that he drew that shows the configuration that housed most of the soldiers or a great deal of the people who ended up going off to Europe to fight in the war. So that’s like something, if I had a museum, an army museum or something like that, that’s kind of a cool thing to have, is this map that describes all the plumbing pictures because it shows the layout of the camp. That’s totally gone now. It doesn’t exist. It’s an empty field or there’s something else there. So don’t you think that that’s worth… It’s part of the historical record.

And I think about that when I go through my Beatles stuff. It’s like, a lot of this is newspaper cutouts and stuff. That’s not, that doesn’t stay. But I wrote an original account of seeing them. It turned into a book. That belongs in a museum collection because future generations will want to read it. So that’s the way I feel about it. It’s like, it’s either you’re going to the dumpster or you’re going to the archive. Which one is it going to be? And I have a lot of archival stuff from World War II from my parents. Not so much from my sister. Her family took care of most of her stuff. I have a few things. But, and then my own stuff and my husband, my God. You know, it’s all archive. He’s got a great archive.

So I have two. [Sighs] I don’t want my kid to have to do this work. I want her to be free of having to wade through the debris. But she says, “Mom, save it all.” It’s like, But I’m I don’t save at all .. I know. there’s times when it’s more important than others in our lives. We look at things. I took a whole bunch. I went through all the pictures and I threw away a bunch of pictures and I put them in a bag. “These, I don’t want to see these. I don’t know what they are. This and that.” And of course I could not get that bag into the garbage. I put it somewhere. Found it, found it last winter, this last winter. And I pulled it out and I thought, again, there’s only about six pictures out of this whole bag that I shouldn’t have thrown away. But I could have lived without them anyway. I need to trust my instincts. It’s time to go. It’s time to go. Mmm …

You visualized grief as a physical, real-concept city: Griefville. What was the moment or feeling that made you realize the emotional experience required an external, geographical metaphor for you to map it out, to articulate a universal experience that is simultaneously so personal?

Well, that’s what, when I had that, my head fell off, you know, it’s melted. That’s when I saw, I saw a place. It was like, “This is where I’m at.” Because I was in my house. I went to the bathroom. I thought I had a stroke. I have to go through the kitchen to get to the bathroom. I wanted to look in the mirror because I felt like, oh, oh, oh, oh, and when I forgot to go to the kitchen, it was like, I forgot I was in my kitchen. And now I was in this place.

And I knew it was called Griefville, but I didn’t even have the language for it yet. But why Griefville? Why, you know, I had to find out later, characters that appeared in my mind started to talk about what, and explain it. So this, the guy who gave me the deed was the guy who said it’s Griefville because, you know, Griefville, it’s hard to say. He’s always looking for a joke because he said working with the dead can bring you down. You have to find some levity. All those shapes and all those characters, like right away, I knew those things were, those people were called Clorines. It just, I’d only maybe two times before in my life had something phenomenal that gave me a vision.

But this was definitely, I don’t think it was, I’ve asked a therapist. Did I have a psychotic break or something? No. Well, what happened that I, all of a sudden was placed in a new world? I thought this has to be real. And then I remembered that I used to, around here somewhere all is an old historical village. And I thought, I have to go there and see if that’s the place. So I drove across town to this place and I was walking around and I thought, this is this place. But this place affirms that what I’m experiencing is a place, but it’s not this place, but it is a place. Because grief puts you somewhere besides your normal.

It does change the way you look at your environment. Things don’t seem the same. There’s no getting back to normal. I even write in there, people think you can just go through a funeral and then get back to normal. There’s no normal. It alters. So you are in a different place because the way you think, the way you experience the world, the way you interact with things, the things left behind, all of that shifts. And you can’t do that from where you’re at. It’s just, you have to, part of grief is being in, it’s hard to describe because it’s not really that it warps reality.

Because you still, I knew I was in my kitchen, but I also knew that for some reason, I was simultaneously and more so in a new place. That I would be, it’s not like one replaced the other. As I was presented with a place. When people die, it’s like the whole time you’re alive, somebody knows where you are. Like your family knows, oh, mom’s at the store or mom’s at work or I know where my kid is or I have a general idea of where people are, my husband is there. And then when people pass away, we know where they go. They’re at the gravesite, physical body. Or we have their ashes on the mantle in the living room or something. So people are always placed.

It’s part of what we do. We go visit the grave. We go to church. We light a candle. We know that’s a place of a sacred moment. Do people need places? Especially when you lose people. You, where is, like I know where my dad is right now. He’s up in Chicago at the Tyler plot at the cemetery, all saints. Where’s my mom? She wanted to be in Tennessee under sapling, which is this tree is growing. So I know where my parents are. I know where my sister is. I know where people are. The excruciating thing when you see people saying, “Oh, they haven’t found the body” and people are in anguish because they know their loved ones is deceased, but the body is missing.

It’s agonizing to not put people to rest. And so the sense of place for us as living is, and especially where our loved ones are, is critical to our wellbeing and sense of our own stability and security. And when you don’t know where somebody is, it’s extremely unsettling. You lose track of people. That’s why Facebook has been so popular is because even though we never talked to our high school friends, we know that we can, if we needed to, we could get in touch with so-and-so. Placement is everything.

And I talk about that in a big way in the second book, but I think Griefvielle felt as a place revealing itself, grief, accepting that this is a thing that I can’t just doodle through life and ignore. And yet it required of me a language I didn’t have yet. So it took time to find the way in that was authentic and not just some kind of twirling through. I had to wait till I was sure. I didn’t want to throw something out there. It’s like, well, this is kind of like what it is, but it’s like, no. And people, I didn’t do it to, I’m going to crusade here and help people. I didn’t do it for that. I just thought I would do it to try to explain and understand.

“People think you can just go through a funeral and then get back to normal. There’s no normal. It alters.”

The Ephemerata © Carol Tyler

After documenting these so extensively, was there one detail that only became clear after publication? Did you find some detail that after all that the project was complete that makes a new sense for you?

It’s hard to answer. I mean, I look at the book. I don’t usually go back and look at my books once they’re published, except to see if they’re on the right pages and all that stuff. But I don’t, because I spend so much time fussing with everything at the beginning, you know, before I even send it to the publisher. I’m surprised that I didn’t make it clear enough when I hear people say, you know, they write about the book and they write about my mom. The whole thing’s about my mom. It’s like, how did they miss that whole sister thing? It’s like, should I have made the lettering bigger? You know, was I clear enough about that?

And then what I do is to try to understand the book more. I will admit, somebody says, “I read the book and I know that person.” So I’ll think, I wonder what… I try to imagine them reading it and what their take might be because they’re coming with all their stuff and their perspective and understanding. And I don’t know. I think because it took so long and I had to labor over it, I was surprised at how much, what an importance Justin had to all of that. When I was putting it together, I thought it’s as if he didn’t exist if I don’t start talking about him.

And I wondered why I didn’t at first when I was first putting it together and it’s because he was here and he was alive and I just took him for granted. When people are in the house with you all the time, you don’t think about what it’s like when you’re gone. But even before he died, I thought, he did play a role in so many ways in some of these things. He’s not just this guy in the house, he was an active participant and to what degree and how and what would be his role in the book. And then when he died before I finished, I thought he deserves so much more attention, not just because I forgot him or anything like that, but because of all the mechanisms of what he had done for me during this time and the levers that he was pulling from the group that I was not prepared for. It’s like that threw me across the room, the realization that Justin was bigger than any of this. His story was bigger than this story I just told.

And I also realized when he died, I didn’t know shit about death and mourning till he died. I thought I knew it was because each person that dies, it’s a different experience. And my mom, my dad and all these people that died at the same time, they came in the cluster. So that presented that experience. So I was wading through that, going through that and Justin my house partner and the husband and dog friend and meal eater, all the things we did together that made this scene wrong. Not wrong, but slanted, like how does Justin fit into Griefville? I opened up a whole nother world and I knew it. I knew it before I finished the book.

I thought I was so blown away by the intensity of him that I thought, “I don’t wanna have to write another book.” But I have to, I wanna tell his story. And that was a surprise to me that, well, I didn’t think he was gonna be gone that quick, but it was a surprise how much all of this gets dwarfed by the loss of him, not made insignificant. It’s just that it’s, and I really shouldn’t use scale because it’s not that he was greater or bigger or anything like that. He was, this is Griefville and I’m talking about this place and I wrote a book about it and everything. And Justin is this, you see, they’re the same plane, but it’s different, but it’s also a big thing. It’s a big deal because it pulled out, this pulled out this question, this question, this question, this question that I talk about in the book. It presented these questions and these feelings. When Justin dies, whoa, I got this question, this question, a whole nother set of feelings and other circumstances.

So now I’m dealing with a different presence with loss that Griefville fits, but kind of in a reconfiguration. He’s less about, the Griefville component of Justin is less about place and more about disposition is what happens to the physical body. You give the physical body to never leaves the earth. You’re either going to be ash or you’re going to be a body in the ground when you die or you go into the ocean or you have a sky burial. People believe there’s a heaven and hell and the purgatory and all of that. So I go more into not the physical, but the spiritual aspects of what’s called the disposition phase of, I’m in disposition. I’m getting rid of people’s things. I’m processing people’s things, dealing with bodies. All that’s called the disposition that heavily falls on the airs.

That’s the real aftermath. Being in the ephemerata, it was like, [Tyler raises her voice] I don’t know, this death thing happens. Well, here’s how you have to deal with it ultimately. So I get into metaphysical questions, more deeper things, afterlife stuff. Thrilling. No, I’m excited about it. It’s all about trying to articulate something I don’t even have a language for yet. And it’s exciting because I pull the reader into a completely different realm. So it’s like you read The Ephemerata, it didn’t answer all the questions. It just says “I’m here and this happened.” It suggested some things. So the next part is going to be, “Well, yeah, I’m here and these things happen, but then what about essence? Where’s the essence of a person? What happens after they die? What happens when people slap you silly from the grave