Contemporary Authors

• Imagine Wanting Only This ( graphic nonfiction) Pantheon (New York, NY), 2017

1. Imagine wanting only this LCCN 2016034575 Type of material Book Personal name Radtke, Kristen, author. Main title Imagine wanting only this / Kristen Radtke. Edition First edition. Published/Produced New York : Pantheon, 2017. Projected pub date 1111 Description pages cm. ISBN 9781101870839 (hardback) CALL NUMBER PN6727.R334 Z46 2017 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms

• Kristen Radtke Home Page - http://kristenradtke.com/contributors/

  Kristen Radtke is the author of the graphic nonfiction book Imagine Wanting Only This (Pantheon, 2017).

  She is the art director and New York editor of The Believer magazine.

  Find her on Twitter @kristenradtke.

• Michigan Quarterly Review - http://www.michiganquarterlyreview.com/2017/04/on-imagine-wanting-only-this-an-interview-with-kristen-radtke/

  QUOTE:
  I don’t know, and I can’t remember which first became part of my identity. I did newspaper in high school, but I was also always drawing — like, failing algebra because I was just sitting in the back, drawing — and for college I went to art school. I kind of resist the idea that there’s something I can do in one medium but not in another — I think that with stories, we can accomplish whatever we need to in either medium, and that it’s about employing whatever best communicates what you’re trying to say in that moment. I like drawing because it’s immediate — it hits us faster than prose writing. And I like pairing writing with images;
  pr 05, 2017in Interviews
  The notion of telling stories with pictures traces back to the cavemen. So, likely, do ruminations on loss, impermanence, and wanderlust. In Imagine Wanting Only This (Pantheon Books, April 2018), writer and illustrator Kristen Radtke fuses such time-tested themes and visual storytelling mechanisms with the more contemporary preoccupation that is environmental devastation. Radtke’s is a debut graphic memoir about modern-day ruins, forged from interior thought and visual imagination. Through masterful drawings and pithy, poetic text, she traces a narrative arc from her childhood in Wisconsin and the death of her beloved uncle to an apocalyptic — yet sadly realistic — vision of her current home, New York City, under water.

  Throughout, Radtke reflects on the complexities of becoming an artist, and what it means when people and places are left behind. She traveled far and wide to document such “left behind” environs — an abandoned mining town near where her uncle’s widow lives in Colorado; the formerly bustling and now near-desolate steel-mill town of Gary, Indiana; a deserted military base on the Philippine island of Corregidor; and the ancient, abandoned cities of Angkor and the Roman Empire. Her renderings also re-imagine several natural catastrophes, including the site of the nation’s deadliest wildfire (Peshtigo, Wisconsin, in 1871); a volcanic eruption that wiped out a town in Heimaey, Iceland; and ultimately, climate scientists’ prediction of a wholly submerged New York City.

  It’s not just for the sake of “ruin porn,” though — Radtke juxtaposes the fragility of these places with that of the human body, writing, “Someday there will be nothing left that you have touched.” It’s a haunting line that hits every touchstone of Imagine Wanting Only This — a coming-of-age story that is also a travelogue, and a rumination of both the literal and figurative varieties of devastation.

  The author recently found time in her busy schedule (she works as the managing editor of Sarabande Books, and designs other authors’ book covers), to answer all my questions about how she arrived on this form, as well as her writing process, her sketching process, and how she merges the two.

  Tell me about the moment you knew you needed to write this book.

  I was writing essays for a long time about abandoned places in grad school, but I didn’t understand that it was a full project. I had a thesis requirement, and was trying to figure out what all my work had in common. A friend noticed I was always writing about aftermath, decay, and ruins — but I’d never seen all that as an essay collection. And I’d always been an illustrator, but I never put them [writing and drawings] together until my last semester in grad school. The first piece I drew is a very different, early version of one of the scenes with my uncle. And then this graphic memoir kind of slowly and arduously evolved from there.

  Did you primarily identify as a writer, or as an illustrator?

  I don’t know, and I can’t remember which first became part of my identity. I did newspaper in high school, but I was also always drawing — like, failing algebra because I was just sitting in the back, drawing — and for college I went to art school. I kind of resist the idea that there’s something I can do in one medium but not in another — I think that with stories, we can accomplish whatever we need to in either medium, and that it’s about employing whatever best communicates what you’re trying to say in that moment. I like drawing because it’s immediate — it hits us faster than prose writing. And I like pairing writing with images; you can get a sense of the background space and scene — stuff that wouldn’t necessarily move the narrative forward in standalone prose writing.

  Tell me about the experience of illustrating your own stuff, as opposed to another author’s.

  At first I didn’t want to design my own book cover work; I wanted my publisher to do it. It seemed crazy to be in control of packaging your own book. I feel like I’m constantly telling authors, You’ve done your part of the book; let me take it from here, and that’s how I felt, too, but my publisher felt pretty strongly that it should be me that did it — which I guess is the standard for comics artists, and that makes sense. But it was hard; unlike when I design other book covers, I didn’t have much of a sense of whether what I was doing was good.

  What’s the editing process like when it comes to illustrations?

  It’s just like editing words; at least, I think that’s how the best editors approach it. I worked closely to someone who responded to both my images and text. I like it when an editor can put pressure on decisions you make with text, and speak to how you balance that with art. I think that sometimes the risk for a graphic book is that during the editing process, people can be excited for its novelty, and therefore not as critical. You need someone who’s going to apply the same pressure and standard to the images. I will say I cut a lot more text — there was a ton more in earlier drafts. Because if you can say something in the form of illustrations, I kind of felt like I should. It was pretty laborious to figure out how not to say the same thing in both mediums.

  Do you start with words, or images, or work on both at same time? Do you draw while you’re experiencing something, or do you draw from memory?

  It depends, but I usually write first. When I’m gathering stories, I take photos, and I work later — I almost never am in a place recording that place. I just try to get down as much written information as I can. While I had visited all the places I wrote about in the book, I didn’t know I was working on a graphic project at the time, so it was hard to find some source material — I had to rely on a lot of archival photographs. Even to draw family members, I had to find photos of them at the age they were at that point in my story.

  Who are greatest inspirations?

  The obvious big one is Alison Bechdel—Fun Home taught me what a graphic memoir was, and I felt really moved by [Marjane Satrapi’s] Persepolis, too. But when I started this project, I can’t say I was super well-read when it came to graphic lit — I’d read Archie comics, and that was about it. Joan Didion was the person I read most in college and grad school and beyond, and I felt like she really informed the way I write nonfiction. Susan Steinberg, a fiction writer whose third collection, Spectacle, is being published at Graywolf, made me rethink the way I write sentences. She writes these short, staccato, no-frills ones that are startlingly beautiful.

  Do you feel the field of graphic literature for women has changed since 2004, when Charles McGrath famously wrote in the New York Times Magazine that the graphic novel was a man’s world?

  I don’t think it’s changed. Even just the other day, I saw that someone had reviewed me on Goodreads; it was a flattering review, but they said, I was expecting this to just be some girl comic. Which tells me the immediate reaction is that it would be very non-literary. The graphic novels and memoirs that get taken most seriously are still by men. With Alison [Bechdel], people still say, Oh, it’s her story, vs. [author of the graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth] Chris Ware’s “art.”

  What’s next for you?

  I’m working on two more projects — a series for the New Yorker’s “Page Turner” section about urban loneliness. It’s more illustration than text — a series of drawings of people publicly alone in New York. I’m always really interested in people who are by themselves in alleys and parking lots; say, having distraught conversations on their phones — I mean, who goes out to the parking lot to have cheery conversations? I’ve trolled the city for these subjects — I also have a series of people falling asleep on the subway. And then I’m also working on a full book project, a graphic novel. That one’s year’s down the road, but I do know it’ll be in color. I feel ready to step away from nonfiction for just a little bit.

  Now that you’ve put this nonfiction out into the world, are you still drawn to abandoned places, or, as you put it in the book, driven by “ruin lust”?

  I don’t really know. I feel like I’m drawn to them in the same way everyone is — there’s something terrifying but beautiful about ruins, especially contemporary ruins, and we all just want to see what happens next in those places. I’ve always been wanderlusty and restless, and this project was a big catalyst to really explore that side of myself.

• Rumpus - http://therumpus.net/2017/04/visiting-abandoned-places-a-conversation-with-kristen-radtke/

  QUOTE:
  ’d played around a little bit with illustrated essays in the first years of graduate school, but only in very limited ways—a ratio of one drawing to a full page of text, for example. I didn’t begin using the comics/graphic novel form until my last semester, and even then only in small doses. I was still mostly writing prose, and then I’d draw a few panels then switch back. I’d been drawing my whole life, but never scene after scene, with the burden of creating recognizable characters and settings over and over again. Most of my resistance to the form was that I simply didn’t think I could do it, or even sustain a drawing style for longer than a few pages. It was such a slow, arduous process.
  VISITING ABANDONED PLACES: A CONVERSATION WITH KRISTEN RADTKE
  BY YVONNE CONZA
  April 17th, 2017

  Complex and intriguing narratives are embedded into Kristen Radtke’s graphic (as in illustrated) memoir, Imagine Wanting Only This. A writer and illustrator with a MFA from the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program, Radtke’s literary debut deserves to sit alongside other popular contemporary memoirs like H Is for Hawk, The Faraway Nearby, and The Empathy Exams. Her compelling visual transmedia storytelling creates intimacy and narrative through the relationship between text and image, which she uses to depict vast emotions, symbolism, thematic impulses, and flashbacks.

  Radtke has been working on this book her whole life. It begins with a tender prologue addressed to a beloved uncle from her younger self. The death of Radtke’s uncle from a rare heart disease coincides with her first visit to an abandoned city while she was in college. After this, ruins of abandoned cities, boarded up mining towns and volcano-covered villages become her obsession, a global pursuit for a contemplative journeyer. Her concern with rot and decay is driven by an inward philosophical and spiritual impulse seeded through a maze of grief that unfolds over time.

  Radtke’s post-apocalyptic insights exist in the liminal territory of ruins and death; we can preserve or destroy what we have left. Her intrigue traces back to a statement she made in an interview with Mary Selph for Blackbird in 2013: “We want—and don’t want—to know what things will look like when we’re gone.” More recently, in Creating Nonfiction: Twenty Essays and Interviews with the Writers, Radtke expanded on the subject: “We see ourselves in ruins, too, particularly modern ones. Ruins that look like lives we recognize are terrifying because it’s proof of how vulnerable we all are, right now.”

  On a beatific September day I took the subway from Manhattan to East Flatbush to visit Radtke. Above ground I walked to her pre-war building and entered a lobby built in 1928. Architecture from a time when artistic attention was paid to ornate ceilings and intricate moldings echoed nostalgia, loss and potential—a perfect place for Radtke.

  We’re not close friends, just fellow ruin-lusters like Shakespeare, Marlowe, Virginia Woolf, and Rose Macaulay. Our obsession serves us as we wander through and gaze upon wreckage in search of connections, truths, and mythologies. At fifteen, the death of my older brother changed the course of my life. It colored how I interacted with the world and made me clutch to a quest that explores permanence, a passion I share with Radtke.

  Kristen Radtke is the Managing Editor of Sarabande Books and the Film Editor of TriQuarterly magazine. For info on her book tour visit her website.

  ***

  The Rumpus: Tell me how this book was started. Did illustrations come before text?

  Kristen Radtke: When I began a very early draft of the book, I wrote the prose first, storyboarded it, and then drew all the images. It was the only way I knew how to get something on the page, and I needed to do it that way—but then I also needed to completely rewrite and redraw nearly the entire thing. When I got more comfortable with the project, I started working between the illustrations and the text, expanding scenes through drawings, and cutting text that I could convey through image.

  Rumpus: Had you always been able to draw?

  Radtke: I got my fair share of Ds in high school math classes because I was always drawing in the back of the room instead of paying attention. Art classes were probably the only reason I graduated. I was just in awe of the way something could begin to appear and take shape in front of me. It felt very private, and I loved that.

  Rumpus: Prior to attending Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program had you thought about pursuing illustrated essays or was that inspired by John Bresland’s workshop? [Bresland, former Film Editor at TriQuarterly Review, and a video essayist, teaches creative writing and filmmaking at Northwestern University.]

  Radtke: I’d played around a little bit with illustrated essays in the first years of graduate school, but only in very limited ways—a ratio of one drawing to a full page of text, for example. I didn’t begin using the comics/graphic novel form until my last semester, and even then only in small doses. I was still mostly writing prose, and then I’d draw a few panels then switch back. I’d been drawing my whole life, but never scene after scene, with the burden of creating recognizable characters and settings over and over again. Most of my resistance to the form was that I simply didn’t think I could do it, or even sustain a drawing style for longer than a few pages. It was such a slow, arduous process.

  At a certain point I just became more interested in mixing writing with something visual, and graduate school seemed like a safe space to try something that might in the end be a complete and utter waste of time. I remember my friends making fun of me when I told them I was working on drawings instead of essays because they thought it was a preposterous thing to do within the confines of a writing program. That isn’t to say that they were wrong, or that the drawings I did during that time were any good—they weren’t. But it was a start.

  Rumpus: Does storyboarding provide structure, scaffolding? If so, how does that structure/scaffolding change from project to project?

  Radtke: Yes, exactly—storyboarding is a kind of scaffolding. It gets me past that blank-page anxiety so I can start building. I can’t say that I totally know how that process changes from project to project since I’m only in the early stages of my second book-length project, but I can say that a finished work is often unrecognizable from what I storyboarded or envisioned before I began. All art probably works like that in some way.

  Rumpus: What’s the editorial process like for a graphic novel? Does it differ from the prose editorial process?

  Radtke: There are similarities in the process. Good editors should respond to drawings with the same kind of attention with which they’d respond to text. I love an editor or reader who will notice things like “the nightstand moved from the left side of the bed on page 14 to the right side on page 17!” or “he was wearing a short-sleeved shirt in this panel, and now he’s wearing a sweater.” It’s amazing how things like that can become invisible to the person making them—or at least they sometimes become invisible to me.

  Rumpus: There’s a level of subjectivity attached to visual components of a graphic novel that could be challenging to an editor if he or she isn’t familiar with elements and tools of illustrated storytelling. Have you had challenges with editors not familiar with the genre? Can you share a time that an editor helped you through a graphic-narrative obstacle by providing constructive feedback that allowed you to re-edit or pursue a different narrative illustration?

  Radtke: I think there’s definitely subjectivity in the way editors respond to visual components of a graphic novel, but that’s the case for prose novels, too. Illustrations have a voice and a style just like sentences do, and everyone is going to respond differently to that. I think sometimes editors who aren’t very familiar with graphic narratives don’t always take them seriously, and sometimes don’t see comics as literature. Which is fine. It’s not for everyone.

  Rumpus: What’s your biggest concern with editors and your work?

  Radtke: Maybe I’d say the challenge is that they’re not as critical of the form because they’re excited to see something different and say, “Great, we’ll run it.” And, I appreciate their excitement over a new style. But I think that you have to be as critical of the graphic stuff as you are of prose.

  Rumpus: Could you elaborate on the connection between the death of your uncle and architectural ruins?

  Radtke: I was a sophomore in college, and it was either a coincidence or a trigger—I’m not sure—but my uncle’s death coincided with my first visit to an abandoned city. And from there, those things felt very intertwined—like the idea of a heart defect, the idea of a heart kind of collapsing on itself, the idea of a building or a city collapsing in on itself…

  The first city I went to was Gary, Indiana. I was going to school in Chicago, and it was about twenty minutes away. In the book I make it seem, and it was, very cavalier, flip, like we’re art students, let’s go do this weird thing. I didn’t really understand the implications of tromping around an abandoned city. I certainly didn’t understand the socioeconomic or racial implications of a place like Gary at the time when I was nineteen. But that awareness and narrative lens was developed as I became more interested in abandoned cities.

  Rumpus: Can you expand on the socioeconomics of a place like Gary?

  Radtke: I showed up to a place with almost no understanding of its history or the hardships it had faced and walked through it like a tourist expecting to leave with a few snapshots and a story. That’s absolutely the wrong way to approach any place that isn’t yours, especially one like Gary, a city that belongs to a lot of people who’ve been disenfranchised.

  Rumpus: Writing a narration that spans childhood to adulthood, what were the challenges you faced as the protagonist of a graphic book?

  Radtke: I got really nervous about how many times could I draw myself before it got ridiculous. [Laughs]

  Rumpus: As the narrator how did you push past feeling self-conscious? Did knowing that a graphic book relies on repeated images for immediate visual recall of characters and places put that into perspective?

  Radtke: I tried not to think about it, I guess. You know, all kinds of anxiety can come up that you have to just push out of your brain or you can’t do it. It’s the same thing with worrying about what my family would think about my book. You know, you just had to do it.

  [Radtke gestures toward her computer screen, where she’s pulled up images from her book. Morgan, her Maine Coon cat, slides between us hoping that the pages where he appears will pop up.]

  This is me in middle school, then high school. Here I’m going to college. It was hard making the transitions of aging. I was just like, okay, maybe I’ll make my cheeks a little bit bigger in high school—back then you have a bit more baby fat, stuff like that. It was tricky because it all took place within a short period of time. You don’t want to rely just on hairstyle or clothing. Changing and altering the narrative text via captions, thought or dialogue balloons is also a transitional tool available to me in developing my characters. Even the space between images and texts conveys a movement of time within the story.

  Rumpus: How did you decide when to use images instead of text to move your story forward? Do images hold more intimacy and emotional weight for you over text?

  Radtke: It really depends on the scene. Sometimes I can see clearly what I want to draw and the way I want a moment to unfold visually. Then I work the text around that. Other times I write before I’ve figured out what needs to be represented visually. But I like working best—and I think the results are better—when I’m moving back and forth between the two, seeing how they can come together. As far as images and their emotional weight over text, for me its more the fact that drawing is so arduous and can take an enormous amount of time. Many of those hours are spent in early the stages where the image doesn’t even look like anything yet. It’s almost always a surprise to me when it comes together.

  Rumpus: Did the material ever suggest to you that a particular scene was better served by an image over text? What does the space between image and text convey? Is it movement of time? Shifting of emotion? Reflective pause?

  Radtke: Not necessarily, although generally if I can draw it, that’s what I do. The text got lighter and lighter in each draft of Imagine Wanting Only This. It’s just a matter of aesthetic preference, but I think big chunks of text can be clunky in graphic work (which isn’t to say there aren’t chapters in this book that don’t include big chunks of text–it’s often the most economical option).

  Regarding space between image and text, it’s different every time. I think that space can convey a multitude of things depending on how it’s employed. If the relationship between text and image doesn’t vary or grow or change, I don’t think I’m doing my job.

  Rumpus: When readers see images versus text, are there cues for them about how to read and navigate your story?

  Radtke: I’m not sure. The standard comics rule is that you read panels left to right, top to bottom. But I think it’s up to a reader whether they want to engage with text or image first.

  Rumpus: When you tackled a complex issue in your book—heartbreak, decay and connection, for example—did visual narrative provide you with greater freedom to explore deeper truths?

  Radtke: It provided me with an additional mode with which to explore and convey these issues, which I suppose can be freeing. When I feel stuck in one mode I can move to another.

  Rumpus: Is there anyone currently who influences your work and artistic vision?

  Radtke: I’m a big fan of Tom Hart and Richard McGuire, and I probably wouldn’t have started drawing comics if it wasn’t for the work of Adrian Tomine and Alison Bechdel.

  Rumpus: How many rounds of edits did your manuscript go through?

  Radtke: That’s a good question. I don’t really know. They bought the book on two chapters. Then I had to make an outline, draw and write the rest of it and I sent all that in at the beginning of this year, maybe January or February of 2016—so probably two or three rounds since then.

  Rumpus: Was there a particular editor that you wanted to work with at Pantheon Books? If so, who and why?

  Radtke: I was ready to throw the book away when Dan Frank, the Editor-in-Chief of Pantheon, read it—and, quite frankly, saved it. He knew exactly what the project needed. I’ve never met anyone who broke things open for me so clearly before. I’ve also been hugely lucky to work closely with Tim O’Connell, a brilliant editor who was so present during the making of this book, and the gracious recipient of so many panicked and annoying emails from me, that he should probably get a co-author credit.

  Rumpus: Why Pantheon Books over another publisher for Imagine Wanting Only This? What made it feel like the right publishing fit?

  Radtke: There isn’t a better publisher of literary graphic novels in America than Pantheon. Chris Ware, Art Spiegelman, Marjane Satrapi, Richard McGuire, Charles Burns—so many of my favorite graphic novelists found homes with them. They make truly beautiful books. They make my work look better.

  Rumpus: Do you have a mentor?

  Radtke: I worked with incredible teachers at Iowa, and my cohort was full of some of the best young writers in the country—I was immensely lucky to be working among them. I started working on the book under the direction of Robin Hemley, who encouraged me to draw in the first place, and John D’Agata. Both professors were indispensable to me at the early stages of the project.

  Rumpus: What are your writing habits? Is there anything you find helpful to do when you’re stuck in a particular place in your work?

  Radtke: My working habits are basically that I work every possible moment that I can. Drawing is simply such a time-consuming process that the only way to make a whole book (for me, anyway) was to just be relentless. The benefit of working between writing and drawing is that when you’re stuck or bored with one medium you can move to the other. But in general I don’t believe in writer’s block. I think you just have to sit and sit and make it happen, which means saying no to a lot of things you’d rather be doing. You just have to do the work.

  Rumpus: What are you currently reading? What online journals or literary websites do you most often read?

  Radtke: Two books by amazing women everyone should look out for Don’t Come Back by Lina Maria Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas, just released by Mad River, and Mira Jacob’s graphic memoir Good Talk: Conversations I’m Still Confused About, forthcoming from Dial Press in 2018. I love reading artist and writer Sophie Lucido Johnson’s great website, as well.

• Los Angeles Review of Books - https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/coming-to-terms-with-impermanence/

  QUOTE:
  I originally envisioned the book as a collection of prose essays, for no other reason than that I love essays and that was the mode I’d always written in. I’ve been drawing since I was a kid, and moved back to visual art a lot — design, stop-motion animation, little projects here and there. My last semester of grad school I tried a graphic essay in comics form, and that turned out to be the beginning of the book, and then it took me another year or two after that to commit to drawing the whole thing. It was just a slow coming-around. I was teaching myself to draw comics while I was drawing the project, so much of the process was just about convincing myself that I could do it.
  Coming to Terms with Impermanence
  Micah McCrary interviews Kristen Radtke

  49 0 1

  JUNE 1, 2017

  AN ACCOMPLISHED WRITER and illustrator (also the managing editor of Sarabande Books), Kristen Radtke has published her work in a range of venues, including The New Yorker, Guernica, the Oxford American, and Buzzfeed. Always, she skillfully combines an artist’s eye with an essayist’s natural curiosity and thoughtfulness. Often, she has given her readers a way to think about deserted venues, from deteriorating apartments to semi-vacant train cars to urban parking lots.
  Her debut — a graphic memoir in which both her prose and her illustrations shine — offers all this and more. Imagine Wanting Only This propels Radtke’s various preoccupations into a meditation about how place and people are shaped over time.
  Recently, Kristen and I emailed back and forth about writing and drawing, structure and form, the rewards of revision, and how this first book finally came together.
  ¤
  MICAH MCCRARY: On more than one occasion, Imagine Wanting Only This has been categorized as a “coming-of-age” narrative. (Eula Biss in particular called it “a remarkable bildungsroman.”) How much of the story, as you initially developed it, was conceived with that in mind?
  KRISTEN RADTKE: This is a hard distinction to parse, since I was working on the project during, or in some cases only a few years after, the events that take place in the book. I can’t say that I ever had any intention of writing a coming-of-age narrative — in some ways, I was really reticent about this, worried that I’d be taken less seriously for chronicling and exploring the time between college, grad school, and those transitional years after. The essayist Lucas Mann talks about this in Essay Daily:
  How many of us spent (or are spending) much of our twenties writing with a narrative voice that is tired and beaten down and aged beyond anything we’ve ever experienced? […] Instead of writing into the discomfort of a narrator mid-struggle, confused, we create false safety. That’s how last year becomes a weary “once.” How grad school, becomes “my years in a run-down apartment at the edge of a small Midwestern town where whiskey was cheap and nights were long.”
  That anxiety was present for me throughout this project, and throughout most of what I wrote before I began it. I’m less worried about it now, perhaps because 22 and 24 feel further away to me now than they did when I started.
  You bring in a sort of collage of different art forms here: photography, illustration, writing. When did these forms really begin to coalesce for you during your project?
  I originally envisioned the book as a collection of prose essays, for no other reason than that I love essays and that was the mode I’d always written in. I’ve been drawing since I was a kid, and moved back to visual art a lot — design, stop-motion animation, little projects here and there. My last semester of grad school I tried a graphic essay in comics form, and that turned out to be the beginning of the book, and then it took me another year or two after that to commit to drawing the whole thing. It was just a slow coming-around. I was teaching myself to draw comics while I was drawing the project, so much of the process was just about convincing myself that I could do it.
  But you’re also a practiced essayist: How did you “translate” those tools — like reflection or digression — into a narrative-in-images? Did you feel particular constraints with the graphic form?
  I didn’t feel any constraints, other than the fact that I was working on a page, the same way I might if I were writing straightforward prose. Even when I’m drawing I’m still making essays, or at least that’s what I set out to do. I like that I can craft a meditation in two different modes — text or image — and I like seeing how organically they fit together. How they communicate as one singular entity.
  You write about your West Side house during your time in Chicago being a “backdrop,” conveying it as a space where you and your then partner, Andrew, “spent most weeks talking about art we did not understand, creating earnest impersonations that are the hallmarks of young art students …” Since then, what has become the “backdrop” for your work? And how do you know which form — or forms — will work best?
  Like many people, I’ve always found myself hyper-attuned to place. It’s really hard for me to produce good work in a place where I’m not physically comfortable, but I suppose what I mean by “place” can shift pretty dramatically. I’ve had terrible apartments in towns I loved, for example, and that was always enough.
  I don’t think choosing forms is ever a conscious decision, at least not for me. The best thing I can do for myself is follow my intuition — to write, or draw, in the direction I feel compelled to move. If something is loud, it seems counterintuitive to shut it out, unless it’s something that’s distracting or destructive to your work. That might mean a TV show that’s too easy to binge-watch or a job that consumes all your creative time. Or a bad relationship. I think we have to do whatever we can to carve out a space in which we can create, and guard it ferociously.
  Some might say the story of Imagine Wanting Only This starts with your randomly learning of the death of man named Seth Thomas in Gary, Indiana; others might trace its beginning to the discovery of the illness in your uncle Dan. Where does the story begin for you?
  Narrative is a strange thing, because it happens all at once. I was writing about my uncle, and I was writing about Seth, and I was writing about abandoned places; it took me a while to realize that they were all pieces of one whole, larger thing. The structure of this book changed dozens of times before it landed as it is here. And who knows if “here” is the right place, either?
  If “here” isn’t the right place, where is? That is, if the narrative “happens all at once,” how did you decide where (whether from your images or from your writing) to follow Imagine Wanting Only This?
  It’s really hard to say, because I worked in the wrong direction so many times — I can’t count the number of rewrites and restructures. I always laugh when people ask how many drafts I go through. (When is a draft a “draft”?) In the end, I think, something just feels right, or right enough, and if it keeps feeling that way when you read and reread it, and when your agent and editor and best friend do, then maybe you’re there. To me, the only really interesting part of making a book was seeing how dramatically it changed over the course of making it.
  As you began “teaching yourself to draw comics,” did you turn to other graphic artists for help?
  Sometimes I feel embarrassed citing famous writers and artists as influences, but I would never have started drawing comics if it weren’t for Alison Bechdel’s work. I don’t think there’s another person doing what she’s doing with graphic nonfiction — she uses transition and physical space so compellingly, and the way she moves us through a narrative visually is truly literary.
  Restlessness is a subject many writers can identify with, and it’s also one you touch upon in your book. At what point did your sense of restlessness transform into productivity? Into an accumulation of artifacts and memories?
  For me, restlessness has always been pretty helpful in terms of my productivity. I don’t necessarily see restlessness as a lack of interest in where you are or what you’re doing — rather, it’s a “wanting more.” (My deadly sin is definitely greed.) And for me, work is always a given. I know that I’m going to work every day — maybe not on what I want to work on, but on something that needs to get done. All that is to say that there’s a way to use any potentially detrimental impulse you have to fuel your creative work.
  What about decay? You write about planting flowers in Italy that you “wouldn’t keep alive,” and how Gary, Indiana, the city itself, caused you to become “consumed by the question of how something that is can become, very suddenly, something that isn’t.” How did your considerations of decay (ruins, bodies, photographs) develop throughout the writing of this book?
  I think I came to see it as something not so tragic. The metaphor became less grand to me. Decay is just another stage in any life cycle, and it becomes so familiar. That isn’t to say I’m not completely terrified of death or aging, or that I don’t sometimes hug my cat and whisper, “don’t ever die,” into his little ear, but I’ve definitely come to terms with impermanence in a way that’s comforting to me. I don’t mean that I understand this process — how “is” can go to “isn’t” with alarming speed. I don’t. I don’t think I understand ruins or collapse any better than I did before I wrote the book.
  Much of this narrative requires consciously thinking about the slow passing of time, but which parts of the process for you moved forward abruptly or swiftly?
  Honestly? The rest of my life while I was writing the book. A lot changed for me during those years. The project itself seemed slow and endless. There were moments, particularly toward the end, when I’d look at the manuscript and feel startled that so much of it was done — on a daily basis it felt like I was getting nowhere. I think that happens when you’re inside something, looking at it so closely. I had to step back in order to realize that I was making any progress at all.
  You also use the word mythology in describing your fascination with the story of your distant relative Adele in Peshtigo, Wisconsin (the site of the Great Peshtigo Fire in 1871). What role do you think mythology might play in your gravitation toward other places and their stories, like Gary or Detroit?
  I’m not entirely sure. Sometimes none at all. I hadn’t heard much about many of the places I visited in the book before I went. I didn’t have many preconceived notions about what I might find. With a city like Detroit, I intentionally avoided writing about it — there are maybe a few sentences in the book about the place — because its story felt distinctly not mine. I was fascinated but disheartened by the way Detroit’s story had unfolded in the news and on the internet. I didn’t want to be just another voice spewing about a place she didn’t really understand.
  Last, as you’re illustrating a scene, do you work from memory? And at what point do you begin to recognize your depiction of a place or person — even yourself — as authentic?
  I do work from memory, yes. And one of the strangest things about drawing and writing is that what you’ve written and drawn becomes more real to you than what you actually experienced — I know a lot of writers feel that way. Everything that I put into the book feels, otherwise, less tactile to me now, or at least present in a different way that I can’t quite pinpoint. The act of making takes on a meaning separate from the acts themselves.
  ¤
  Micah McCrary’s essays, reviews, and translations have appeared in Essay Daily, Assay, Brevity, Third Coast, and Midwestern Gothic, among other publications. He co-edits con•text, is an assistant editor at Hotel Amerika, and is a doctoral student in English at Ohio University.

• Creative Independent - https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/kristen-radtke-on-publishing-your-first-book/

  QUOTE:
  Put your stuff on the internet. I mean, truly, really truly. I think you just have to be out there in every way that you can, submit yourself constantly and just see what happens. I think that’s the most important thing. The other thing I did when I started doing graphic stuff is that I submitted work to places that had never done graphic stuff before. Places that I just liked. A lot of them were like, “Cool, we never thought about this. Why not?” I think sometimes because it’s a smaller genre, it can feel like there’s no place for you, but there is.
  Kristen Radtke
  Writer, Illustrator
  Kristen Radtke is a writer and illustrator based in Brooklyn, New York. Her graphic memoir, Imagine Wanting Only This, was published by Pantheon Books in April 2017. When asked to reflect on the experience of publishing her first book, Radtke explains, "I think the blessing of all this is that I'm never going to write my first book ever again. First books are messy things. Next time I'll be less concerned about making things as neat and tidy as possible, which was definitely a real fear for me on this first book. I’ll try to maybe not let it drive me so crazy."
  Conversation
  Kristen Radtke on publishing your first book

  Writing, Art, Beginnings, Process, First attempts, Success, Focus
  From a conversation with T. Cole Rachel
  August 29, 2017
  Highlights on
  Download as a PDF

  You work in publishing as an editor. How do you balance that kind of professional life with your own creative life?
  It’s tricky. I feel like I’m always negotiating how to do it properly, so that one part doesn’t suffer. It’s certainly easier to push off my own creative projects than it is to push off the day job, especially when my day job is in a creative field. So it’s not like I’m just working a generic office job, I am working with other people’s art all day. So it’s harder to slough off that responsibility. It’s difficult. I’m about to start a new job—still in publishing—and one of the things I’m excited for is that it’s stationed on the west coast, and I’m on the east coast. I’ll probably start my work day at 10:30 or 11. So I’ll have, hopefully, a couple of hours that I can be vigilant with myself to do work every morning before people on the other coast start waking up.
  Are you able to say, “I’m gonna get up at 6 A.M. and work for three hours”?
  I can never get up at 6 A.M. Never ever in my life. But I can definitely stick to a schedule. I can get up at 8:00, and do that for two hours. I’m just not a morning person. I always like the Chuck Close quote that says something like, “Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us show up and get to work.” I love that and I think it’s true. But it’s harder, I think, when you’re at certain stages of a project. For example, if I have a page storyboarded, and I know what’s going to be drawn, I can draw it. When you’re in the early idea generation stage of a new project, it’s really hard to go home from your day job and be like, “Now I’m being an artist.”
  How did the graphic novel—or in your case, the graphic memoir—become your preferred way of expressing yourself?
  I went to graduate school for just writing prose, nonfiction, and I started doing these little experiments. I think my first essay I ever turned in in graduate school was in two columns. It was a terrible essay about cicadas. In one column was the text, and in the other column I had drawings of cicadas I’d done with charcoal which I scanned and put into the essay. Everyone was like, “Why are these here? That’s stupid.” I was like, “Okay, I’ll never do that again.” Then maybe a semester or two later, I started experimenting with drawings again. I would do a double-spaced page in Microsoft Word and put a picture up in the corner, in a way that didn’t make sense. I did things like that for a long time, because I knew I was interested in visual stuff, but I didn’t know how to incorporate it.
  It wasn’t until probably my last semester of graduate school that I tried a graphic novel format. It just never occurred to me before that because I never thought I had the skill to draw something consistently for 300 pages. It seemed so overwhelming. So, I was definitely slow coming around to it.
  RadtkeImage1.jpg
  Do you remember the first time you felt like it was coming together in a way that made sense?
  I think in any project you have that feeling about three dozen times—you think it’s coming together and actually it’s not. But that feeling is necessary in order for you to keep going. Actually, the first graphic essay that I ever drew, actually turned into part of the prologue for my book. I ended up redrawing the drawing, and rewriting some of the text, and rearranging a part of it… it definitely turned into something.
  I’m trying to think of the point at which I felt like it was actually coming together…. It was probably after I got the book contract, because before that it felt like it would never happen. Even after I got the book contract, I felt like it would never happen. After I signed with Pantheon, I had so much work to do. I probably only had two complete chapters, which I ended up changing completely. So it wasn’t until I was halfway through that work period, after signing, that I felt like it was maybe possible that the book would be completed.
  I can’t imagine what the editing and rewrite process would entail with a graphic novel. It’s one thing to make changes to the text, but the images add a different layer of complication to the process.
  It’s arduous and time consuming. A sentence can be revised ad nauseam forever. If you know what needs to happen in a scene, you may be revising that for a while to get the language right, but you’re creating the whole time. With drawing it’s different. If I storyboard something and I know, for example, that in this picture I’m going to draw myself with my feet up on my desk, talking on the phone, as I am now, I can see that exactly in my mind. Then I just have to spend the hours to put it on the paper… but that takes much longer than revising the sentences.
  Do you find it hard to cut things? Is it heartbreaking to have to cut an image out of the book that isn’t working, especially after you’ve spent so much time working on the drawing?
  It’s not so much heartbreaking as it is infuriating. It’s hours you’ll never get back. Although there’s a certain point for me—especially when I feel like I’m very close to the end of a project—where if someone says, “Cut this chapter.” I’m like, “Fine. I don’t care. Sure.” There’s a moment in which I give myself over to it, and I think that’s totally necessary. I don’t think I could finish something if I didn’t adopt that mindset. I don’t know if anyone else feels like this, but toward the end of a project, I’m so sick of it and I kind of hate it. It takes a while before the smoke clears on that feeling. So I’ll do anything to it at the end just to be done with it and have it over with.
  RadtkeImage2.jpg
  When you were putting together Imagine Wanting Only This, did you share the work with someone along the way? Is it important to get feedback in order to avoid falling too far down the rabbit hole of a project?
  In the beginning, I definitely shared like crazy. I felt like I needed to workshop all the time. I needed feedback constantly. And then I stopped doing that. When I started doing it again, it was horrible. I sent it to a couple of friends and I was so overwhelmed by the feedback. I shared it when I thought I was maybe three-fourths of the way done. It turned out, it was maybe only a fourth finished. I felt like that process was super detrimental, and it set me back a lot of weeks, because I was just so overwhelmed by the feedback. Going forward, I’m not going to be doing that as much. I may talk through things—like, “Does this kind of logic make sense?”-Or I might share individual drawings, but getting too much feedback can really throw the whole thing off course. The best time to share something is when I know I’ve taken it absolutely as far as I can, and I know there’s nothing else that I can do on my own.
  Another writer told me that they were afraid if they shared anything too early, if one person said even the slightest critical thing, they would probably throw their hands up and abandon it, that early on even the slightest whiff of criticism can make the whole thing evaporate.
  It can be totally devastating. It’s so bizarre how that can happen, because I feel like in a lot of ways I’m pretty tough. I remember a couple of weeks after my book came out, I would see a Goodreads review, and just want to quit writing forever. Now I think they’re hilarious when they’re really mean. But I think we go through phases, probably, with our own work. It probably depends on how rooted and solid we’re feeling in our creative practice.
  Graphic novels constitute their own literary universe, which can be a little insular. There were a lot of people who read and wrote about your book that maybe didn’t have much previous contact with graphic novels. Were you surprised by the reaction to it?
  First of all, I think it’s just weird to have anyone talk about your work for the first time. It was my first book, so just having it read at all by any person I didn’t know was strange and interesting and kind of bizarre. I probably should have been locked in a room away from the internet for the first month, because it was just so surreal. There were certainly things that people said that I was surprised about. I thought that everyone would say, “Eh, the writing is just okay, but the drawings are good.” And I think it turned out to be the opposite, which was surprising to me. I sort of felt more self-conscious about the writing than the drawing, then the critics felt the opposite way. So I think for me the surprise was just that I was surprised. The feedback that I got was not necessarily what I was expecting.
  Do you feel like this format allows you to say things in a way that no other format or genre would allow? The ability to both show and tell?
  Maybe. Whenever I’m asked that question, I’m always really unsure, because I resist the idea that there’s a perfect medium for any project, or that there’s a medium that can do something that another one can’t. Certainly things operate in different ways and with a different manner, but I like to think that any story can live in any medium. I don’t know if that’s true, but it’s something that I tell myself. I think any artist should just use the tools they have available to them. For me, over time, as I was making this project, my way of thinking gradually changed.
  Now I think about things in panels rather than paragraphs. At first it felt laborious to translate text into images. Now I think I’m storyboarding in my mind more than I am writing paragraphs in my mind the way I used to. In that sense, I think my way of thinking has totally changed. I’m working on a collection of essays now, which has a lot of prose in it but there are also illustrations. I just don’t know that I could totally go back.
  How much did your own experience working as an editor in publishing help get you through the process of getting your own book out into the world?
  I helped me enormously just because I knew what to ask for and I knew what to advocate for. I knew when someone told me they were doing something small that they were pretending and it was actually a big thing—I knew it didn’t really mean anything. You know, the smoke and mirrors didn’t really mean anything to me. I knew when I wasn’t getting something I needed. I also knew when someone was working really hard for me, and I knew how to say thank you. I think the main thing was that I knew was just how much time all this stuff takes, and I knew to be really grateful for all of it, and to be as direct with the people I was working with as possible, to thank them for their time. I knew to try to work with them and assist, because I think it’s really difficult sometimes to be working with writers who feel like it’s still all their thing, and it’s not. It’s not just yours anymore. You’re working with a team.
  My editor said to me jokingly the other day, “You know too much.” I think sometimes that’s true. I think it made me more anxious to know there were all these benchmarks for success that I was either hitting or not hitting. I knew that because I had worked on books before. I think it definitely made me more aware of the ways in which I could fail, which isn’t always a good thing.
  RadtkeImage3.jpg
  What advice do you have for a young writer working on a graphic novel? How do they get people to even see their work?
  Put your stuff on the internet. I mean, truly, really truly. I think you just have to be out there in every way that you can, submit yourself constantly and just see what happens. I think that’s the most important thing. The other thing I did when I started doing graphic stuff is that I submitted work to places that had never done graphic stuff before. Places that I just liked. A lot of them were like, “Cool, we never thought about this. Why not?” I think sometimes because it’s a smaller genre, it can feel like there’s no place for you, but there is.
  You have one book under your belt now. What were the most important lessons that you’ll take into your next one?
  I think the blessing of all this is that I’m never going to write my first book ever again. First books are messy things. Not to say that some of my favorite books aren’t people’s first books. I could never have done my first book any other way, but I probably could have done it better, had I been a different person or at a different point of my life. So I think my future projects will be very different. I think they’ll be less personal, much less autobiographical. Next time I’ll be less concerned about making things as neat and tidy as possible, which was definitely a real fear for me on this first book. I’ll try to maybe not let it drive me so crazy.

The allure of decay: in her new graphic memoir, Kristen Radtke explores her preoccupation with human mortality and abandoned spaces
Claire Kirch
Publishers Weekly. 264.15 (Apr. 10, 2017): p44.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Listen
Full Text:
Kristen Radtke has always been fascinated by abandoned structures that have fallen into decay. But she also feels a compulsion to preserve what is lost by journaling and writing. These seemingly contradictory impulses led Radtke, 29, to work for the past six or seven years on graphic essays that she has compiled into a memoir, Imagine Wanting Only This (Pantheon, Apr.).

Radtke says her nonlinear graphic memoir started as a series that she began as a graduate student in the University of Iowa's M.EA. program for nonfiction writers. After a two-year stint in Louisville, Ky., Radtke, who is the managing editor at Louisville-based publisher Sarabande Books and also the video editor for TriQuarterly, Northwestern University's literary magazine, moved to Brooklyn in 2014.

"Imagine Wanting Only This started as prose," Radtke explains. "At first I didn't realize that I was writing a book about ruins; I was just writing a lot about ruined places. I didn't recognize that they had anything in common until I'd been working on the book for a couple of years."

The memoir opens with Radtke and her college boyfriend taking a road trip from Chicago to Gary, Ind., when she was 20 to visit the ruins of a cathedral in the city's center. They discover a bag of photographs and take it with them, a spontaneous act with emotional consequences that is referenced repeatedly throughout Imagine Wanting Only This. The pictures turn out to have been left by friends as a tribute to a young photographer, Seth, who was killed while photographing an approaching train.

The memoir concludes with Radtke's move to New York City and her imagining the city devastated by terrible floods. In between, Radtke recalls her childhood in Green Bay, Wis., and learning in elementary school about the Great Peshtigo Fire of 1871, the deadliest wildfire in history, which leveled a nearby town the same day as Chicago's more famous fire.

Radtke also describes her visits as an adult to the World War II ruins on the island of Corregidor in the Philippines and to Heimaey, an island off Iceland's coast that was destroyed in 1973 when a volcano erupted and covered the town in lava and ash. The townspeople later returned to Heimaey and rebuilt the town, a fact that impressed Radtke: "I thought [Heimaey] was so striking, the idea that you could love the place you are from enough to move back even after it had been completely destroyed and you would rebuild essentially exactly what you had before."

The title of the book, Imagine Wanting Only This, refers to Radtke's response to visiting that reconstructed town. The cover image shows the author from behind, gazing out at the Detroit skyline from inside the Detroit Metropolitan Airport. Recalling a moment during a layover there, she says she realized that the image of a new airport next to a decaying city "encapsulated the ideas of the book." She adds: "Detroit is our American example of ruins more than anywhere else. So many structures there have been abandoned since the automobile industry left."

Human beings have always been fascinated by ruins, Radtke notes, because they are intrigued by what existed before them and what will come next. Some contemporary ruins--the result of industry leaving a place--are particularly evocative, she says, because they demonstrate "how each of our civilizations is vulnerable to the same things," from antiquity to the present.

As a child, Radtke says, she "always drew and always wrote," particularly after her parents--her father is a retired engineer who became a farmer, and her mother a homemaker--moved from a subdivision to the countryside outside of Green Bay. "It was a really comfortable upbringing, but it was very isolating. It's probably why I was a writer--I just spent so much time in my room alone, drawing, writing."

Radtke's family did not travel. They "really wanted to stay close to home, which was something that I bristled at," she says. This, together with a family history of a genetic heart defect that is resistant to treatment, contributed to the wanderlust she has exhibited since her late teens.

"The reality that we have a finite amount of time can make us all a little frantic," Radtke says. "Or at least it made me a little frantic in those moments where I've recognized it. It makes me anxious to go out and see and do as much as I can. I think it also informs that need to preserve and to take things down."

After leaving home at 18 for Chicago to attend Columbia College's art program, followed by a short stint in Italy, Radtke moved to Iowa City in 2009, where, encouraged by University of Iowa writing program faculty members Robin Hemley and John D'Agata, she began combining words and images, beginning with comic strips and video essays. "I resisted doing a full book of [text and images] for a long time," she says, explaining that she didn't think at the time that she could sustain the visual narrative and draw the same characters "for 300 pages." Though Radtke considers herself both a writer and a visual artist, she notes that drawing is often easier for her than writing and says she believes that one can convey in graphic form anything that can be expressed in prose. "But I do think we all use the tools we have to tell stories," she says. Sometimes she draws entire pages before writing any text; at other times she "completely storyboards and maps something out with text and draws later."

Radtke lists among her literary influences Alison Bechdel and Marjane Satrapi, who have both written graphic memoirs. She also praises cartoonist Adrian Tomine for his characterizations and dialogue.

With her literary preferences running toward short stories and essays, Radtke notes that she initially enrolled in Iowa's nonfiction writing program to hone her essay-writing skills. "I'm really influenced by the form of the essay," she explains, "That is really how I structured the book, with an argument and then investigating. I read a ton of Didion when I was writing this book. She is the master of essays in general."

Emboldened by the critical reception of Imagine Wanting Only This, which is a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick for spring, Radtke is working on two new graphic projects: a graphic novel about female friendships that she calls a "terrible man book," and a series on urban loneliness that is being published on the New Yorker's website. That series, with "big illustrations" and "probably no narrative" was inspired by Radtke's move to New York City after living in such small towns as Green Bay, Iowa City, and Louisville.

New York City, Radtke says, "is such a great place to people watch: we're very publicly in our private spaces, because we spend so much time in transit or crammed all together." She adds, "It's very interesting, watching people fall asleep on the subway or have a screaming phone call in a parking lot in a way that doesn't happen in smaller towns where we can get away from one another."

Focusing for so many years on ruin and decay, Radtke says, made her feel that she needed to move in the opposite direction with her next project. "I wanted to do something next that was highly attuned to people--their faces, their bodies, the way they talk and move through space," she says.

QUOTE:
In a way, what she has done in this impressive book is to
revive the dead and recover the lost while illuminating a world in flux, in which change is the only constant. Powerfully
illustrated and incisively written--a subtle dazzler of a debut.
Radtke, Kristen: IMAGINE WANTING ONLY
THIS
Kirkus Reviews.
(Feb. 1, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Radtke, Kristen IMAGINE WANTING ONLY THIS Pantheon (Adult Nonfiction) $29.95 4, 18 ISBN: 978-1-101-
87083-9
Insights and images combine in a meditation on loss, grief, and the illusions of permanence.Sarabande Books managing
editor Radtke isn't an artist who also writes a little or a writer who scrawls but a master of both prose narrative and
visual art. Like memory, the narrative loosens the binds of chronology, playing hopscotch through the author's girlhood,
college, formative years as an artist, and apocalyptic fantasy of her current home in New York. A strain of heart failure
seems to run in Radtke's family, and the key to this memoir is the death of her favorite uncle, who was recovering from
the surgery that ultimately killed him and whose death made the author and her family all the more concerned with the
family medical history. The event also planted the seed for this book and its larger thematic focus, as Radtke became
"consumed by the question of how something that is can become, very suddenly, something that isn't." On her return
home for the funeral, the author discovered an abandoned mining town that she would later revisit. During art school,
she became fascinated by Gary, Indiana, a city in ruins, where she discovered the photos of someone whose attempts to
document the city led to his death. She left a fiance and what she imagined to be a "stagnant future" for vagabond
travels taking her from the ruins of Italy to the ravages of Southeast Asia, while her own heart condition gave notions
of impermanence and loss a personal emphasis. "I couldn't comprehend why the dead couldn't be made undead," she
writes. "Why a heart that caved couldn't be filled out again." In a way, what she has done in this impressive book is to
revive the dead and recover the lost while illuminating a world in flux, in which change is the only constant. Powerfully
illustrated and incisively written--a subtle dazzler of a debut.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Radtke, Kristen: IMAGINE WANTING ONLY THIS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Feb. 2017. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA479234411&it=r&asid=af0b528c7e3a9899574b67c647be3ba1.
Accessed 1 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A479234411
10/1/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1506877301007 2/4

QUOTE:
Radtke's neat, grayscale drawings are detailed and coloring-book precise, and her thoughtful, meticulous narration
makes true visual essays
Imagine Wanting Only This
Annie Bostrom
Booklist.
113.9-10 (Jan. 1, 2017): p54.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
Imagine Wanting Only This. By Kristen Radtke. Illus. by the author. Apr. 2017. 288p. Pantheon, $29.95
(9781101870839). 741.5.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
When Radtke was in college, studying art in Chicago, the uncle she'd grown up adoring died of a heart condition.
Around the same time, she visited Gary, Indiana, and began to cultivate a deep interest in the ruins of cities and
decaying places. The idea of "how something that is can become, very suddenly, something that isn't" obsessed her.
Radtke's neat, grayscale drawings are detailed and coloring-book precise, and her thoughtful, meticulous narration
makes true visual essays of them. In grad school, she travels to the Philippines, Burma, Singapore, and Vietnam,
seeking and studying international "ruin-porn," as she notes some call it. Her story cartwheels, too, exploring the
science behind her uncle's defect and the probability that she has it, too. She tells the story of the infamous fire in
Peshtigo, Wisconsin, her home state, which decimated the area and took thousands of victims but remains regional lore
after occurring on the same day as the Great Chicago Fire. In her cerebral journey of a first book, Radtke, an illustrator,
designer, and managing editor of a small press, asks and answers: Why do ruins fascinate, and why is this fascination
considered perverse? Why are ruins there at all?--Annie Bostrom
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Bostrom, Annie. "Imagine Wanting Only This." Booklist, 1 Jan. 2017, p. 54. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA479078033&it=r&asid=b47a953163503ad2e9abdfb1ae189c3b.
Accessed 1 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A479078033
10/1/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1506877301007 3/4
Imagine Wanting Only This
Publishers Weekly.
263.52 (Dec. 19, 2016): p106.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Imagine Wanting Only This
Kristen Radtke. Pantheon, $29.95 (288p) ISBN 978-1-101-87083-9
Writer, illustrator, and editor Radtke's graphic memoir does something difficult within just a few minimally designed,
emotional pages: she transforms the over-studied experience of being a talented artist stuck in that yearning gulf
between college's purpose and life's demands into something unique and thuddingly real. Starting with a bracing trip
she takes as a Chicago art student into a ruined Gary, Ind., cathedral, and framing her story with the sometimes panicky
fatalism that comes with a dangerous heart defect, Radtke unspools a ruminative narrative about searching for meaning
in an impermanent world. The focus on entropy, decay, and randomness would be grim and borderline pretentious if it
weren't delivered with an unusually forthright honesty and deft, Chris Marker--esque ability to parse out meaning and
wonder from the smallest details. Though the story of her investigative journey into decay around the world resonates,
it is flattened by artwork that, oddly enough, has almost no sense of place. (Apr.)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Imagine Wanting Only This." Publishers Weekly, 19 Dec. 2016, p. 106. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA475324313&it=r&asid=849f4b43860572243b26115f9695da96.
Accessed 1 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A475324313
10/1/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1506877301007 4/4

QUOTE:
A fantastic example of the graphic novel's possibilities as a literary medium, this work is visually imperfect,
lyrically beautiful, and unquestionably brave.
[STAR]Radtke, Kristen. Imagine Wanting Only
This
Emilia Packard
Xpress Reviews.
(Nov. 18, 2016):
COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC
http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/reviews/xpress/884170-289/xpress_reviews-first_look_at_new.html.csp
Full Text:
[STAR]Radtke, Kristen. Imagine Wanting Only This. Pantheon. Apr. 2017. 288p. ISBN 9781101870839. $29.95; ebk.
ISBN 9781101870846. GRAPHIC MEMOIR
At first glance, ruins are romantic. Look again, and they often speak of pain and failure. In Imagine Only Wanting This,
debuter Radtke explores all manner of devastation--the detritus of a youthful relationship, the aftermath of volcanic
eruption, the hollowed-out shell of a church in deeply depressed Gary, IN. She remembers her favorite uncle, lost to a
rare heart defect, and fears for her own heart, literally and figuratively. She recounts the story of a long-dead ancestor
who implored, seemingly successfully, God's protection on her church during a massive firestorm in small-town
Wisconsin by marching around the building's exterior, crucifix in hand. Beautifully written, this multidirectional
memoir ties threads and minutiae from Radtke's personal and family history and history writ large to create a tender,
drifting reflection on the calamity life is often built on, the nothing it will become, and the breathtaking beauty of
lingering between those forgone conclusions. Her illustration abilities are somewhat stilted--she's a writer first and an
illustrator second--but the art complements her flowing prose.
Verdict A fantastic example of the graphic novel's possibilities as a literary medium, this work is visually imperfect,
lyrically beautiful, and unquestionably brave. [See Prepub Alert, 10/24/16.]--Emilia Packard, Austin, TX
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Packard, Emilia. "[STAR]Radtke, Kristen. Imagine Wanting Only This." Xpress Reviews, 18 Nov. 2016. General
OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA473692716&it=r&asid=a8734f651833a3d04c04b76bbe8f4582.
Accessed 1 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A473692716

Kirch, Claire. "The allure of decay: in her new graphic memoir, Kristen Radtke explores her preoccupation with human mortality and abandoned spaces." Publishers Weekly, 10 Apr. 2017, p. 44+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA490319223&it=r&asid=c64c4bd40ba0c3fda104deb569d59b82. Accessed 1 Oct. 2017. "Radtke, Kristen: IMAGINE WANTING ONLY THIS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Feb. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA479234411&it=r. Accessed 1 Oct. 2017. Bostrom, Annie. "Imagine Wanting Only This." Booklist, 1 Jan. 2017, p. 54. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA479078033&it=r. Accessed 1 Oct. 2017. "Imagine Wanting Only This." Publishers Weekly, 19 Dec. 2016, p. 106. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA475324313&it=r. Accessed 1 Oct. 2017. Packard, Emilia. "[STAR]Radtke, Kristen. Imagine Wanting Only This." Xpress Reviews, 18 Nov. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA473692716&it=r. Accessed 1 Oct. 2017.

• Atlantic
  https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/04/a-graphic-novel-memoir-that-tangles-with-the-puzzle-of-existence/523359/
  Word count: 1283

  QUOTE:
  remarkable graphic memoir
  A Graphic-Novel Memoir That Tangles With the Puzzle of Existence
  Kristen Radtke’s Imagine Wanting Only This fuses existential prose and breathtaking illustration.

  A detail from the cover of Imagine Wanting Only ThisPantheon
  ARNAV ADHIKARI APR 18, 2017 CULTURE
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  The title of Kristen Radtke’s remarkable graphic memoir Imagine Wanting Only This almost reads as a riddle. On one hand, it seems to ask a somewhat disgruntled question: “Could you imagine wanting just this, and nothing more?” On the other, the phrasing suggests, temptingly: “What if this is all you needed?” What if life, ephemeral and fleeting, could be devoid of ambition, of any desire for more? Either reading offers both gratification and emptiness, beauty as well as boredom. It’s a paradox rooted in the simple yet unanswerable question of what it means to live a meaningful life, and it’s the question at the heart of Radtke’s exploration, one that she tackles with a breathtaking mix of prose and illustration.

  There is little linear plot in Imagine Wanting Only This, even though each of the eight chapters finds Radtke at a slightly different stage of her life: at art school in Chicago, coping with a family member’s death, traveling abroad and ending up at graduate school in Iowa, becoming obsessed with the history of ruins and disasters. At each point, she seeks answers to her nagging life questions while also attempting to escape her reality. Radtke, an editor at Sarabande Books, uses delicately drawn panels and the occasional full-page spread to move seamlessly through memories and geographies, creating an elastic sense of time that pulls the reader into her interminably restless mind.

  RELATED STORY

  Alison Bechdel's Sad, Funny, Sprawling Graphic Memoir

  Radtke is a familiar sort of narrator: someone seemingly compelled to search for everything that’s not in front of her. She’s driven to seek out new experiences that push her away from family, friends, and her fiancé: She leaves Chicago to adventure through Italy but feels acutely alone there, backpacks around Europe yet wants to go somewhere more dangerous or exciting, plans to marry and then vacillates, finds a rare employment opportunity after graduate school but feels trapped in Kentucky, where she becomes an insomniac. At one point she admits, “Being stuck in one place probably always makes you think about another”—perhaps a typical statement for someone in their 20s who doesn’t know what she wants. But Radtke connects her ennui to a wider landscape, finding a counterpoint to her disquietude in the world of ruins: abandoned towns, crumbling monuments, and cities destroyed by natural disasters or economic downturn.

  About halfway through the book, Radtke seems to diagnose herself with what the scholar and artist Svetlana Boym referred to as “ruinophilia,” a fascination with the destruction and decay of physical structures. Boym considered this obsession with ruins not merely a form of modern malaise but also an active source of meaning-making, an exploration of what she called “the riddles of human freedom.”

  For Radtke, whose life has been punctuated with the passing of loved ones—from her grandmother to her beloved Uncle Dan, whose death from congenital heart failure serves as a worrying backdrop to her own occasional palpitations—empty mining towns and contaminated environmental zones provide an inexplicable form of comfort. They are historical markers of mortality, of how everything must eventually bend under the weight of time. In the same way that her family’s memory of her uncle begins to fade as the years go by, so disintegrating structures move on from what they once were. The military ruins on the Filipino island of Corregidor or the abandoned city of Angkor Wat, for example, which once promised progress and brimmed with civilization, are, she writes, like “the edge of something new against the edge of something old, and both just as empty.”

  To many a painter and poet, decay has provided artistic inspiration, and Radtke renders it beautifully too, shading the walls of an old, gutted theater in gradients to depict moisture; sketching over archival photographs as if to revitalize them; and, in one particularly moving two-page sequence, capturing her stagnating relationship with her partner by showing a thick film of toxic-looking dirt slowly climbing up their bedroom walls and enveloping them in darkness. Documenting nighttime walks along Iowa’s railroad tracks and trips to Icelandic volcanoes that threaten to wipe out all proximate life, Radtke is able to create beautiful if odious universes out of the potential of ruin, finding infinitesimal shades of nuance within a soft, greyscale palette.

  Pantheon
  Radtke also recognizes that all ruins, while captivating to peer at, are in some capacity predicated on destruction. She seems wary of turning her ruinophilia into “ruin porn” by glorifying the aesthetic value of disrepair and ignoring the human suffering that often accompanies it. Still, she writes, over a series of Biblical images showing New York City being submerged underwater, “We all do it … fantasize disaster.”

  These dark ruminations lead her down an almost monomaniacal path to uncover how lives were forever altered by disaster, and “how something that is, can become, very suddenly, something that isn’t.” She feels compelled to pore over her connections to an almost mythologized ancestor who is said to have saved her congregation from the great fire of 1871 in Peshtigo, Wisconsin. Or, to investigate how the U.S. wiped out over 6,000 sheep in two days in Utah because of chemical weapons-testing during World War II. Or, to ruminate over the life of a deceased young photographer named Seth, whose images of abandoned buildings she discovers in a vacant church in Gary, Indiana, and which haunt her throughout the course of the story.

  Pantheon
  What Radtke ultimately finds, by way of her exploration of disintegration, is an antidote to her restlessness—cold, physical evidence that human ambition, indeed, may be futile. Why keep wanting, when history will eventually dissolve everything that we call ours? “Am I supposed to want children who will mourn me or husbands I will watch lowered into the ground or houses I will endure in their emptiness?” she asks. These are heavy and often unsubtle questions that can at times feel too broad-stroke, but Imagine Wanting Only This knows when to pull back on the pathos and offer negative space for such weighty questions to expand into. (In that, it’s reminiscent of Alison Bechdel’s graphic-novel masterpiece Fun Home.) Radtke deploys humor sparingly, but when it appears you can’t help but laugh and hold onto it—from the way she diagrams her MFA cohort by the brand of cigarettes they each smoke to her sketch of a screensaver dancing across a monitor as she stares back in boredom.

  There are few definitive discoveries in Imagine Wanting Only This, which is frustrating at times, and by its end, it’s unclear whether Radtke has found a solution to the riddle of the book’s title (although the stunning sequence of final frames, which I won’t spoil by trying to describe, does offer a dramatic form of resolution). Her story doesn’t feel resigned to a hard fatalism though, and joy comes in some of its smallest moments, suggesting that the brevity of human time on earth may almost be a liberating thing.

• NPR
  http://www.npr.org/2017/04/22/523586347/wanting-more-from-imagine-wanting-only-this
  Word count: 828

  QUOTE:
  Radtke's reflections are enervating. Of course, given that her story is about looking fruitlessly for meaning, she can't very well roll out tidy homilies about life, the universe and everything. But at a certain point, when someone says so little, you have to conclude they have little to say. This book would be better off with a dose of desperation. As it stands, it's a puzzle that's not worth solving.

  Wanting More From 'Imagine Wanting Only This'

  April 22, 20177:00 AM ET
  ETELKA LEHOCZKY
  Imagine Wanting Only This
  Imagine Wanting Only This
  by Kristen Radtke

  Hardcover, 277 pages purchase

  Imagine Wanting Only This is both a puzzle and a letdown. It may be a debut graphic novel, but its author has no shortage of experience as a writer and artist — she's contributed to, among others, the New Yorker, the Oxford American and the Daily Beast, besides serving as the film and video editor at TriQuarterly magazine and the managing editor of Sarabande Books. And yet in this work, Radtke gropes for something to say and fills her pages with rudimentary, schematic art. The puzzle is to what extent these weaknesses are acts of deliberation, part of a sophisticated effort to imbue the reader with Radtke's own sense of alienation, and to what extent they're merely failures of storytelling. The letdown is the realization that it's mostly the latter.

  Still, Radtke does have a complex project in mind here. She's interested in loneliness and ruin — both the emotional ruin of personal loss and the world's literal ruins, the broken-down and abandoned places she visits all over the globe. She's traveled obsessively. Buoyed by educational stipends and teaching fees, she's visited a dozen European countries, Iceland, the Philippines, Vietnam and Cambodia. She's also confronted a kind of ruin in her own body; she has the same genetic heart problem that killed a beloved uncle. After his death, she writes, "every few months I found myself looking again into the inscrutable heart defect that threaded through my family ... I couldn't comprehend why the dead couldn't be made undead. Why a heart that caved couldn't be filled out again."

  ... at a certain point, when someone says so little, you have to conclude they have little to say.
  With these themes in mind, it's somewhat understandable that Radtke would employ the graphical style she uses here, but that doesn't make it any more likable. Her drawings are cold and rejecting. The people are collections of outlines that haven't been filled in, while the muddy grayscale brings little impact to anything else. One critic has compared her drawings to coloring book illustrations, and they also look like clip art: basic forms that exist only to do their jobs. Though her people occasionally strike interesting poses, Radtke mostly shrugs off the possibilities of the human form.

  She's more attracted to problems of composition, especially how to convey the loneliness of a space that doesn't have anyone in it. (Or, rather, that has one person in it: Radtke.) She draws the empty streets of nighttime Iowa, the plains of Iceland, her parents' garage and — imagining the future — a subway platform awash in the surf of global warming. Interestingly, the literal ruins she visits are the most crowded of all her locales. An abandoned cathedral in Gary, Ind. seems to huddle rather than soar, and she describes it as crammed with stuff: "thick chunks of plaster" and "ivy ... covering the slated stone with spindles of earthly web."

  The latter is one of the few examples of lyrical writing in the book. Usually, Radtke goes with artful affectlessness. This works fairly well given her topic, harmonizing with the glum illustrations and making their aridity seem pointed. But Radtke's reflections are enervating. Of course, given that her story is about looking fruitlessly for meaning, she can't very well roll out tidy homilies about life, the universe and everything. But at a certain point, when someone says so little, you have to conclude they have little to say.

  Ultimately this seems to be a problem of Radtke's circumstances, not her skill. Like countless young, white, middle-class Americans, she faces a vista of possibility and doesn't know what to do about it. Her international jaunts are pointless exercises in artificial self-discovery — no different from the neatly circumscribed quests thousands of college students take every year — so it's no surprise when she doesn't find anything new waiting out there. She doesn't mine the emotions her heart condition must inspire, and responds to her uncle's death not with open grief, but with more numbness. This book would be better off with a dose of desperation. As it stands, it's a puzzle that's not worth solving.

  Etelka Lehoczky has written about books for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times and Salon.com. She tweets at @EtelkaL.

• Pop Matters
  http://www.popmatters.com/review/imagine-wanting-only-this-by-kristen-radtke/
  Word count: 1153

  'Imagine Wanting Only This' Is as Beautiful as It Is Troubling in the Questions it Poses
  BY JOHN PAUL
  16 June 2017
  THROUGH HER VISUALLY STUNNING GRAPHIC MEMOIR, KRISTEN RADTKE EXPLORES THEMES OF LOVE AND LOSS AND THE IMPERMANENCE OF LIFE IN ALL ITS FORMS.
  cover art
  IMAGINE WANTING ONLY THIS
  KRISTEN RADTKE
  (PANTEON)
  US: APR 2017

  AMAZON
  With a family history of a rare hereditary heart disease known as dilated cardiomyopathy, writer and illustrator Kristen Radtke has over the years developed an understandable fascination with the impermanence of humans and the buildings and cities they construct. Having lost a beloved uncle to the disease, her own heart condition weighs heavy on her mind and runs through the literal and figurative heart of her new graphic memoir, Imagine Wanting Only This.

  A form of heart disease characterized by impaired systolic function and ventricular dilation, dilated cardiomyopathy, we learn, is when the heart essentially rapidly beats itself into mush. It’s as if the person is dying from the inside out, much like the abandoned structures and towns of which she becomes so enamored, contemplating not only the impermanence of human life but, in many instances, of society and cultures in general; that which appears relatively normal from the outside may well be concealing the genesis of decay and, ultimately, death. In this, Imagine Wanting Only This spends much of its time plumbing the deeply personal depths and is ultimately a philosophical pursuit of so-called ruin porn as it applies to her tenuous existence.

  Delivered in a modernist, hyper-real style that often incorporates actual photographs that help lend an additional air of credence to the stories related by Radtke, Imagine Wanting Only This is full of striking visuals. The intricacy with which she recreates the various abandoned, dilapidated buildings and ruined towns is impressive; that her writing is equally up to the standard set by her artwork makes it an all the more engaging read.

  The narrative begins with the introduction of her beloved Uncle Mike and the times spent together in Radtke’s youth. After this brief expository scene-setting, she quickly shifts forward in time, running through the course of her college relationship. After the usual college infatuation period begins to wear off, she soon finds herself pulling away, delving deeper into herself and the existential dilemma associated with an obsession with the transience of lives lived in hopes of creating something of lasting import only to ultimately become little more than distant fuzzy memories before fading out entirely.

  All of this is triggered by an otherwise innocuous trip to an old abandoned church in the city of Gary, Indiana. Finding the remains of photographs littered throughout—images we soon learn were part of a makeshift memorial to a fellow explorer of ruined buildings who met an untimely end following his passion—she collects them and takes them back to her shared apartment. As they gradually decay and eventually disappear on an ill-fated trip to Europe, so too does her connection to her college boyfriend, despite having agreed to his marriage proposal.

  Having broken off the engagement, she makes her way through one situation to another, ending up in Iowa like a less needy, but equally self-destructive Hannah Horvath. Anxious once more and with the memory of her late uncle’s heart condition looming large, she begins traveling all over the world to bear witUIKeyInputDownArrowUIKeyInputDownArrowUIKeyInputDownArrowUIKeyInputDownArrowUIKeyInputDownArrowUIKeyInputDownArrowness to the myriad abandoned and decaying remnants of societies long since passed. After traveling throughout Southeast Asian, she arrives in Detroit—the virtual mecca of such things—on her return flight.

  It is around this point the narrative begins to waver, her quest has taken her throughout a number of crumbling structures that are left to sit in ruins. Moving away from the ruin porn elements of the story, she delves into a fascinating family history. This proves to not only be an account of her ancestors but also serves as a history of Wisconsin in an extended section on the event that came to be known as the Peshtigo fire. Little documented then as now, it would become the nation’s deadliest wildfire, taking out a massive swath of the state. Yet, because it occurred concurrently with the great Chicago fire of 1871, the devastation was largely overlooked, remaining little more than a trivial footnote.

  As she is quick to point out, however, this is an event that deserves to be well-known—and not for the somewhat supernatural reason that resulted in her familial connection. Beyond the devastation wrought initially by the Peshtigo fire, the based physical principles behind its fury led to even more destruction in the 20th century. Referred to as the Peshtigo Paradigm, this scientific study by the American military looked into the cause of such a devastating fire in order for it to be weaponized. Having ascertained the reasoning for the fire’s swift and complete devastation, the military succeeded and kicked off the firebombing of Dresden and cities in Japan during World War II before finally coming to the ultimate solution and weapon in the form of napalm.

  While a seemingly historical aside, this particular tangent fits neatly within the overarching theme of the narrative as Radtke explores alternating themes of impermanence both physically in the form of human life and that which we build up around us. She also emotionally invests in those things that continue to exist only in our memories, equally subject to degradation over time. With the fire having largely been forgotten and its core principle having been used to wipe out entire communities, it ties in neatly with her fascination with the ruination of both ourselves and our surroundings.

  The title itself refers to her thought process upon arriving in Iceland after developing something of a passionate obsession with a travelogue documentary. In the film, the decimation of a village by a volcanic eruption is recounted with the narrator pining for the views of the gorgeous landscape that were once his. As Radtke takes this loss of familiarity, stability, and comfort into consideration, she looks out at the same view and imagines what it must have been like to want nothing but a return to that which once was.

  It’s a tragic paradox within which to become trapped as we all will never have a chance to return to who, where, and what we once were. Through the slow march of time, everything around us betrays its inconsequentiality. It’s a sobering worldview and one that it seems everyone encounters at a certain point in life. Rarely does anyone manage to do so in such a thoughtful, personal manner. Imagine Wanting Only This is as beautiful as it is troubling in the questions it poses.

  7/10

• Los Angeles Review
  http://losangelesreview.org/book-review-imagine-wanting-kristen-radtke/
  Word count: 653

  QUOTE:
  Imagine Wanting Only This is more than a visual interpretation of an existential crisis, or a quarter-life crisis, or a crisis of any variety. Rather, each panel serves as a poignant reminder of humanity’s shared loneliness. A reminder, too, that though we are all alone, we are all alone together.
  BOOK REVIEW: IMAGINE WANTING ONLY THIS BY KRISTEN RADTKE
  Reviewed by B.J. Hollars

  Imagine Wanting Only This
  Graphic Memoir by Kristen Radtke
  Pantheon, April 2017
  $29.95; 288 pp.
  ISBN13: 978-1101870839

  In her essay, “Time and Distance Overcome,” writer Eula Biss—speaking, ostensibly, about the invention of the telephone—notes, “Even now it is an impossible idea, that we are all connected, all of us.” Yet it is precisely this “impossible idea” that percolates just beneath the pages of Kristen Radtke’s debut graphic memoir. Part memoir, part history, part mystery, part poem, the result is breathtaking, a tour de force that explores Radtke’s grapples with loneliness the world over, one destination after another failing to set right what’s gone wrong. And much has gone wrong, including Radtke’s loss of a beloved uncle, her inadvertent tampering with a dead photographer’s memorial, as well as a personal journey to find her place—and significance—in a mostly disinterested world.

  Taken together, this is more than enough plot to fill this quiet narrative, one that is complicated by each new destination amid Radtke’s travels. In a diary entry from Italy, she confesses: “There are so many expectations of what this is all supposed to look like—being happy, having an adventure.” Pages later, while planning another trip, she turns this problem of expectations inward, writing: “It felt like I had to see everything, as if it was the only way my life would count or matter.” While Radtke’s work is haunted by a multitude of ghosts—her uncle, the dead photographer, as well as one ruinous landscape after another—the spirit she never shakes is tied to her own significance. Visually, this is rendered most memorably in a two-page spread, where Radtke positions herself in the far right corner of the page as an Icelandic waterfall consumes the space around her. No words are needed, the message is clear: our time here is short, and our significance always in question.

  Such notions of impermanence and contribution are woven skillfully throughout. In one instance Radtke writes that she’s “consumed by the question of how something that is can become, very suddenly, something that isn’t.” Later, this sentiment is echoed through Radtke’s explorations of an abandoned mining town in Colorado, as well as the aftereffects of the Peshtigo Fire in Wisconsin—both examples of places that left their mark, though not terribly good ones.

  Yet for her own part, Radtke’s contribution cannot be overstated. Imagine Wanting Only This is more than a visual interpretation of an existential crisis, or a quarter-life crisis, or a crisis of any variety. Rather, each panel serves as a poignant reminder of humanity’s shared loneliness. A reminder, too, that though we are all alone, we are all alone together.

  B.J. Hollars is the author of several books, most recently Flock Together: A Love Affair With Extinct Birds and From the Mouths of Dogs: What Our Pets Teach Us About Life, Death, and Being Human, as well as a collection of essays, This Is Only A Test. Hollars serves as a mentor for Creative Nonfiction, a contributing blogger for Brain,Child and the founder and executive director of the Chippewa Valley Writers Guild. An associate professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, he lives a simple existence with his wife, their children, and their dog. For his writing, visit www.bjhollars.com; for his podcasts, visit www.snippetspodcast.com.

• The Comics Journal
  http://www.tcj.com/reviews/imagine-wanting-only-this/
  Word count: 1292

  REVIEWS
  Imagine Wanting Only This
  Kristen Radtke
  Pantheon (Penguin Random House)
  $29.95, 288 pages
  BUY IT NOW

  REVIEWED BY GREG HUNTER JUL 26, 2017
  Some works fall to ruin over time, and some are ruins on arrival. Kristen Radtke’s Imagine Wanting Only This is the former, the product of shaky construction. One part graphic memoir, one part visual essay, Imagine considers the impermanence of things, with a focus on human mortality and the structures we create. It is a taxing place to visit.

  Imagine Wanting Only This follows Radtke’s narrator/avatar across several years and locations, placing Radtke first at a site of an early-twenties cohabitation and then at graduate school and afterward. As the years advance, her narrator’s curiosity about declining cities and structures grows into true fascination, leading to an ambitious, international survey of ruins during her time in grad school. The circumstances surrounding this project are severe: the passing of an uncle, the passing of a friend, and the possibility of a hereditary heart condition. To critique the resulting work is not to suggest that these events deserve anything less than real empathy. But the memoir blurs exploration and consumption in a manner that may make some readers queasy, and the visual choices on display undermine the effectiveness of the book.

  Scenes with the potential to intensify Imagine’s themes of decline and decay—a wake, a breakup call—are often blunt in their execution or awkwardly staged. Radtke’s grayscale, photo-referenced artwork registers as not drawn but traced, with static sequences across panels and unnaturally smooth figures within panels. The approach to light and shadow gives most objects, including people, a plastic sheen; the placement of certain captions and speech balloons appears to be a last-minute consideration.

  While some pages fall flat, a few tip into the ridiculous. One sequence, about late-night travel anxieties, concludes with comedic literal-mindedness. Another has Radtke’s mother describing a legend in which the Virgin Mary appears before one of their ancestors, with the memoir visualizing the event. Afterward, Radtke does not appear convinced, but a reader may struggle to discern just how absurd Radtke finds the story—the pages would make for a goofy display even if all parties were true believers. Later, Radtke’s narrator visits a museum devoted to mining, and one page juxtaposes a museum display’s miniature figures against the craggy hands and face of a “real” miner. There’s something to this contrast—about how dangerous work can be sentimentalized, or about the erasure of the dangers working people have to endure—but it’s muted by these figures all appearing to inhabit the same sort of uncanny valley.

  As an essay, the book invites concerns well beyond any comics-formalist complaints. The idea of ownership enters Imagine Wanting Only This early. Describing a crowded post-college living situation in “a crumbling neighborhood on Chicago’s west side,” Radtke’s narrator says, “the place felt like ours. The fact of the house’s missing facade and its boarded front windows seemed of little concern.” The aesthetics of the place get a mention; the complexities of gentrification do not. Later, as Radtke’s narrator begins grad school in Iowa City, a caption notes, “It was an easy place to feel you’d conquered. It was a whole new kind of ownership.” Although these pages come early in the book’s chronology, the sentiment lingers as the memoir’s scope expands. Soon Radtke’s narrator begins documenting visits to various world ruins. The book presents “[t]he remnants of America in Vietnam,” “the killing fields of Cambodia,” and other location in list form, an image or two for each, photo referenced as if to annex the sites’ gravitas.

  If Radtke’s narrator in Imagine Wanting Only This projects outsized feelings of ownership, that itself is not a failing of the book. With a line like, “[i]t felt like I had to see everything, as if it was the only way my life would count or matter,” Radtke’s narrator acknowledges her pursuit of ruins is more a matter of urge than of altruism, and as the substance of a literary work, that’s not a bad thing either. The willingness to be unflattering to oneself should probably be a prerequisite for memoirists. What’s frustrating about this memoir, and perhaps the best measure of it, is what the book does and doesn’t do in regard to its writ-large gentrifier’s mentality. Imagine is not, for instance, a performance of privilege that eventually challenges readers to examine their own entitlement—that would be a very generous reading of the work, anyway. Until the end, the book is more concerned with the success or failure of this existential grasping than the impulses behind it.

  When Imagine Wanting Only This reaches the subject of Detroit, Radtke’s narrator offers a defense of the artists and the journalists who have already been documenting the city’s hardships, one a reader might also take as a preemptive defense of Imagine: “Perhaps critics call images of Detroit ‘perverse’ because they mirror a life we recognize … We forget that everything will become no longer ours.” These lines are spiky, provocative, and insightful, and yet they confine Detroit to a dialogue among onlookers. Meanwhile, the city still has a population in the hundreds of thousands, and there’s not a line here from any living resident. This is the book at its best and its worst: it urges readers to view spaces differently but operates with its own set of blinders.

  Near the memoir’s end, during the same trip on which Radtke’s narrator visits the mining museum, the book does give voice to people who inhabit one of the United States’ changing, challenged landscapes. These scenes are troubling in their own way. After discussing the fate of Gilman, a Colorado mining community, with Lois, a former resident, Radtke’s narrator says,

  I didn’t like the things I’d heard from Lois. I’d wanted the story of Gilman to have more immutability somehow, but she spoke of it all so casually. … I wanted her to say that they’d lost something irreclaimable, as if it’d show me that maybe someday I could claim anything with this much ferocity.

  To conduct this interview, Radtke’s narrator travels to Colorado Springs, which the book refers to as “a worn-down industrial town.” Perhaps, in part, it is; it’s also the site of ten different colleges, and two-thirds as populous as Denver. The selective framing of this language suggests that even if these encounters in Colorado didn’t meet Radtke’s expectations, the book is not above picking the facts that suit it best.

  The memoir’s last, best burst of self-awareness comes near the end of this Colorado section: “I assign meaning to these scooped-out places as if obsession equals authority. But there’s nothing to understand except that I have no business understanding what I cannot feel.” Radtke’s narrator soon follows this with, “to know what [the people of these places] were, I’d thought, meant I’d given them something. Something like permanence”—a thought that reduces Radtke’s subjects to needy abstractions, even as the project acknowledges its own limitations. Imagine Wanting Only This carries this ambivalence toward the end, a sense of nothing truly attained, concluding with words of vague lyricism and bad renderings of what New York City might look like underwater. New York too could be a ruin, Imagine says. If that happens, toss this book into the flood.

• Brevity
  http://brevitymag.com/book-reviews/imagine-wanting-only-this/
  Word count: 904

  A Review of Kristen Radtke’s Imagine Wanting Only This

  by EMILY HEIDEN • April 19, 20171 Comment
  Cover+2c+new+skyline-01+(2).jpgKristen Radtke’s graphic memoir Imagine Wanting Only This is a book about abandonment. Through Radtke’s beautiful and bruising images, we consider the ways we leave places and people, and the ways they leave us. We feel these departures deeply because of Radtke’s painstaking drawings, which allow us to experience the story for ourselves with an immediacy that narrative alone often struggles to achieve.

  As someone who had no inherent interest in abandoned landscapes, I was surprised to find myself so drawn in by Radtke’s renderings of them on the page. When the book begins, she and her college boyfriend, Andrew, go on a trip to the defunct town of Gary, Indiana, to explore, and we discover with them its disrepair. I was especially struck by a depiction of an abandoned movie theater. There was something savage about it, something wild. How could society allow such decay to exist? In my too-suburban mind, cities are tidy. What doesn’t work out is bulldozed to the ground and resurrected as high-rise condos. These black and white images, therefore, provide one of the first encounters I’d ever had with a full-on departure—the decision of a community to simply pack up and go.

  As the narration moves on, we also experience abandonment through Radtke’s relationships. The death of her Uncle Danno is her first true loss, and one she explores powerfully through words and visual images. Months after Danno dies of complications due to heart surgery, Radtke discovers a cassette tape of an interview she conducted with him when she was in elementary school. She heads to the garage, climbs into a truck, and presses play. Her uncle’s voice begins blaring from the player, his words stabbing at the reader and Radtke’s heart when he joyfully proclaims: “I mean…look at me—I beat heart disease!”

  Many of Radtke’s images and stories express the desire for and illusion of permanence. The interview with her uncle preserved a piece of him; his voice is still present on the tape; she can access it whenever she presses play. But this experience makes her and the reader feel her uncle’s absence even more poignantly, knowing that’s he’s gone. When Danno proclaims his triumph over the disease we know eventually killed him, we confront the fleeting nature of life.

  The book’s most engaging moments deal with her only concerted attempt to commit to a person or place: her relationship with Andrew and their house in Chicago. Together they undertake what she calls “a first pass at adulthood”—getting a kitten; paying utility bills—in essence, playing house. This partnership is an important sojourn in the trajectory of her life, but not the destination. Radtke becomes restless and leaves the country. Andrew clings to their love, eventually proposing to her in Europe. The proposal is the stuff of fairytale; the ring is beautiful; the backdrop an idyllic European town along a river. Radtke accepts, and immediately finds herself staring at the ring warily. After the engagement, she tells us “Every city we visited…began to feel like the stock backdrop for some stagnant future, our imaginary kids stomping up the stairs next to photos of us twenty years younger, holding up the Leaning Tower of Pisa.”

  Radtke’s account of her relationship with and engagement to Andrew ring especially true for me: my own college relationship culminated in a move to Iowa with a boyfriend I too tried to play house with. When he proposed, I cried, nodded yes, let him put the ring on my finger, then walked in a daze to the bathroom, where I stared at the stone, feeling the same mounting pressure Radtke felt. I too pictured our future children, and myself as a soccer mom. I knew the engagement would keep me stuck in one place, when I wanted to experience all of them. Like Radtke, I knew I had to move on.

  Both Radtke and I indicted ourselves for leaving those loves. She makes statements throughout the book like “To abandon something beautiful is where the crime rests,” and laments her lack of “…ability to claim something with ferocity.” This capacity to grab hold of a love, a land, a home, is something she praises in others and questions in herself, asking: “Am I supposed to want children who will mourn me or husbands I will watch lowered into the ground or houses I will endure in their emptiness?”

  She sees the end in the beginning, her brain always fast-forwarding to ruin, abandonment, and decay. Radtke concludes the book by envisioning the prophesied flooding of New York City, telling us “we forget that everything will become no longer ours”–a pronouncement that asks us to question the stability of our everyday surroundings. The book, finally, is Radtke’s desire to hold on to what she cannot bring herself to believe will remain.
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  Emily Heiden is pursuing a Ph.D. in literary nonfiction at the University of Cincinnati. She holds an MFA in nonfiction from George Mason University. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Long River Review, and Juked Magazine.

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