Meet Myriam Steinberg

We recently connected with Myriam Steinberg and have shared our conversation below.

Myriam, so good to have you with us today. We’ve always been impressed with folks who have a very clear sense of purpose and so maybe we can jump right in and talk about how you found your purpose?

As I was fast approaching 40, I realized I hadn’t done anything towards what I actually really wanted in life: have a child. I was so focused on the festival I was organizing, that I didn’t make the time to find a partner with whom I would be happy to have a family. The people I did date, turned out to be less than compatible. After my last relationship ended over the timeline for having kids, I decided to go at it on my own.

8 months later, I had my first appointment at the fertility clinic. A couple months after that, I had my first IUI (Inter-uterine Insemination). I got pregnant right away, but what I thought would be an easy journey, turned out to be a five-year journey filled with four pregnancy losses before I got pregnant with my twins. Even that pregnancy turned out to be very complex and stressful.

Throughout it all, I couldn’t find the support resources that spoke to me. At the time, there were very few books or public stories about miscarriage and high-risk pregnancies. Most written things were either too medical, only a snapshot moment of loss that didn’t include the context of the pregnancy, or were simply non-existent. It inspired me to write a graphic novel memoir of what I went through.

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?

I am a writer by circumstance. My first graphic novel is called Catalogue Baby: A Memoir of (In)fertility. Despite the heartbreak that led to why I became a writer, I feel honoured to be able to share my story. I love that I was able to do it in graphic novel format. I’m a visual person so being able to translate my story through illustration has been a special experience. I want the reader to really feel the visceral nature of a challenging fertility journey. When an emotion or situation either have no words to describe it or if it would take too many words to explain them, there is no better way than through images.

I am currently working on my second graphic memoir, entitled Stick, Stay, Grow. It follows the conception, high-risk pregnancy (my son’s water broke at 18 weeks), and life in the NICU of my twins. Hoping to see it out in the world sometime 2025 or 2026.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

Resilience
Stubbornness
Open-minded exploration and seeking construction feedback from multiple people about all aspects of your project.

Ask questions. Many, many questions.

Be gentle with yourself and if/when you’re stuck, give yourself the time and self-care to get through it.

Find your community. For example, as a writer, I belong to a co-writing cohort who meet Monday to Friday mornings over Zoom. We check in to share what we’ll be working on, then work on our own projects for an hour and a half. At the end, we check in again to see what we accomplished. I have found so much support, motivation, and success through these co-working sessions. I can’t recommend them enough.

Awesome, really appreciate you opening up with us today and before we close maybe you can share a book recommendation with us. Has there been a book that’s been impactful in your growth and development?

When I set out to write a graphic novel about my experiences, I had never written anything “official” before, nor had I read more than one graphic novel. I didn’t have the patience, time, nor desire to go to school to learn how to draw and I knew that I wasn’t up for creating the final illustrations, so I farmed that out to an illustrator.

Just like with the drawing, I didn’t want to sit in class to learn how to write a book. I’d always been a bit of an autodidact, but this was going to be taking it to the next level. I went to the library and took out dozens and dozens of graphic novels to discover what style of art I liked, how to write and draw a cohesive story, and describe wonder, humour, grief, anger, humour within grief and anger, and whatever else I could glean to make my book as absorbing, interesting, and well-rounded as possible. As a result, it wasn’t just one book that played a role in my transformation into a graphic novelist.

In the end, I wrote the manuscript, and storyboarded the entire book, designing the layout, and using stick figures and very, very rough images to tell the illustrator what to do.

What I ended up (re)realizing, is that there is no right or wrong way to learn how to write a book. I learned that it’s ok to be piecemeal influenced by many, many sources and that, when reading “how to” books, you can pick out only the things you like and that work for you and discard the rest. I also learned that a book is never written without the constructive criticism and hardcore edits of people you trust. I learned that a book you’re reading for research can be a terrible book, but there might be that one turn of phrase, that one illustration that influences how you write your own emotion or situation.

Contact Info:

Image Credits

Illustration of babies going into embryos: Marlee Red
double page spread illustrations: Christache

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