No. 96 - The Mother Lode

A reimmersion into graphic memoir material

Dec 02, 2025

I started painting my Mom from photos in 2018, a year after she died. This is one of three paintings made from the same glamour-puss photo

Hi Lovely People

On Sunday November 23rd I read Kelcey Ervick’s newsletter The Habit of Art, as I do every Sunday, and experienced a synaptic event that’s caused me to wake up about an hour too early every morning, mind racing, ever since. Kelcey’s post was called Finding Stories in Family Photos, and was about a graphic memoir she’s been creating off and on for years, inspired initially by a photo of her great-grandmother in Belfast.

I remembered in a flash that when I first started forming the concept for my project Life’s Work: A Visual Memoir back in 2020, my original idea was to incorporate photos, memorabilia, journal excerpts, and letters along with the artwork I was making. That idea gradually fell away as the project became an exhibit in 2022 solely made up of artwork: paintings, drawings, large-scale memoir comics, and an installation.

At a certain point during the making of this exhibit I knew I wanted to create a graphic memoir in book form, but I never gave the photos another thought. My intent was to create all new paintings. Unfortunately, apart from a few false starts, I could not gain purchase.

Then I read Kelcey’s post about using photos and started to get excited as I remembered my original concept for a multi-media “visual memoir”. Was this my way back in? I’ve had the manuscript for the graphic memoir written for three years now, but ultimately kept getting stalled on the artwork due to life events, rustiness with painting, and—I eventually came to realize—sophomore jitters. There was some serious calcification taking place in the old noggin. A veritable log jam. I’ve long had the idea to “serialize” the memoir in a loose way by writing about it here my newletter, but that idea too was somehow jammed.

Not anymore, it would seem. I don’t know what direction this will take, but that’s okay. If it gets me started, that’s all I need to know. I’m going to have to be comfortable with not knowing how it will all unfold.

Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
—E. L. Doctorow

You probably should make the whole trip that way, and that goes for art-making as well.

When I saw Kelcey’s post, it just so happened that I’d been looking at old photos of my family the night before—so with those photos in mind, I started to write. My mother (and her eventual dementia) are the main focus of Life’s Work: A Visual Memoir—along with my relationship with her—but there wasn’t much about her as a young person in that project/exhibit. I’m going to start getting into that, below.

➡️Psssst, this isn’t the graphic memoir. This is just me starting to explore again.

Tena Holm (1932 - 2017)

My mother was born in Calgary, Alberta in 1932.

My mother and grandmother on the prairie.

My grandparents came to Canada from Denmark in 1921. My grandfather owned a parcel of land he’d been homesteading outside of Jenner, Alberta, so they lived there for a time. In 1935 the family moved to Victoria, BC. They bought a rooming house for $800 and ran that for eight years before moving into a large room on the top floor of the First Baptist Church, where they lived until my grandfather died in 1950.

As a teen with her father outside of the First Baptist Church, where many a family photo was taken.

My mother, by all accounts, was the spoiled one growing up. She was the youngest of five children and was apparently coddled. I heard this from both my aunt and my grandmother, and I don’t doubt it. Certainly in the years that I knew her, she was self-absorbed, bordering on narcissistic. I don’t remember ever being put first by her, apart from one day that stands out when I was around eleven years old.

We went for a drive, just her and me, and she said we could drop in and visit whoever I wanted. I remember I didn’t trust the gesture, not least because it was no treat for me to drop in on some relative or friend and be bored while my mother did the visiting. But the feeling of even ostensibly being put first was so novel that I point-blank asked her why she was being so nice in this way.

Every dog has his day, she said.

I had an interesting moment with my mother when my husband David and I moved to a new house in 2009. I was showing her around the house for the first time—she would have been seventy-seven years old, and I would have been forty-nine. I had made a mosaic floor in the basement bathroom—I was into mosaic at the time—and she asked about it.

“Do you… like doing that kind of work?” she asked haltingly. I was aware that this was new for her. Asking about an interest of mine.

“Yes!” I said. “I mean, I love mosaic, and there was something about doing a mosaic so close to the ground… feels solid and elemental” (or whatever I said).

She looked like she was going to cry.

My impression was that she understood in that moment that she could have been asking questions like this long, long ago. But it was too late.

She wasn’t a monster—she just hadn’t completely grown up in some ways, and seemingly never got over the break-up with my father. They separated after my brother was born, got back together long enough to conceive me, and then split for good a couple of months before I was born. Counseling was not in the lexicon at the time. They had booze for that.

I can’t speak for my brother—each child in any family naturally has a different temperment, and a different relationship with their parents—but I grew up wary of my mother and her moods.

Exhibit A:

At Aunt Elsie’s for Christmas dinner, 1969 or 1970

You can see me at the back, gauging my mother’s mood—looks like it might not have been good.

My Mom was a looker. Tall with long slim limbs, and possessing a natural elegance. I found a number of love letters from hopeful suitors in her youth among her things after her death. She had a ready sense of humour and she liked to have a good time. She and my father had a lot of “good times”:

When my parents were separated between the births of my brother and I, my mother went to live with her sister Betty and family in Point Claire, Québec. My father took a job in a logging camp in northern BC, and wrote copious letters to my mother promising to send money, saying how much he loved and missed her and my brother, and that they could “work it out”. When they got back together, my uncle said to my mother, “whatever you do, don’t get pregnant again.”

She did. That’s how I came about.

They didn’t end up working it out. My father went on to have another long-term relationship, and had two more children who I didn’t meet till I was in my early forties. My mother stayed single, though she had a few trysts during my childhood, as I now know from letters she received.

People used to write letters!

Single mother with young daughter in 1962

That’s the dip back into the family stuff for now. I’m starting to formulate a loose structure for the graphic memoir, and boy does it feel good to have some life breathed into this project again.

Good-bye Mom. I’m sorry about the things that didn’t work out.

SOME STUFF

In my Substack About page I write

I believe in following your nose, and trusting that what you find interesting is important. Because it is.

Recently two things have come into my inbox that echo that sentiment:

Oliver Burkeman’s latest post, called Interest is Everything, and
Andy J. Pizza’s latest Creative Pep Talk episode. Andy J. Pizza is an illustrator whose work isn’t what I’d call “my thing”, but I really like his youtube videos about creativity because they always seem to hit home in one way or another. In this video he’s approaching from the angle of finding your own unique selling point, but he’s talking about following and trusting your own interests in order to do so.