The following is an interview with Maureen Burdock regarding the upcoming release of the graphic novel, Sleepless Planet, through publisher Graphic Mundi. In this interview, Fanbase Press Editor-in-Chief Barbra Dillon chats with Burdock about the creative process for bringing her experiences with insomnia to the page, how she hopes that this personal narrative may connect with readers, and more!
Barbra Dillon, Fanbase Press Editor-in-Chief: Congratulations on the upcoming release of Sleepless Planet! What can you share with us about the genesis behind this project?
Maureen Burdock: Thank you! Well, I have struggled with chronic insomnia since I was about four years old. It worsened when I was in my mid-forties, probably as the result of perimenopause and the demands of being in graduate school. It got so bad at times that I was only able to average four or five hours of sleep per night for weeks at a time. My body and mind were falling apart. I went to several sleep doctors and clinics. Nothing really helped until I started using marijuana edibles, which could knock me out, but I knew that was suboptimal. I was also in therapy dealing with PTSD and chronic anxiety. There was a link there, but I just couldn’t crack the code. I intuited that my sleeplessness was partially the result of early childhood trauma and partly nutrition and lifestyle issues.
After completing my second graphic novel, Queen of Snails: A Graphic Memoir, published by Graphic Mundi in 2022, I felt like I’d released so much trauma and baggage from my early years. I’d been involved with Graphic Medicine almost since the inception of that discipline and community, and I’d seen and experienced how powerful making (and reading) comics about health-related topics can be. It seemed only natural to tackle sleep in this format. I knew that by doing this, I would need to take the issue very seriously and look at my lifestyle and nutrition under a magnifying lens. I would need to make significant changes while researching, writing, and drawing the book, so this became an autoexperiment, a research challenge, and a creative project, all rolled into one.
BD: In balancing the writing and illustrative duties of the project, what can you tell us about your creative and research processes in bringing this personal narrative to life on the page?
MB: These two processes were very much woven together for me. As someone with a research but no science background, I had to be creative in my approach. After considerable initial investigation where I read piles of books and articles and listened to online lectures and podcasts and so forth, I decided to break the project down into four parts. I went with the trope of the four elements because that’s a simple and effective way to understand bodily functions and processes.
I began with air, breath. I learned so much about breathing. I realized I wasn’t very good at it! I learned about upper airway resistance syndrome. UARS is often not diagnosed because it affects women, including younger ones, who don’t fit the typical apnea profile (obese middle-aged to older men). UARS is even referred to as “young fit female syndrome.” When this is left untreated, it can worsen and evolve into sleep apnea. I suspected I fell into this category.
While I worked on this first section, I was indeed diagnosed with mild to moderate sleep apnea. It was significant enough to need attention, but not bad enough for insurance to cover a CPAP machine. My diagnosis made me curious about why sleep apnea is so prevalent around the globe. Shouldn’t people be able to breathe easily at night? Shouldn’t I? What went wrong? Biologically, it didn’t make sense that we would devolve as a species in this way. If I could figure out why this was happening, I knew I could better address the cause and heal myself. I learned a lot of interesting things. For example, according to paleoanthropologist Dr. David Lieberman, our jaws have become weaker and narrower due to lack of chewing harder foods, as our ancestors did. Our ancient ancestors would have spent about eight hours a day chewing. There were no blenders, no smoothies, no marshmallows. The popularity of bottle feeding also contributed to children having weakened jaws and airways. Further, contemporary lifestyle habits like unconscious breath-holding, common among those of us who work at office jobs, have resulted in a condition which writer and researcher Linda Stone dubbed “email apnea” and “screen apnea.”
While learning about these causes of apnea, I tried several alternative healing methods, like teaching myself to play the didgeridoo, which a peer-reviewed Swiss study found to be effective in cases of apnea like mine. I also read Breath, the best-selling book by James Nestor, and he advocates for gently taping one’s lips closed at night. That really worked. In just a few weeks, I retrained myself to breathe through my nose at night, which made a big difference. I no longer woke up anxiously gasping for breath. Meanwhile, I also learned about—and chronicled—different breathing and meditation techniques and habits to calm the nervous system. I worked on becoming more conscious of my breathing habits during the daytime. My anxiety improved and so did my sleep.
I repeated this method—asking questions about root causes, doing research deep dives, and creating the book—with the three other elements: fire, earth, and water. By the time I began to address my broken metabolism in Part Two: Fire, the Metabolic Furnace, I was invested enough to enroll in a program to become an integrative nutrition health coach. That helped structure my research and I also wanted to help others individually, in tandem with producing this graphic novel, which I hope will help others who struggle with sleep.
BD: What makes Graphic Mundi the perfect home for this story?
MB: Graphic Mundi is such a wonderful imprint. I loved working with Kendra Boileau to edit and publish Queen of Snails. Kendra and her colleagues have brilliantly taken the Graphic Medicine concept and broadened it to include works that might be similarly categorized, but that also tie in with global cultural, political, and environmental issues.
Sleepless Planet, as the title suggests, is about how human restlessness, wrought by capitalist demands for “perpetual progress,” are affecting the rest of our planet’s beings. I’ve put forth a kind of rewilding and degrowth manifesto in Sleepless, in sync with Tricia Hersey’s Rest is Resistance. I like to stay true to the old feminist adage that the personal is political. By slowing down, we help ourselves, heal ourselves, and can more readily support the health of the planet, too. That’s the “Mundi” part of Graphic Mundi.
BD: Graphic Medicine is an emerging genre that combines the field of medicine with the medium of comics. How do you feel that Graphic Medicine stories like this one can not only help to engender empathy, but to initiate conversations around necessary topics like our modern insomnia epidemic?
MB: The traditional heroic model of medicine is wonderful for acute injuries and illnesses, but it puts diagnostic and prescriptive practices into the hands of a few highly qualified individuals, who unfortunately have to answer to institutional demands and to the pharmaceutical industry, which is in cahoots with corporate chemical and agricultural giants. Practitioners are often unable to spend the time and energy they’d ideally like to exert on individual care and follow-through, and they are typically not savvy about nutrition and lifestyle causes of disease or about treating whole individuals, listening intently to their stories for clues that would help facilitate healing.
Graphic Medicine is a powerful way for individuals to tell their own stories. The comics form is particularly effective for representing and reimagining the self-in-community, for tackling challenging topics, and for making those topics digestible. Comics that focus on stories of sickness, health, and healing democratize medicine. Such narratives can destigmatize conditions (like Forney does in her book, Marbles, or Czerwiec does in Taking Turns), demystify serious illnesses (like Fies’ Mom’s Cancer), and provide models for self and others to follow in order to find solace, community, and healing in various ways.
Sleepless Planet follows this model. I hope that it will shed some light on the fraught topic of sleep, and that it might help broaden and deepen conversations about human sleeplessness and restlessness—how these intersect with hyperactivity, hyperproductivity, and overconsumption as these relate to the current mass extinction. Please take a good inhale here and exhale slowly…
BD: Are there any other projects – past or current – that you would like to highlight for our readers?
MB: I’m still very proud of Queen of Snails, my graphic memoir about finding a sense of belonging after sudden displacement from my country and family of origin. Almost five decades later, I am planning to leave the US to move back to Europe. I plan a sequel, in which I further explore the concept of home, belonging, and (re)migration. I’ve also written a novel that I hope to see published in the next year or two. The protagonist finds strength through rewilding and eclectic community in the face of violent authoritarianism.
BD: Lastly, what is the best way for our readers to find more information about Sleepless Planet?
MB: Please check out my website, www.maureenburdock.com, or go to https://www.graphicmundi.org/books/978-1-63779-093-9.html
