How Martine Leavitt took a beloved comic strip and ended up with a YA novel

A boy named Calvin and a girl named Susie set off on an adventure with a talking tiger named Hobbes. Sound familiar? In her YA novel Calvin, Martine Leavitt mines her favourite comic strip to tell the moving story of a schizophrenic teenage boy on a singular quest to meet his maker and heal himself.

In her own words, Leavitt reveals the years-long process that led to Calvin, which won the 2016 Governor General's Literary Award for young people's literature (text).

Circuitous path

"In many ways,Calvinstarted a long time ago, when I was writing my bookTom Finder.When I realized thatTom Finderwas about a homeless boy, I did a tremendous amount of research on homeless youth, and walked around with this little black cloud over my head for a long time. When I finishedTom Finder,I wasn't finished with the little black cloud, or it wasn't finished with me. So I wroteHeck Superhero,which deals again with homelessness and a question I had: what does a kid do if he gets a toothache and he's living on the streets? I had found out that in these cases in Calgary, for example, they'll just pull your teeth out. And while I was writing this story, I thought, well, I should write about a homeless girl next, and that led me to writeMy Book of Life by Angel.

"AfterAngelwas published, I realized that I had dealt with three different contributing factors to homelessness in young people. InTom Finderit's abuse kids thinking they are safer on the streets than at home.Superherodeals with poverty, andAngeldeals with addiction. But one of the main contributing factors to homelessness in young people is mental illness. And I thought, maybe one day I'll write a book about that. I had this one neuron in the back of my brain throbbing away, searching for a story of some kind."

Comic relief

"Then one day much later, I was reading one of my Calvin and Hobbes collections, as I do on a regular basis, and the thought came to me that nowadays, Calvin would probably be diagnosed as schizophrenic. And it made this enormous electrical storm in my brain with the urge to write about mental illness. Eventually I came up with this notion that Calvin, having schizophrenia, feels that he's been given this illness by Bill Watterson, his creator (and the creator of Calvin and Hobbes), and Watterson could eventually cure him.

"I thought, Calvin has to go on a pilgrimage, but going on a pilgrimage to meet Bill Watterson is not that exciting in and of itself. Then somehow I came across an article online by a man named Dave Voelker, whowalked across Lake Eriein the middle of winter. Pretty much all the experiences Calvin and Susie have on the lake were also experiences Voelker had, but interpreted in the mind of a hyper-imaginative boy whose brain is breaking down."

Love story

"Susie, Calvin's champion and true love, surprised me the most as I wrote the book. She's strong, but then again, so is Susie in the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip. But I was surprised by how this strength manifested itself. My Susie was so brave in her willingness to be vulnerable with Calvin, and to love him. And that's what I love about Susie. I think one of the best compliments I got was when a review called this novel "a deeply tender love story." You wouldn't think that with these two characters, because they're pretty blunt and awkward with each other, but I was so happy to read that the tenderness came through."

Tiger tale

"In the novel, Hobbes is Calvin's hallucination. Only Calvin can see and hear him, and Hobbes is how the schizophrenic episode manifests itself. So what happens to Hobbes at the end of the book was an important piece for me. I read an article by a psychologist who had schizophrenia. And when voices first started to come to her, she felt they were hostile, and she resisted these voices. But the more she resisted them, the more - not violent, necessarily - but the more outrageous these voices became, and the more disturbing for her. She got her illness under control, and began to see as a professional psychologist that these voices are a signal that something is wrong. In that sense, they do not need to be silenced; they need to be listened to. And in the same way, Hobbes was able to truly help Calvin."

Martine Leavitt's comments have been edited and condensed.