Women Asking Women: Joana Mosi & Miranda Schreiber

JOANA MOSI: I’m loving your book, Iris and the Dead, and one of the reasons is that it feels personal, true and genuine. How do you find balance between writing from your own reality and fiction? Or, where do you find the line between both, if there’s any?

MIRANDA SCHREIBER: With the book I wanted to document an emotional experience and relational dynamic that was definitely autobiographical, but there were many aspects of the real story that wouldn’t have worked in a novel and had to be altered, sometimes dramatically. A lot of things, some of which I thought were really interesting, just couldn’t be conveyed in the context of this particular story. I did spread genuine feelings about gain and loss among all the characters. I guess it was a balancing act of honouring an emotional reality I really wanted to represent while negotiating with the demands of the form, thinking about pacing and what kind of story needed to emerge on its own. I do think of the actual story as sometimes creeping in or encroaching on its fictional version despite this, and sometimes I gave the characters specific uncanny feelings as if they could sense they were derived from something a little different.

MIRANDA: Your text brings together fantasies, film photographs, memories, digital images, advertisements, video game sequences, anxious fixations, and dreams into one single story, so that the reader experiences these visuals as the characters do. I have always struggled to identify the right place for our digital lives in writing, but when I read your book, I finally felt that it had been properly integrated. What was the representation of all these images like for you?

JOANA: I deeply care that my books, my stories and characters feel genuine. I write about the present and the themes that I like to work on often question real experiences. I hope that my work connects with the reader on a personal level. Now, I believe that most people, at least in the Western European-North American sociocultural paradigm I’m immersed in, are feeling increasingly overwhelmed by social media, digital screens, and fast, uncontrollable technological developments. I feel it in an overwhelming, exasperating way, and I’ve been trying to portray that noise in my comics for a long while now—not by choice, but because I can’t put it any other way. I’m a late millennial, so I remember when the internet and the digital world were secluded in a specific, limited space, such as a net café, the family computer in the living room, or the shared Windows XP of the school library. Nowadays, the digital realm is indistinct from our daily life; there’s no offline anymore. We’re constantly connected and aware; we need a smartphone to scan a menu in a restaurant, to navigate around town, and we need it to fulfil bureaucracy or book a doctor’s appointment. Governments demand your social media accounts to prove your “identity.” It’s not a choice anymore; being online is an extension of reality as we think we know it, and I try to mirror that in my books… maybe not so much in The Mongoose, but more intentionally in Physical Education (coming soon in 2026), or back in My Best Friend Lara (2021).

JOANA: Your novel has a deliberate structure built on short “chapters,” resembling diary-type entries, that make the reading experience well-paced and engaging, but still takes its time to reveal the story. How did you decide on the format, and how is it related (or not) to writing in the first-person perspective?

MIRANDA: The narrator is writing to someone with a short attention span, who lives with very different references and worldviews, and who has many incentives to ignore her. She has to be entertaining, and part of that meant constantly interrupting herself with ideas that could be more captivating than whatever she was discussing. The book also takes advantage of a singular opportunity to speak before she’s lost perspective about exactly what the gap in experience is between eighteen and twenty-seven-years-old. I think I’ve probably already lost this viewpoint. So she has to be scientific in her approach; she can’t miss any details. I think isolating various topics for discussion was a way of meeting the very specific, vast demands of having one chance to convey something. 

She’s also just coming out of a ten-year period of severe depression, so the form was also reflective of trying to write from a perspective of extreme fragmentation and disorientation in the hope that something more whole could still come from it, even though it wasn’t really continuous with the world in the way a more traditional novel would have been. Really it’s about being shocked at losing this continuity and trying to make something from what arose in its place. So it also had something to do with survival.

MIRANDA: After unspeakable loss, the people in Julia’s life seem to struggle to tell her the right story about what has been taken from her, and what continues to be gone even as she goes forward. The text itself doesn’t quite have an explicit answer for it, but I still felt like it presented us with some possibilities for what to do about desiring the return of impossible things. Did you have anything in particular you thought readers, especially readers who were grieving, might take from it?

JOANA: I’m not interested in answers, but more in the process of understanding, deconstructing questions, or problems. In The Mongoose, I was trying to use Julia, as the pivot character, to bring the challenge to the reader regarding the contractions implied in the process of grieving. Of course, it comes from a personal perspective, in which my take leans to the fact that grief is not morally clear or balanced, and pain can isolate people instead of bringing them together. When I lost my dad, I noticed how my mom, my sister, and I suddenly became very aggressive and conflicted with each other. Despite all sharing the same loss, we never felt so apart from each other. I was interested in understanding that loneliness, the miscommunication and the discomfort around Julia’s circle rather than trying to find a soothing, happy ending for her. I don’t think grief can end, or go away, but I want to believe that we can find a way to live with it. Maybe I don’t believe in clean, happy endings…but I do enjoy exploring different angles on the same story, and the different outlooks and takes we can get from them.

JOANA: How different do you find writing a novel, a book, from other types of writing, such as journalistic pieces or research? And even more, do these different approaches to writing influence one another?

MIRANDA: I find them to be very different practices methodologically, but I think both still proceed from a deep respect for human life and sovereignty of thought. Both I think should be guided by a resistance to hierarchical views of people, or contempt; in this way they’re both about argumentation. With fiction and journalism, in terms of general approach, I think of writing as being a craft but also just a natural form of human expression. So there has to be a way of practising and refining a writing style that leaves room for writing as one of the basic ways people have always testified to their existence, suffering, and aspirations.  I think this is particularly important in terms of being a reader of either form. 

MIRANDA: The end of this story offers the reader such a subtle development in Julia that I felt able to trust it. I felt like it reconciled just enough that it might be picked out one day in her memory as a moment of peace, but I didn’t feel in any way mislead about the nature of her future or the fact that she will still be there, without the person she misses. How did you decide exactly how far along to follow her?

JOANA: Thank you for your observation. It’s very close to my initial plan with Julia’s arc! Actually, the original idea started with having that ending; I always knew where I wanted to lead Julia, and building the story was about figuring out which obstacles she would have to encounter to reach that point. I knew I wished the overall tone to be hopeful. Yet, I like to leave the reader with a question, something to let them sink in after reading. I believe The Mongoose is the cleanest, clearest story I wrote, and yet, every reader I get the chance to talk with gives me a new, different take on what the ending and the mongoose itself mean. Some people take it in an optimistic note, but some others feel that Julia’s journey is a bit hopeless. The little mongoose itself means so many different things to many different people…some takes are so surprising that I prefer them to my own initial intention. I think that’s the beauty and true joy of putting your work out there—your story becomes everyone else’s. 

Joana Mosi is an award-winning visual artist and cartoonist based in Lisbon, Portugal. Born and raised close to the sea, Joana has a really hard time sitting still in one place for a long time (which is a problem when your job requires you to spend lots of time at a drawing table) so she ends up traveling a lot, participating in art residencies and comics festivals across the globe. While she’s planning her next artistic endeavor, she stays fresh by teaching (and learning from) new generations of creators.

Miranda Schreiber is a Toronto-based writer and researcher. Her work has appeared in places like the Toronto Star, the Walrus, the Globe and Mail, BBC, and the National Post. She has been nominated for a digital publishing award by the National Media Foundation and was the recipient of the Solidarity and Pride Champion Award from the Ontario Federation of Labour. Iris and the Dead is her debut book.