- I started the project with a trip to China to do some initial research.

Very early on, realized that Wisconsin ginseng is pretty much the most prized ginseng.

- I was gonna ask you maybe one of the most surprising things that you've learned in all of these journeys in researching.

I would think Wisconsin ginseng had to be up there as a surprise.

(gentle music) - Ginseng gardens, that was the primary agriculture of my small hometown, Marathon, Wisconsin, right in the center of Marathon County.

I've learned since that it's not well known that that tiny town was the largest producer of American ginseng in the world in the 1980s.

- [Sandy] For many, art is an escape.

For graphic novelist Craig Thompson, that escape was comic books.

And comic books became his calling.

- I've had a 25-year career in graphic novels, but only six books in that career, because they're all pretty hefty tomes.

- [Sandy] His 600-page memoir, 2003's "Blankets", was widely acclaimed, and catapulted Thompson to become one of the premier American graphic novelists.

- [Craig] "Blankets", it's a coming-of-age memoir about my childhood, a lot about Wisconsin also.

- On this episode of "The Arts Page", we sit down with the cartoonist author, Craig Thompson.

(gentle music) (gentle music continues) Thompson's new book, "Ginseng Roots", is a return to the memoir format.

Wisconsin was and still is one of the leading ginseng suppliers in the world.

The book is about his time working on a ginseng farm in rural Marathon, Wisconsin.

(gentle music) Tell us that journey.

When did you start working on a ginseng farm in central Wisconsin?

- I started when I was 10 years old, during my summer, quote unquote vacations, when other kids were going to summer camp or sleeping in, my brother and my mom and I were getting up at the crack of dawn, 5:00 am, when it was still dark out, putting on dirty clothes, still moist and muddy with all the pesticides we'd been in the day before.

And we were working class family.

My parents provided what we needed, just not what we wanted.

So toys, candy, and what was most important to me, comic books, we had to earn those ourselves.

And so we were totally happy to have this summer job, starting when I was 10 at $1 an hour.

- A dollar an hour.

- Which in 1980s was one comic book an hour.

- [Sandy] Although working on a ginseng farm was hard and dirty, the hours and pay terrible, Thompson expresses a great fondness and gratitude for that time.

- Yes, I would say it's a fondness.

When I started this project, I was in a moment of midlife crisis with my career.

Like I said, I'd been doing graphic novels for over 20 years, almost 25 years.

It just became a job like any other.

I was taking it for granted.

And so it was helpful for me to go back to my first job, which was this tedious physical labor that I actually was able to enjoy.

Like how can I tap that again, this sense of happiness to work?

- Truly grounding.

- Yeah, yeah, grounding in many, many ways.

- Ginseng, prized for its medicinal qualities, is used in a seemingly endless amount of products, everything from ordinary over-the-counter supplements and energy drinks to shampoos and toothpastes.

Who wants it?

- Asia wants it, China, specifically.

It's the beginning of our trade relationship between China and the US, before we were even a country.

So the first French Jesuit explorers in the New World in the Americas discovered ginseng here, with the help of the tribes, the local tribes.

They started exporting it in 1718.

And then with the ratification of the Treaty of Paris in 1784, that's when we sent our first shipment to China, and that's what we used to pay our debts to France for funding our revolution.

So I like to say that there might not be a United States of America without ginseng.

- [Sandy] Some of Thompson's other books include 2011's "Habibi" and 2015's, "Space Dumplins".

Both of those books are purely fictional, "Habibi", a love story, and "Space Dumplins", a space adventure.

When Thompson started developing "Ginseng Roots" in 2016, he realized he needed to return to the memoir format that put him on the map.

- I didn't want to talk about myself, I wanted to talk about plants.

And when I meditated on, whoa, what kind of plant do I know anything about, all these memories of working ginseng were stirred up.

And then as soon as I started into that research, ginseng seemed infinitely fascinating to me.

But when I started talking with people as I was diving into my research about what I was working on, I could see their eyes glaze over a bit, like, what, you're gonna work on this book about an herb?

And it's all history and nonfiction.

People were a little bored with the concept until I told them, well, this was my first job starting when I was 10 years old, and my tiny town was the biggest producer of American ginseng, at least in the world.

Then people were hooked.

And so I reluctantly realized, oh, I have to return to memoir.

This is the emotional entry point for the reader.

- [Sandy] By returning to the memoir format for "Ginseng Roots", Thompson added a new character to his family that was left out of 2003's "Blankets", his sister.

- In "Blankets", she wasn't part of the immediate story I was trying to tell about my relationship with my brother.

And my sister would've been a background character in "Blankets", so I thought it was better to just not include her at all.

20 years later, I come back to doing a memoir, and I learned that my sister has a lot of thoughts and memories about ginseng, probably more than anyone in my family.

She has the best recollection.

And so I was like, oh, do I put my sister in this book?

Will that be jarring for my readers that have this vision of my family already to learn that I have a sister?

So I was just very upfront about it in the second chapter of the book of like, okay, there's some omissions in my memoir in "Blankets", and now I'm gonna try to be more forthright about all those things, and correct some of those omissions by including my sister.

And over the course of the project, I became much closer to my sister.

- What an interesting byproduct of the creative process to bring you closer to your roots by writing about ginseng roots.

- Yes, I feel like I have a really, really close dynamic with both my siblings.

And I think the book, the process of making the books is a part of that.

- [Sandy] Weaving the story of his rural childhood with several modern themes and the history of the ginseng trade is impressive in itself.

But that's just one side of "Ginseng Roots".

The other side is Thompson's masterful artwork.

The way he depicts those themes and histories through the use of symbology and creative pen and ink illustrations is stunning.

What are some of the symbols that people will see, and why did you use them?

- There's a couple Chinese characters as in text, pictograms that really captivated me.

One is the actual character for ginseng itself.

There's the character for ginseng.

This character's for humanity, and you can see it repeated in the character for ginseng.

Above that character is three stars, which represent the heavens.

And then below the character is three lines or stripes that represent the roots digging into the earth.

So within that one character is the whole story of not only ginseng, but also maybe cosmological narratives, heavens above, earth below, and humanity in the middle.

But then also very captivating to me was this very simple Chinese character for field.

And it's just a square that's been divided into four quadrants.

It's very potent that that's the symbol for field, the sort of field you would plow and plant crops in.

But it's also I would say a symbol for comics.

It's like a page that has been divided into quadrants to have panels.

And so that's sort of a field I work in and that I have to plant.

Here I am in Taipei, Taiwan, where they gifted me a little typeface character with that symbol for field.

You can see it's just a square divided into quadrants.

- [Sandy] Now, like you said, it does look like comic book panels.

- Yeah, and they told me it's a great character, bringing on a wish for a bountiful harvest, which is what I needed at that point in making the book.

Ginseng at end of summer erupts in these beautiful red crimson berries.

It's the only time you can really identify it when in its wild environment.

And it's why I chose the red color in the book, but also Chinese wood blocks and watercolor printings often use red as the single other tone, so black ink and red ink.

- I agree that red does seem to be that Chinese color, but there are also red connections to Wisconsin, Bucky Badger, but I'm thinking more natural.

Granite?

- Yes, red granite.

A lot of the farmers in Marathon County attribute the properties of Wisconsin ginseng to the red granite in the soil.

Another thing that farmers talk about in Wisconsin is the taste is different.

And there is truth to that.

You can taste the difference.

What I think is actually a maple syrup sweetness from the maple trees.

Ginseng is a crop that's harvested in fall, when Wisconsin does that, arguably its most beautiful.

And those red maple trees turning vibrant red is part of that process.

- Several hundred page graphic novels have become Thompson's calling card.

The scale of writing and drawing such colossal books takes years to accomplish.

Thompson considers them a worthwhile endeavor.

You are writing and you're drawing.

What's your approach to such a massive project?

- You're right that every book is pretty big.

I mean, "Blankets" was almost 600 pages, and that came out 20 years ago.

And that was part of the statement of "Blankets".

There wasn't such a thing really in comics at the time.

So I wanted it to be this big brick of a book.

So I've always been drawn to big books.

I want to get lost a bit as the creator, and I want the reader to get a little lost too.

That to me is part of the pleasure of reading.

With "Ginseng Roots", it really lent itself to that, where ginseng allows you to go to all these different places, whether you're talking about the Chinese-US trade relationship or about the changing shape of agriculture from family farms to these huge corporate farms, and then smaller, intimate things, like my family, and my relationship to them and my relationship to my small town that I grew up in, that I wanted to run as far away as possible from when I was a kid.

But now I was eager to return there, and I really saw it through different eyes.

(silence) (gentle music)