Q&A: The Rural Cartoonist

Navied Mahdavian is a former 5th-grade teacher who is currently working as a full-time cartoonist. His work has been featured in The New Yorker, The LA Times, NPR, Reader’s Digest, and Wired. He moved to rural Idaho from the San Francisco Bay Area in 2016, spent a couple of years there, and published a very insightful and humorous graphic novel called “This Country: Searching For Home In (Very) Rural America.” I spoke with Navied to learn more about his book, his passion for cartooning, his wildest experiences living in rural Idaho, and his take on the urban-rural divide. Enjoy our conversation below.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The Daily Yonder: How did your transition from San Francisco to rural Idaho happen? What prompted the decision?

Navied Mahdavian: We had visited the summer before [we moved] and immediately fell in love with the landscape. Also, San Francisco is expensive, and [my wife and I] both wanted to be artists. In the Bay Area, as a teacher and a PhD student, we were living in an apartment, but in Idaho, we could own land, and we were able to buy six acres for a very low price. So, it was the overall allure of possibility and economic viability that led to the decision. Besides, cowboys are romantic, too!

DY: As you said, one of the reasons you moved was to focus on your career as a cartoonist. Could you tell us more about your passion and career in cartooning?

NM: It was pretty random to start cartooning. I was always a doodler, but it wasn’t until we moved to Idaho that I had the time to work on my craft. When people think of New Yorker cartoons, they think of New York. They don’t think of Idaho. So, it didn’t exactly make sense to have moved there to pursue cartooning. But more than anything, it was the time that the place afforded, where I could actually sit down and think, away from many of the pressures that would have prevented a sort of creative practice. I have some friends who are New Yorker cartoonists who have day jobs, and I don’t know how they’re able, you know, at night time or on the weekend, to have the mental space, to be able to sit down and say, “Okay, I’m going to be creative. I’m going to be funny.”

DY: According to your book description, you’d never fished, gardened, hiked, hunted, or lived in a snowy place before your move to rural Idaho. Could you tell us about some of your wildest experiences there?

NM: We were a little naive about what it was going to be like. We had visited during the summer before; we hadn’t been there during the winter. The first winter we were there, it got down to -36 degrees [Fahrenheit], and that January, it didn’t even reach zero degrees during the daytime. So the cars didn’t start. We also always ran out of firewood quickly. And the nearest town was 20 miles away.

There’s a moment when I was driving and suddenly the car started veering off the road. I was turning, but the car wasn’t responding because it was iced over. And I was like, “Okay, well, I’m going off the road.” We were almost hit by a semi and flew off the road. Fortunately, someone who would become a good friend stopped to help us.

I also got into bird watching. I can track the seasons by the bird sounds. I wake up early to listen to them. I also did a lot of hiking and gardening. At the peak of our gardening, we had 23 raised beds. I’ve always been a city person, and nature wasn’t something that I had explored, but being in rural Idaho, it was hard not to interact with the natural world in a way that you don’t do in cities.

DY: Before moving, what preconceptions did you hold about rural America, and how were they challenged or reinforced during your time in Idaho?

NM: My parents are from Iran. So, being a brown person moving to a predominantly white area, I thought my racial identity would be the thing that would alienate me the most. There’s one interaction, it’s in the book, where a conversation that I was having with somebody that was really pleasant suddenly turned negative when the person asked me, “You’re not a Muslim, are you?” in a really pointed way. She’s like, “Oh, I don’t mean to be nosy.” There were numerous interactions like that, and I had to figure out their intentions. Were people just being curious, or were they trying to be unwelcoming?

There is also a city versus rural divide, where people there were very suspicious of those from big cities. We had a few friends who visited from New York. They ended up driving from New York, arriving in a big black SUV with a New York license plate. And one of the guys from the town walks over to them. He was a retired cowboy, and he said, “So I heard you boys are from New York City.” Then he found out what they were doing (donating a film projector), and he became really welcoming after that. But there’s a suspicion of people from the city, and it is because, just like me, he might have acted with preconceived notions.

But I also understand that they are rightfully concerned about gentrification. Many of the residents [in my area] are ranchers whose livelihoods depend on hundreds of acres of land. And so, when people from the cities move in, they drive up real estate prices.

So, in the book, I attempted to capture the push-and-pull situation.

DY: Are there any cultural differences you experienced moving there?

NM: There’s a moment in the book where we opened up the movie theater that had been closed for like 10 years. My wife and I, both being artists, were drawn to it as something we could do for the community. We don’t know ranching, we don’t know cows, but we do know art and film, so we thought we could reopen the movie theater. We were trying to do what we thought was best for the town by showing them what we wanted to show, and we felt they needed to come and see them, because these are really good movies. And I think it was one of those moments where we realized that we were being naive, we were being patronizing, and we were falling into that trap of city folk coming in and trying to teach people in rural areas, like this is what they “should” be watching. Eventually, we ended up showing mainstream movies and John Wayne, which they really wanted to see, instead of the artsy movies we had originally intended to show. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to watch John Wayne.

DY: In your book, you mention political differences between you and your rural friends, but it also highlights the broader political divide between rural and urban residents. Do you think they will be able to bridge the divide anytime soon?

NM: The majority of the town and the county voted for Trump in 2016. So, it was hard not to experience the place within the context of the First Trump Presidency. There was no hiding that the people in the town were very different politically from what I was used to, and from the views that I myself held. For example, I never thought about hunting from a class perspective. Being from the cities, I have always associated guns with violence. But for people in rural Idaho, as some of them told me, hunting was for feeding their families. They are using their local resources rather than trucking in things. So, in that sense, I was also able to understand the complexities of their views, which I did not before.

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But one of my biggest takeaways was that I made really good friends there, many of whom had very different political views. For example, with one of the characters in the book, Josiah, there were a couple of times when we discussed politics, but for the most part, we didn’t. We understood that we had very different views, but I think it did not matter. With people’s political views, we are getting only 1% of a person, and we are missing all of the other things that make them human.

DY: There will be both rural readers and non-rural readers reading your book. What do you hope that both audiences take from your story?

NM: There is one interaction that I had with somebody who makes a very brief cameo in the book. She was one of those people in the town whose family had been there for 150 years. In my book, there’s one image of cowboys looking out over the landscape. To create that, I used a reference photo that I found online from the National Geographic Issue. She said that when she saw the image, it brought tears to her eyes because it featured her dad, uncle, and someone else in the photo in the book. For me, it was just random cowboys in the area, based on a reference photo I used. However, for her, they were real people – her family. It was a special moment and also a reminder that, through the book, I was not only telling my story but also sharing their stories and experiences – and I wanted to honor them.

Overall, I tried to give a nuanced portrait of the place to not come across as the coastal elite, coming in and judging the people who are there but rather just illustrating my personal experiences living in such a place.

So, after reading my book, I hope that city dwellers will gain some insights into rural life and vice versa. I also hope they see that there are divisions and different cultures. But there are also friendships that I forge, that show that it is possible to bridge those divides in a meaningful and lasting way.

This article first appeared on The Daily Yonder and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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Previously Published on dailyyonder.com with Creative Commons License

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