by Caroline Keane
Yinz City is a comic that focuses on the experiences of QTPOC in 2015 era Pittsburgh. It focuses primarily on social settings, queer community, and the different ways characters are socially connected. The author, higu rose, is a Pittsburgh based illustrator, graphic novelist, and teaching artist. We met to discuss higu’s work on Yinz City, the inspiration, and what’s being explored.
CK: Thank you for making your work accessible online, when I read it in the library I was trying to stifle my giggles. It really captured the feeling of being in a small queer/political community. Whether you live in a big or small city, queer communities tend to be on the smaller side, even if there are a lot of queer people living there. It captured what it’s like to have your messiness or lack of messiness to be fully on display. When you’re in a close-knit community, even if you are private, your habits are visible to everyone leaving you exposed to potential judgment. Especially within more politically-minded people who may be evaluating your actions more harshly. Why is it that within Yinz City your work seems to focus on relationships, friendships, social scenes, and the conflicts within those?
HR: I really enjoy, from a writer/reader perspective, stories that aren’t necessarily about an actual plot per se. I really like reading about characters and people interacting. I find interpersonal relationships to be very interesting and the dynamics like how people behave around certain people, but not other people, the difference in presentation in different spaces. I sometimes like to say Yinz City is my way of lovingly making fun of my friends because there are just so many funny characters in life that are fun to do little studies on them almost. Little studies about different people. I do like writing about messy people, it’s really fun. The very specific and weird ways in which different people are messy.
CK: Because we all are in different ways, even if we’re celibate, not dating, dating very intentionally, we are all messy.
HR: The different ways people act in friendships, whether they’re good friends or bad friends, whatever those words mean, the way people treat each other-the people who they are around a lot. Whether it be coworkers, friends, siblings, cousins, family.
CK: What kind of responses have you gotten to Yinz City, from your closer circle and readers more broadly?
HR: Many said that there was an authenticity to it, like ‘I could’ve known that person or been at that party. Or I’ve been in that situation. This is a very specific feeling to 2015 Pittsburgh, I was there and I know how it feels, and recognize the people in the background.’ From a broader response, others I’ve met through drawing it have felt similarly that it captures the Pittsburgh vibe. It seems like more people have read it outside Pittsburgh than in Pittsburgh. Some of them have said, ‘I’ve never been to Pittsburgh, but this makes me want to go there.’ Or ‘I feel like I know this place [from reading].’ One person said, ‘I can tell that you love this place even if you think it’s kind of stupid,’ which it is. Which is part of why I love it.
We went on to discuss authenticity as a value, and the role it can play in healthy conflict and community.
HR: I do feel that sometimes being confronted with something about yourself, or the people around you can cause conflict, with you and other people or even within yourself. That confrontation is part of what potentially would inspire reflection and maybe growth from there. ‘Oh I have to face this, maybe I’ll do something about it.’
CK: It seemed like the comics might have been a way for you to have an outlet to explore that growth, personally or within the people around you. Does that feel accurate to you?
HR: I don’t know, I never thought about it like that. Part of why I drew it, at the time I was living in Chicago, I spent two years living there. I missed Pittsburgh so much that I was like I’m going to write this story about Pittsburgh just so I can think about all the things that I love about it and all the things I don’t necessarily love about it. I think there are aspects of the writing that reference certain events that I am exploring or processing how I felt or would feel in certain situations, this comes up more in future issues I’ve written. I think all art is a way of processing or expressing, all creators are processing something via their art. I used to do more memoir work where I was more obviously processing things, but I felt like I ran out of things to say about myself and decided to do fiction instead.
CK: Within my creative outlets, where I’m journaling I can get out what’s on the surface for me, but other mediums tend to bring out what’s more subtle or sitting underneath the surface. I was aware of it, but not in a super conscious way.
HR: As Yinz City goes on I think I’ll realize more things as I read it. I feel like I’ve noticed similarities between myself and certain characters that I didn’t know about until I wrote about them more. I was like oh wait, I do that kind of thing, or that’s how I react to certain things, and didn’t realize that I had written that in until I had actually written it and read it.
CK: Would you say your work is political?
HR: Hmm…not in the sense that I purposefully have a political message that I’m trying to convey. I do feel that to a certain extent everything that a queer person, and/or person of color, trans person, all of it whatever, I feel like because our bodies and our existence is politicized without our permission, everything we make is automatically politicized. The very fact that a queer person is making something because people look at queer people as political bodies. The Black experience is politicized in itself in the way that it can be analyzed and talked about in different political contexts and ideologies. So any art that would come out of that is also [politicized]. I don’t think that Toni Morrison is necessarily always specifically trying to be political in her fiction, but I feel like people can look at her fiction as being political text or can be interpreted through political lenses.
CK: She’s just writing about her experience or the experience that she’s observed.
HR: Exactly. Maybe there’s certain underlying political or ideological things that get in there without me thinking about it, but that’s just the nature of me writing about what I’m thinking about.
CK: I noticed that there’s little seeds of that, but it’s not really overt propaganda.
HR: I think the characters have certain ideological leanings that maybe they’ll reference, but it’s not my goal to write about anarchism or something. I don’t know that I consider myself a political person, I do have thoughts and opinions, but I would never write about them directly, it would show up in the things that my characters do and say…When there’s a villain you can tell what the author thinks is bad, because that’s how they write the villain. ‘A villain is someone who’s selfish and greedy, or a Buddhist, or something, blah blah blah.’ So you think selfish and greedy Buddhists are bad people, or something like that. You can extrapolate the author’s feelings on certain topics through the way they write about it.
CK: In your work, there might be one or two, but there’s not many villains.H
HR: There are definitely annoying people.
CK: And different peoples’ behaviors are annoying to some more than others. What is on your website stood out to me, something along the lines of so much of queer writing is ‘I feel good, cozy, and safe, and I’m having a good time’ and you wrote ‘I’m not having a good time and I don’t feel safe.’
HR: It’s just easier for me to write that, I wonder what that says about me. Conflict and uncomfortable feelings are way more interesting for me to write about. Although it is something that I’ve been thinking about, maybe I should write about having a good time because queer people have a good time very often. I should make sure to include that narrative, it’s very important to me, but also life is very uncomfortable sometimes in minor and major ways. I feel like I don’t want to write something that just acts like that’s not the truth.
C: Maybe you’re considering your audience.
HR: I don’t really care about who my audience is and I’m not interested in writing for an audience. Originally I was writing them because I thought they were fun stories and I’m interested in them and other people can be, too. I’m not writing for any group in particular but I’d love it if mostly queer people read it.
“the characters of YINZ CITY ask themselves: can good people be shitty friends? can good friends be shitty people?”-from higu.cool
CK: Are you a pro or anti Zodiac queer?
HR: I’ve lived my life hard anti, but I’ve softened over the years to being dismissive, not necessarily anti, but like that’s okay.
CK: Then I won’t ask …
HR: Go ahead..
CK: What’s your sign?
HR: Capricorn?
CK: I was in the ballpark. Any final thoughts?
HR: One thing I will say is, we were talking about or about how I’m not interested in drawing stories that are like I feel so safe and cozy because that feels inauthentic to me. Maybe that’s specific to my experiences and my friends’ experiences, but I also feel like there are a lot of narratives in fiction from queer people where it’s like it needs to be nice because we need to represent queer people as being very nice or something. On the other side it’s like we’re all dying and miserable and sad all the time. I’m like, well no queer and trans people are regular people. They do dumb shit and they are sad and they are happy sometimes. That’s what I want to write about, queer and trans people being “normal human beings.” In heavy quotation marks because I feel like being a freak is great, so I would love to write about freaks, whatever that means.
CK: And you do.
HR: Selling comics is cool and I love to get money out of it, but I just want people to read it. I like to make it available online so people can do that.
You can find higu’s work and shop online at higu.cool and on Instagram @higoons. Stay tuned for future issues of Yinz City, and other works. You can read Yinz City online for free at yinz.city.
PETRICHOR 
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