A Creative Response to Cancer

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Teva Harrison, "Pain Management," 2016

ink on paper

It’s the sort of crushing news that pushes you to your physical and emotional limits. Four years ago, Toronto-based artist Teva Harrison, then only 37, was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer. By the time doctors figured out why she was in pain, the disease had spread to her bones and was both terminal and incurable.

At first, she didn’t want to talk to anyone. But eventually she began discussing painful childhood memories with a psychiatrist on her oncology team. Back home, feeling raw, she began to draw, making dark, primitive comics. “Then I’d feel a bit of peace,” she says. “Once the story was outside of my head, I could let go a little.”

Eventually, she started drawing about life with cancer. “It’s the unspoken that is most frightening,” says Harrison. “Shining a light on my experiences takes some of the power away from the bogeyman that is my cancer.”

Her drawings hit a chord with friends, and she posted them online. Within a month, The Walrus contacted her, asking to post them on the magazine’s website. Soon after that, a publisher reached out, telling Harrison she had the makings of a book.

By 2016, Harrison had compiled her drawings, along with short companion texts, into a graphic novel, In-Between Days: A Memoir about Living with Cancer. It won the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize for Non-Fiction and was shortlisted for a Governor General’s literary award and a Joe Shuster Award, given for Canadian comics. Then, late last year, her first major solo exhibition, In-Between Days, featuring 40 drawings, opened at the Winnipeg Art Gallery.

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Teva Harrison, "In-Between Days," 2016

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Teva Harrison, "What's Wrong With Me?" 2016

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Teva Harrison, "Can't Be Trusted," 2016

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The last four years have been intense. Harrison underwent surgery, radiation and chemotherapy, but she is also making the most of the “beautifully lucky experiences” that have come her way.

“I feel a need to say as much as I can because I have a finite amount of time.” She pauses to correct herself. “We all have a finite amount of time. I’m just really hyper-aware of it. If I’m going to say it, I need to get on it.”

Harrison is working on two new books. One is a fictional look at the concept of mortality. The other, a graphic novel, offers black humour about the cancer journey. Meanwhile, Granta, a prestigious British literary magazine, is publishing her illustrated essay about a trip to Canada’s North. And she is the lead illustrator for Draw Me Close, Canadian playwright and filmmaker Jordan Tannahill’s memoir about his mother’s terminal cancer diagnosis.

It sounds like a lot, even for someone in good health. And it’s all the more poignant because it was cancer that brought Harrison back to making art after she “fell out of practice” after art school.

“I feel lucky because I was an artist who wasn’t making art,” she says. “And now I have all of these opportunities open to me. What an amazing turn of events, even if it’s for a reason I’m not thrilled about. It’s amazing. I’m making the most of it.”

She now focuses on a few months at a time

“I’m filling them with these great experiences. I just got back from South America and am planning to go to Southeast Asia really soon. I’m lucky my husband has the same approach to life that I have, so we’re just living and, in between, I’m working on interesting projects that I wouldn’t have had the mental space for before.”

Stephen Borys, the director of the Winnipeg Art Gallery, recalls feeling recharged after talking with Harrison at a panel discussion about art and life. He mentions Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, composed in 1940 when Messiaen was in a Nazi camp, and played before some 4,000 prisoners and guads.

“Boston Conservatory music professor Karl Paulnack has asked why anyone would bother with music in the camp when all they wanted to do was live. But Messiaen’s experience is not unique. Here, in a place where people were focused on staying alive, art had an essential role. ‘Art is part of survival, part of the human spirit,’ Paulnack states.”

Harrison is remarkably positive in an interview, despite chemotherapy earlier in the day. She is buoyed by recent news that her cancer is smaller than when she was first diagnosed. People with her type of cancer are expected to live only two to three years.

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Teva Harrison, "Happily Ever After," 2016

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She believes that what we are at our core is brought out by adversity. The cancer has taught her to let “the small stuff” go and focus on what makes her happy, such as exploring her creativity.

“I made things but I wasn’t focusing my entire attention on art and creation,” she says. “I didn’t really allow myself the time. And now I allow myself the time for whatever I want, aside from going to the hospital when they tell me to. Other than that, I’ve found a way to understand that allowing yourself to do the things that are most important to you is not a bad thing. So it’s just very liberating.” ■