Tessa Hulls is an artist and writer who won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for her graphic memoir Feeding Ghosts.
Show notes:
- Tessa Hulls
- Feeding Ghosts
- Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir, by Tessa Hulls – The Pulitzer Prizes
- Isabel Wilkerson: Caste
- Kaliane Bradley: The Ministry of Time
Learn more about Scrivener, and check out the ebook Take Control of Scrivener.
If you like the podcast, please follow it on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. Leave a rating or review, and tell your friends. And check out past episodes of Write Now with Scrivener.
Tessa shared some screenshots showing her Scrivener project, which appear below.
Tessa Hulls won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for her memoir, Feeding Ghosts; the first time that a graphic book, or comic has won a regular Pulitzer. (Art Spiegleman’s Maus won a Pulitzer Special Award in Letters in 1992.) “I think that comics are a uniquely powerful tool for showing history, because it keeps the immediacy of an emotional relationship in something that, if it were just rendered in words, would be really academic and removed.”
Tessa chose the form because she is an artist, not a writer, so she could “bend time and show the connections across generations and places in a way that’s just not possible with words. By virtue of introducing myself as a character who literally walks through the narrative, I can provide the continuity to do these jumps that would be impossible without that framing device.”
The work on Feeding Ghosts was taxing. It took nine years, with much of the work done during Covid. I asked how the pandemic affected her dealing with the complication and the pain of this story. “It was miserable. By the end of it, I was a tattered shell of my former self. And it took me a really long time to recover. The timing was truly brutal. And I think ultimately, Covid made the book stronger because I had literally no choice but to live inside of this world with no outlets. I would say that the production phase was about four years. But it destroyed my mental health.”
Feeding Ghosts is about Tessa’s family, between China, Hong Kong, and the United States. “I grew up in a tiny town in Northern California, and my parents were both immigrants from massive cosmopolitan cities. My mom was born in Shanghai, and my dad in London. My grandmother lived with us and had ended up as collateral damage of the Chinese Communist rise to power. I didn’t know what had happened to her. Feeding Ghosts came out of my desire to understand why there was this core of damage within my family. And that ended up requiring me to go back to the 1800s, and the history of the Opium Wars, to really understand, okay, what was it in my family’s past that broke my grandmother’s mind?”
Tessa’s website says that she’s an adventurer and has visited all seven continents. I asked if she was antsy and just had to go places. She said, “I think for a long time I was running because I was trying to avoid having to tell this story. That’s why I didn’t start it until I was 30: I needed to get that sense of escape out of my system and know that I was solid enough in myself to be able to survive taking on this project for as long as I did.”
Tessa use Scrivener for Feeding Ghosts in a way few other authors would. She “manhandled Scrivener into being something that could be far more visual than it was probably designed for, because the way that I work, my main background, was as a visual artist.”
“I wrote this 10,000-word outline of the book, and then I used Scrivener to break apart that structure so that the approximate amount of content that I would need to cover on a page would each be an individual text. Then I turned that essentially into a three-ring binder, printed it out and then would leaf through it and be like, ‘OK, I think I know how to turn this page into a comic.’ It’s not that the text would be a script or a description of what would be there. It would be literally, ‘here is where I explain the Cultural Revolution in three pages.’ So by allocating all of those to individual Scrivener files, that’s how I had a sense of how long the book was going to be. As I drew those pages, I would scan them. I would do a low-resolution image and drop that into my Scrivener file so that when I had it in [the Corkboard in] Group Mode, I could see all the images on that infinitely large wall.”
Most Scrivener users move to another file type when they get to the editing stage, but Tessa couldn’t do that. “I forced my editor to learn Scrivener for this project because it was the only way that I could show her what I was doing. In my Binder, I had a file that said, Daphne, read me. (My editor’s name is Daphne.) And that’s where I would say, ‘OK, this is what I’ve done on this pass-through.’ And I used color coding so she was able to track what I was up to, what I was changing, how things were progressing. Once the page was completely done, I would color-code it as green so that when I looked at it in Corkboard view, I could see how many pages were fully finished.”
“I never would have been able to pull this off without Scrivener. By writing that 10,000-word outline, I was making the little picture on the cover of a jigsaw puzzle. And then I had to make 386 bespoke pieces, and I told my editor she was going to have to trust me that they were going to fit. I used Scrivener’s way to look at all of those pieces and basically take an X-Acto knife to them, metaphorically, to change the edges so that they would fit. And there was no other way I could have done that.”
Tessa has said that she doesn’t plan to write another book. “I don’t ever want to have to disappear from the world for that long again. And, really, I’ve only had one story that haunted me my whole life. I don’t have another one waiting, thankfully.”
Kirk McElhearn is a writer, podcaster, and photographer. He is the author of Take Control of Scrivener, and host of the podcast Write Now with Scrivener. He also offers one-to-one Scrivener coaching.