Madeleine Jubilee Saito does not find art therapeutic

Circling Issue #34, Featuring Madeleine Jubilee Saito

Madeleine Jubilee Saito is a cartoonist and artist from rural Illinois living in Seattle. In 2022, Madeleine was an inaugural artist-in-residence at On Being, the public radio podcast about spirituality. Her comics opened each section of the bestselling anthology of women’s writing about climate, All We Can Save (One World, 2020). Her work has been featured in the LA Times, HuffPost, and Guernica magazine, and was mentioned as a notable work in The Best American Comics 2019.

When we first began Circling, Madeleine was one of the first people I knew I wanted to interview. A friend introduced me to her watercolor-style comics after college, and I have cherished them and given them as gifts for years. When she mentioned her new book coming out this spring, I was so excited to be able to share her work here. She sent me a digital advance copy before the interview, and I opened it at my desk at work, read it front to back, and cried. Reading her work is a spiritual experience, a wrestling w…