AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
How far would you go to fulfill your dreams? Samanta Sanchez, an aspiring teenage weightlifter from Chile, is willing to risk it all, including her health and her relationship with her family. When she gets a chance to train in an elite program, Sam chases her dreams of winning a weightlifting medal with everything she's got. That's the plot of the new graphic novel "Raise The Bar" by Fernanda Frick. And the author and Illustrator joins us now. Welcome to the program.
FERNANDA FRICK: Thank you for having me.
RASCOE: So I have to ask you, like, of all the sports and settings you could have chosen, why weightlifting?
FRICK: Yeah, it's a bit of a weird choice, right? A couple of years ago, I did a lot of CrossFit. And in CrossFit, you have the Olympic weightlifting movements, the snatch and the clean and jerk. Weightlifting feels amazing. It makes you feel strong. But also I really like anime. There's a subgenre that is sports anime. They tell you the story in a way that it's like, you can't help but root for the athletes.
RASCOE: Sam is absolutely determined to become a weightlifting champ even though her parents - they really want her to stop. They even say that if she doesn't medal after her first season of training, that she'll have to quit lifting forever. There's a reason why her parents were so skeptical. Talk to me about some of that generational trauma that they were working through.
FRICK: At the beginning of the book, we see Sam's parents really against her becoming a weightlifter because they say, hey, you don't have any friends, you are obsessed about the sport, being exhausted, having calluses in your hands, really big muscles that - when you're a girl, some people still see having muscles as something weird. And that's, like, the reasons they give at first.
As the story goes on, they're able to talk honestly, and they see Sam getting, like, ostracized and isolated when she was a kid because of her obsession of lifting things, and they start to think, hey, maybe this has something to do with the wounds that the Chilean dictatorship left. And it's, like, this fear of being different because back then, in the dictatorship, which was in the '70s, if you stand out, it had really dangerous consequences.
RASCOE: And they were still working through that trauma.
FRICK: Yeah, the dictatorship was over by decades, but that still remains. And I decided to put that in the book because that's what kind of happened with me. There had been persecution in my own family. This resurfaced because when I was 14, I started learning animation. And I did an animation that was a little bit violent that made them tell me, like, there's this history in this family that you didn't know about. Putting that story in Sam's is a way to honor that side of the story.
RASCOE: Yes. There's a gendered aspect to the way people reacted to Sam.
FRICK: Yeah, it's definitely in the subtext. There are some passions and things that you might not even blink twice if it was a boy, but when you're a girl, it becomes kind of a problem.
RASCOE: And Sam idolizes this Eva Dos Santos who, in the book, is the first Latin American weightlifter to win Olympic gold. Did you have similar, like, role models in your life when you were growing up, maybe in animation, people that you looked up to who you could aspire to?
FRICK: My idols, my mentors were through books, through YouTube videos. And actually, Eva Dos Santos is based on film director Ava DuVernay.
RASCOE: Oh, really?
FRICK: Yeah, a little bit because back when I started animation, I started watching her films, listening to her interviews. That really inspired me and made me keep going.
RASCOE: Sam - in addition to Eva, she looks up to Barb Miller, a fellow weightlifter/influencer that she follows and learns from. And Barb also ends up training at the same complex. When they initially meet, they become "rivals," quote-unquote (laughter). What did you want to illustrate about girls in competition versus collaboration with that relationship between Barb and Sam?
FRICK: So when you grow up with a chip on your shoulder, it's really easy to see someone who - it's almost like an alternate universe version of you who's had everything you haven't or everything that you are not. So she sees in Barb everything that she wanted and she doesn't have. This, like, cliche girl rivalry thing - oh, there can't be two of us, one has to win - I want to believe that's subverted pretty early on for them to become, like, the kind of rivalry that, instead of pushing someone down, it raises both of them up.
RASCOE: There is a shadowy figure that you illustrate whenever Sam is having a particularly hard time with her lifts. And I'd like you to read their exchange.
FRICK: OK.
The shadowy figure says, (reading) it won't change anything, you know? Who asked you? It will. It has to. But it looks so heavy. Why do you keep insisting? Just drop it.
RASCOE: That kind of self doubt - it's universal, right?
FRICK: Yeah. So the shadow figure - it's recurring throughout the book, and yeah, it's her self-doubt. It's her relentless ambition. And I really wanted to kind of depict this idea of what fuels you. I really like the concept of dirty fuel versus clean fuel. So this shadow figure, it's like this representation of dirty fuel, which is being driven by the shame of not feeling good enough. The shadow figure was never bad. It was a part of her.
RASCOE: Yeah. And so much of this book is about dealing with fears and overcoming obstacles. And I know that even this book went through a bunch of iterations. You know, at first, it was going to be a series.
FRICK: Yeah, I got the first idea for the book in 2016, when it was the Rio Olympics, 10 years trying to get this story in the hands of people. And yeah, at first, it was supposed to be an animated series. But sadly, that didn't work out. I decided to - OK, what's the way I can do that? It's a book, a graphic novel. I don't ever think that I would have been able to put a little bit of my family story, the dictatorship trauma, in a animated series. So this version - it's really what I wanted to tell.
RASCOE: That's Fernanda Frick, author and illustrator of "Raise The Bar," out this week. Thank you so much for joining us.
FRICK: Thank you so much for having me.
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