Author of the week

Navied Mahdavian Did you hear the one about the New Yorker cartoonist who moved to a tiny cabin in rural Idaho? asked Kathleen Yale in Orion. Navied Mahdavian and his filmmaker wife did just that in 2016, and his new graphic memoir about the experience, This Country, wins some laughs by mocking his lack of preparedness for minus-35 winter temperatures and chores such as cutting fire logs with a chainsaw. “I definitely played up the humor,” he says. “I leaned into the bumbling idiot persona, which wasn’t too much of a stretch.” He leaned into the region’s beauty as well, often letting his spare drawings do the talking. Other times, the Miami-raised son of Iranian immigrants focused on how he was forever aware, despite being welcomed by most neighbors, of being an outsider. “It was,” he says, “my first experience of being a minority.” The couple, who’d left San Francisco because housing costs were too high, lasted only a few years in Idaho, said Kousha Navidar in WNYC .org. They’d purchased 6 acres 20 miles outside of a tiny town, and though neighbors were quicker to help than he’d ever known, Mahdavian never got used to the stares or pointed questions he often fielded. When the couple had their first child at the end of their third Idaho winter, they decided she deserved to grow up in a place where she could feel that she fit in. So they sold their 280-square-foot cabin and resettled in relatively affordable Salt Lake City. Mahdavian realized that isolation wasn’t ideal for a cartoonist. “Art needs an audience,” he says. Still, it’s too soon to say whether he’s finally found his true home. “I’m a Millennial,” he says. “Not knowing where we belong is our thing.”