Actress Mia Kirshner is probably best known for her role on the Showtime drama The L Word, but for the past several years, she’s been focusing her creative energies on the people that nobody seems to notice: women and children around the world who have been displaced, silenced and forgotten. Over the past few years, 33-year-old Kirshner has traveled to some of the most desolate and dangerous countries in the world to see and meet some of the most victimized people, in hopes of bringing the world’s attention to their plight.

One part of her commitment to bringing attention to the world of global refugees is I Live Here, an unusual collaborative graphic work that will be published by Pantheon in October. A mixed media combination of comics, photos, journals and travelogues, I Live Here is a four-segment book collection, with each section——and each artist—focused on the personal and social trauma of displaced people in a different country. Much acclaimed comics journalist Joe Sacco, creator of Palestine, produces a graphic novel that examines war-torn Ingushetia, Chechnya; comics memoirist Phoebe Gloeckner examines the serial killing of women in Juarez, Mexico; French-Algerian artist Kamel Khélif surveys ethnic killing in Burma and Thailand; and finally, there’s a children’s story by author J.B. McKinnon and artist Julie Morstad that tackles the AIDS epidemic the African country of Malawi. Other writer-contributors include Chris Abani, nonfiction writer Karen Connelly and short story writer Lauren Kirschner.

To bring all this disparate graphic and prose material together in a single book, Mia Kirshner enlisted the talents of award-winning creative directors Michael Simons and Paul Shoebridge to oversee the book’s design and production. Kirshner has also founded the I Live Here Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to “telling the stories of silenced and unheard people” through a variety of media projects, as well as establishing writing programs, beginning with a program that will launch in Lilongwe, Malawi. In anticipation of the book’s release on October 14 and her subsequent monthlong book tour, Kirshner talked with PW Comics Week about how her love of comics helped bring the project together, and where she’s taking it next.

PW Comics Week: How long have you been working on this project?

Mia Kirshner: It’s been seven years. It came about because of a gradual sort of feeling that I had, that the life I was leading was pretty limited. I didn’t feel like I knew enough about how the rest of the world lived. And I also felt like I just wasn’t happy creatively with what I was doing. So I did about a year of research and put this idea together: the combination of comics and first-person accounts of survival and trauma. Joe Sacco was the first person I approached.

PWCW: Had you known Joe Sacco previously?

MK: I’d known his work. I was a huge, huge fan of Safe Area Gorazde: The War in Eastern Bosnia 1992-1995. I felt like that comic explained the war—a very complex war that I hadn’t been able to understand before the comic. I wish I still had the letter I wrote him; it was a really passionate letter, and I was pretty shocked to hear back from him, and that he said yes. We had no publisher at that point, and Joe dedicated so much of his time to working on this project. Joe was also the one who found my literary agent and donated his salary. Aside from the fact that his art speaks for itself, he is just an incredibly kind person.

PWCW: So your interest in comics preceded this project?

MK: Yes, definitely. I basically just wrote to my favorite comics artists. That’s really how I chose Phoebe [Gloeckner]—have you read her book The Diary of a Teenage Girl? It’s pretty wonderful. I knew for a while that I wanted [I Live Here] to be about teenage identity, and what it means to be a girl, and I was really shocked when [Gloeckner] said yes. And Kamel Khélif—who’s not known at all in the United States, but he should be. I was in a comics store in Paris and I saw his work, and I found his number through his publisher and I had the hotel concierge where I was staying translate the call. [laughs] The book came together in a pretty wild way.

PWCW: Did the artists have a chance to visit the locations, or was it more based on the accounts that you brought back?

MK: It was different for each one. Joe came with me [to Chechnya]; that was the very first trip I took, and he collected his own material. With Burma, it was a very different process. Kamel didn’t want to go, so I went. Originally, it was going to be a comic without words, but after I went, the human rights worker that I had worked with, she went back into a brothel on the Burmese border with questions that I had. She had this woman who is an underage worker keep a journal and photograph her life. And all of that went to Kamel, along with ephemera from her life, like a piece of her clothing and her makeup. Unfortunately, it was stopped by customs and given to the FBI. They were concerned that the reason these pictures existed was because there was [sex] trafficking going on. So I had to go meet with the FBI about the package and assure them there was nothing weird going on. Then after I saw the initial pass at the [Burma] comic, I really felt like it needed words. I wrote the script for the comic based on her diary and basically put the words into the panels. So those are her words.

PWCW: Do you plan to continue doing this type of humanitarian work? [Kirshner is in negotiations with Pantheon to publish subsequent volumes of I Live Here, but the two parties have not yet signed a deal. However, Kirshner insists that she will publish subsequent volumes herself, if need be.]

MK: Of course, of course. It’s [going to be] four books; this is the first of four, and it’s a series. I mean, for me, my day job [performing on The L Word] paid for the book; it’s as simple as that. I didn’t look for outside funding, because I wanted to be sure I wasn’t taking money if the project wasn’t going to work. I would rather it be at my own [financial] risk.

PWCW: And you’ve also started a foundation.

MK: Yes, because of the work on the book, my partners and I have started the I Live Here Foundation. Doing a book is great, but it doesn’t help the communities we’re going into directly at all. But the one thing that I did feel like I could help with was the lack of creative writing programs in these areas. Our first creative writing program was in a juvenile prison in Malawi where I spent some time. I realize that these [creative writing] programs don’t address food and medicine and water, but what it does address is making people feel listened to and heard and validated. I think it gives them a sense of empowerment. That’s what’s next for us.

PWCW: You had originally planned to donate your royalties to Amnesty International. Are some going to the I Live Here Foundation as well?

MK: They have to go to Amnesty. That was my promise when I went into those places, and a promise is a promise. But for the next series of books, it will definitely go back into the Foundation.

PWCW: Are there places you’re already looking at for the next book?

MK: Iran is very interesting to me; Colombia is very interesting; Yemen is very interesting. When I finish work on my day job, I’ll go on a book tour for a month, and then begin work on the next one.

PWCW: Could you see yourself doing something in comics outside of this project?

MK: 100%, yes. It’s a medium I love very, very much that is very close to my heart. It’s really a perfect medium.