Most journals are about our own little problems. But Toronto actress Mia Kirshner travelled to four desperate parts of the world to bring back the tales of the most vulnerable people, Gayle MacDonald writes

For the past seven years, Toronto actress Mia Kirshner has been obsessed with self-financing and publishing her debut book, I Live Here, a harrowing tribute to the overlooked victims of war, corrupt governments and crippling disease.

“I worked on the book – all the time,” says Kirshner, a gorgeous, dark-haired slip of a thing who started acting as an extra in low-budget television and saw her career take off after nailing roles in Love & Human Remains and Exotica.

“I drove my friends and family insane because they said it’s all I talked about. I know it’s true, and I’m sure, very annoying to be around. But it literally has been an odyssey, an obsession for me. Because once I saw how many people have sacrificed so much … well, I became obsessed,” she says with a smile.

Kirshner says all this while in town last week to present her so-called paper documentary at the International Festival of Authors. The 33-year-old explains that she became fixated with the idea of the four-part book – which took the actress and many collaborators to some of the most ravaged places in Chechnya, Myanmar, Juarez, Mexico, and Malawi – after 9/11.

“I realized then how incredibly ignorant I was to the most vulnerable. With all due respect to journalists, the way the popular media is structured – and the way in which they respond to events – they pay attention to the big ‘explosions’ but often turn a blind eye to the quieter stories – the harder ones to reach.”

Kirshner, whose parents immigrated to Canada from post-Holocaust Europe, set out on her own dime (including a hefty bank loan) to find those hidden stories. The end result is an innovative, moving montage of graphic novellas, paintings, collages, the victim’s own stories, photographs and the actress’s own journals that recount the plight of Karen refugees and child soldiers terrorized by the Myanmarese (Burmese) military Junta, or the stories of mothers in Juarez, where 400 young women have been raped and murdered while the government and police do nothing.

“I chose the places that personally touched me,” says Kirshner, who splits her time among Los Angeles, Paris and Toronto.

“On one of my last days in Malawi, I got lost, and ended up in a gas station where a young woman offered me the use of her cellphone,” she adds. “She told me she became pregnant by a man who she thought she was going to marry, but he left her with HIV, which she has subsequently passed onto her daughter.

“But she was just this incredible model of grace. She didn’t feel sorry for herself. She is supporting her family. She is somebody who just gets it. Someone who is literally sucking the marrow out of the day in the best of ways.”

In 2001, Kirshner began by doing mock copies of her book. She then started mailing out letters to a bevy of creative strangers, never mentioning her “day job” as an actress, whose most recent stints include The L Word and Brian De Palma’s The Black Dahlia.

“I certainly understand the cynicism that accompanies my job, but ultimately I’m quite grateful to it because it paid for this. The film and TV stuff just happened to me. I’ve always wanted to write a book. I’ve always been a little restless and felt I wasn’t using the tools to pursue what I’m truly passionate about.”

So she pushed and prodded. She has co-written I Live Here with J.B. MacKinnon, Paul Shoebridge and Michael Simons. It also features the work of renown comic-book artist Joe Sacco, who contributed a graphic novella about Chechen refugees (Kirshner flew him there, and covered his expenses), as well as fiction by Toronto writer Ann-Marie MacDonald.

Kirshner grew up near Casa Loma in an average Jewish middle-class neighbourhood. She went to high school at Jarvis Collegiate Institute and studied Russian literature at McGill University in Montreal, before quitting to move to Los Angeles (she is soon leaving that city to set up permanent digs in New York).

She describes herself as an “incredibly average” student, who was “ostracized” by public-school educators who thought she had “an unusual way of thinking.”

But one teacher – whom she had the fortune to meet at an alternative school – believed in her and supported her writing. “She was amazing and she always told me to ignore everybody and just go for it,” says Kirshner, who thanks this woman in her book. “It’s my goal for this book to get into schools. And I hope it inspires kids go into their own communities to look for the hidden stories.”

To pay for subsequent books, (she already has plans to go to Pakistan and Iran), Kirshner says, she will keep on acting. It’s a means to fund this odyssey she can’t quit. “When they handed me the final version of the book, I burst into tears. I was so happy. So proud, and so honoured.

“Once you start, it’s like a passion. This is the very beginning for me. I could not stop at four.”