“It Started With An Obsession”: Jesse Lee Kercheval On Making Her Graphic Memoir “French Girl” https://ift.tt/gh2mALJ
Jesse Lee Kercheval, poet, writer, translator and visual artist, was in Uruguay during the height of the pandemic when she picked up a pack of red colored pencils and didn’t look back. Before March 2020, she would have told you that one “irrefutably true fact” about herself was that she couldn’t draw. But you would never guess it from her bold and vibrant narrative illustrations in her graphic memoir French Girl.
In this interview, she reveals what the process of creating French Girl was like, as well as how her writing background informed her work.
Jesse Lee Kercheval was born in France and raised in Florida. She is a writer, poet and visual artist. Her memoir Space, about growing up in Florida during the moon race, won an Alex Award from the American Library Association. In 2020, during the pandemic lock down in Uruguay, she began drawing for the first time in her life, posting one drawing a day on social media and developing a large following. Her graphic narratives now appear regularly in literary magazines
What books did you read as a child?
I was a big reader as a child, checking out stacks of books from the library each week, reading everything from Dr. Seuss to Dostoyevsky. One of my favorites was Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped. Looking at it now, I think the art by W.C. Wyeth was probably part of my attraction to the book.
Did you have any prior interest in comics or graphic novels before embarking on your journey with making French Girl?
I confess that for most of my life, I did not. I had taught two as a professor (Maus and Persepolis). But I never really read comics as a kid except for the ones in Mad magazine and a stack of Classics Illustrated comics a friend inherited from her older brother. But once I started in that direction —especially after taking my first (online) comics/graphic narrative class with Kristen Radke during the pandemic — I did a lot of catching up.
How old were you when you wanted to become a writer?
I think I always made up stories. When I was somewhere I could not read — on a family car trip or, much to the dismay of my teachers, sitting in class — I would “write” stories in my head. I always had one going.
You were in Uruguay at the height of the pandemic when you picked up a pack of color pencils at the grocery store, having never drawn before. What pulled you to drawing and telling a story visually as opposed to just prose?
I was locked down in a 10th floor apartment without even a balcony, and I was losing my mind. I’d come to Uruguay to work on an anthology project with a friend, a Uruguayan poet, but I couldn’t even see her. I was spending all my time doom scrolling.
The Queen of Comics Lynda Barry teaches at the university where I was a creative writing professor. Over the years, we shared lots of students and I often asked one of them to do a day of Lynda’s exercises that combine drawing with writing for my students. My undergrads loved it.
And it really helped with the MFA students who are always so tense, thinking their whole lives are at stake with every word they write. It loosened them up. Got them to stop worrying about whether they could be brilliant on demand and remember being creative is fun. So, I think, I just looked at those colored pencils in the store and thought, Oh, I’ll look up some exercises by Lynda Barry and do them. Not because I thought I could draw, really. Just because it would cheer me up or at least distract me from what, at that moment, seemed like the end of the world.
Also, during the pandemic everyone was trying out something new — baking bread (my husband was doing that), knitting. We all had permission to use our hands to quiet our minds.
What was your relationship like to art growing up?
Nonexistent. Or at least I did not think of myself as an artist or capable of making art. I think I got NI (Needs Improvement) on every grade school report card in art. I felt I had made a choice to go through the door marked “Words” not the one marked “Art.” But when I think about it, I realize that is not the whole story. I remember doing two drawing games with my sister. One was “Scribbles,” where my sister would make a random scribble on a page which I had to turn it into something — a woman in a feathered hat, a snake with a monocle, a monster. Then do a scribble for her. The other was “Birds,” where we would work on collective drawing of birds living in a giant tree, in the branches, inside the tree, even underground.
But beyond the required art in elementary school, I never had an art class. Never even thought about taking one. Until March 2020, I would have told you the one thing that was absolutely, irrefutably true about me was that I could not draw.
You have been described as a writer/poet/translator and visual artist. How does this feel? What’s it like to enter into a new medium?
Scary. Each and every time. But I think that is what attracts me to it. Each new genre or art has that dizzying moment where you just have zero idea what you are doing, no past to escape or recreate. I felt that way moving from fiction to poetry, poetry to memoir. It was terrifying to learn Spanish at 53 and begin to translate poetry but also so, so interesting. The new makes me feel alive.
With art, I wanted to escape where and when I was and do something that did not involve staring at a computer screen for more hours of my day.
Did you approach words and images as separate entities or as one body of work from the beginning?
That has been an evolution. At first, I just drew. No words. I drew every day and posted the drawing on social media. My only rule was that once I started, I had to finish. No tearing a drawing up and throwing it away. If I had let myself be embarrassed, be critical, I would have ended up with a pile of crumpled paper and me as an artist would not exist.
But I did have the idea that I wanted to combine words with art.
The work that became French Girl really started in a wonderful class I took with the artist Sarah Lightman through the Royal Drawing School in London. Her class, and others I later took through the school, were full of visual artists who drew easily and struggled with words, the opposite of me. In Lightman’s class, I started drawing, then letting the drawings lead me to the story.
For French Girl, and the pieces I have drawn since I finished the book, that is what I do. I draw, whatever interests me at the moment, trying for a drawing a day. Then sometimes — not always — a few of them start to suggest a narrative. I start drawing with more direction, writing a tentative “script” in my head to guide me. When I have everything or almost everything drawn, I add text.
French Girl has a unique structure in that it is formally innovative and told in sections, with each using a different fairytale or fable as a motif. What drew you to fables to express your personal and familial narrative?
To be honest, it was homework. Or classwork. In the class I took with Sarah Lightman, she gave us a prompt/assignment to use a fairytale. I groaned. I resisted. I have always disliked reworked Grimm fairytales in novels, stories, poems. The second time I got the assignment, in a different class, I decided to just confront Grimm head on and drew “Wolf,” which is in French Girl, and is based on “Little Red Riding Hood,” the fairytale that has been used more than any other, especially for some amazing feminist revisions. I realized it fit a story my mother had told me about her grandmother. I also realized the power of reworking images which are so familiar is that they have an almost religious power to them.
What inspired you to explore girlhood, childhood, sisterhood and motherhood and in tandem? Did you start with narrative, or theme?
I think it started with an obsession. Those are themes I often return to, not only in my previous memoir but in my poetry books as well. But in this case, it started with the drawings and those freed me to “see” the stories differently, re-examine the memories. Because of this, French Girl goes places Space, my “all words” memoir, and my poetry, could not.
Do you have any advice for writers or artists who want to explore mediums they may be unfamiliar with?
Do it! There was a point when you knew nothing about the form you now work in — and you learned and mastered it. What is so scary about doing that again?
What gives me encouragement is thinking of the process, a step at a time. Each day thinking, Okay, another drawing. Okay, a few words on the page. Then, sometimes, you look back and realize you have written (and drawn) a whole book.
What are you most looking forward to with French Girl’s release?
Honestly, what I am really looking forward to most is going to CAKE (Chicago Alternative Comics Expo) in August and SPX (Small Press Expo) in D.C. in September and meeting other comics folks there and seeing all their work.
Otherwise, also honestly, every time I have a book released I am nervous. Like sending a child out into the world — or Little Red Riding Hood into that forest. But I have to have faith kind people will encounter French Girl along the way.
Your background as a poet is evident in the lyricism and seamlessly woven together narrative threads of the book. How does poetry inspire and inform your work?
I do think French Girl is more like my poetry in the way I create it, how I intuitively feel my way into what I want to draw and say. Rob Clough, my editor at Fieldmouse Press, has said more than once the book is “like” a poetry comic or visual poetry. It is like that — but not that. Or not exactly like my poetry, which is a bit less directly narrative. I think it might be more like my lyric essays.
The more I write in different genres, the more I think there are no real boundaries, no clear differences. And now that I draw, the more I agree with Lynda Barry (or my intuition of what she believes) — there is no difference between words and art. We follow our ancestors in struggling to communicate. Cave wall to comics.
NONFICTION French Girl By Jesse Lee Kercheval
Fieldmouse Press
Published September 2024
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