Interview: Jesse Lee Kercheval
Poet, translator, memoirist, fiction writer, and visual artist Jesse Lee Kercheval’s recently released graphic memoir French Girl portrays seventeen episodes from throughout Kercheval’s life, rendered in vibrant color by Kercheval herself. It showcases the powerful immediacy of Kercheval’s twenty previous books while introducing readers to an expressionist visual style that lies somewhere between Henry Darger’s Vivian Girls and a book of visions. The pains of loss, womanhood, and family are rendered through hypnotic lenses, and each section brings with it a mysterious and strong nostalgia.
In the following interview, Jesse Lee was gracious enough to answer my questions about the origins of French Girl’s captivating tales, her recently published flash creative nonfiction essay in CRAFT, and the relationship between memory and storytelling.
—Stephen Meisel
Stephen Meisel: You’ve mentioned in previous interviews that you began these pieces by drawing. After that, you would write a story to fit with the images. How does this process work for some of the more fantastical stories in the book, especially when the stories play so much with memory and autobiography? How does this play out in a story like “Bang” where a hole at the center of the narrator’s chest grows from an “infinitesimally small singularity” into an exploding light that enshrines her daughter and all the women of her ancestry, “back to the beginning of time”?
Jesse Lee Kercheval: Most of the pieces in French Girl did begin with drawing rather than writing. After so many years as a writer, if I start with words, I end up with way too many words for a comic. And if I write first, then draw, I end up drawing the very thing I write. Write “apple” and draw an “apple.” The idea is for the words and images to be different, for each to add something new to the whole.
“Bang” was the last piece I drew for French Girl. Each October since 2001, my husband and I have gone to a silent film festival, Le Giornate de Cinema Muto, in Pordenone, Italy. In 2023, we also went to Padua and Florence. I was obsessed with all the Madonnas and angels we saw in churches and museums. When we came back, I went to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts for a month to finish French Girl, and I started to draw what I’d seen. I’d been especially struck by the paintings where the saints seemed to have dark halos, the result of the gilding turning from gold to black over the centuries. As I drew, the images connected with a teenage memory of being in a car coming back from roller skating with friends and realizing I felt like I had a wound in my chest, a deep sadness. A black spot I could touch. Then that memory joined with ones about my mother’s depression, which is a recurring theme in French Girl. As I drew, the Madonnas and angels became the women in my family and, as you mentioned, I followed my ancestors back through time to the Big Bang. Once I was there, I knew what I was trying to say. I drew the last images—the light entering the universe, illuminating my daughter and all the children—knowing where I wanted the story to end.
So the first step was, and nearly always is, drawing until I realize what the story is for me. Why angels? Then I add the words and draw final images to bring everything together.
SM: You’re an established translator of Uruguayan poetry. Do you find there’s any intersection between the act of translation and connecting images and words?
JLK: I didn’t learn Spanish until I was in my fifties, did not start to draw until my sixties. I think both are ways to see the world with fresh colors and sounds. In “Verde,” an essay I wrote for The American Scholar about my first Spanish lessons, I describe that sense of newness: “On the second day, I learned verde. Green. I shivered. I was in a concrete, windowless room, but I could see verde—leaves, limes, avocados. I had worn out good old green. After 30 years teaching writing in an English department, when I said the word, all I saw were the letters G R E E N, like tiles in a game of Scrabble. But verde. I rolled it around on my tongue. I could taste it. I could smell it. Verde smelled like being alive.”
I would say my feeling when I open a new box of soft pastels—perhaps one with all shades of green—is the same. As a translator, no longer a beginner language student, my work is with the subtle shades of green, as it were, but it is still a constant world of discoveries. And so is my drawing.
SM: French Girl marks your first foray into the graphic novel, and you’ve spoken about having relatively minimal knowledge of comics beforehand. Beyond comics, did you have particular periods or artists that fascinated you? Some of the images in French Girl remind me of medieval art in their subjects and perspective.
JLK: I confess I was never a comics person. I read the Sunday comics in the newspaper when I was a kid. I once taught Maus. Since I started drawing, I’ve learned a lot about the amazing graphic novels and memoirs that have come out in the last decades. But I have always loved art. One of the first books I can remember having as a child was called Twenty Centuries of Art and I remember staring at the reproduction of God’s finger touching Adam’s in the Sistine Chapel. I mentioned my recent trip to Padua and Florence above and I have always loved medieval art.
Also, the impressionists, the surrealists, and American folk art. My husband is a historian of photography, pre-cinema, and silent film (thus the silent film conference) and I am fascinated by those images as well. I wrote both a novel (My Life as a Silent Movie) and a book of poems (Cinema Muto) about silent film. Pordenone, where the film festival is held, is an hour north of Venice so every other year we go to the Biennale there. We went this fall. And the Biennale is like being fire hosed with art, so much art you feel like you are hallucinating.
So I think my brain was full of images when I finally started to draw—but it was a struggle to get them onto the page!
SM: All of the images in French Girl are drawn in soft pastels. Do you prefer colored pencils? Why or why not? Are you looking to try other materials/utensils?
JLK: I started drawing in March 2020 with colored pencils. When the pandemic hit, I got locked down in a rented apartment in Montevideo, Uruguay, where I had gone to work on a translation project. I was losing my mind doomscrolling on my computer so on a hurried trip to the supermarket, I bought a big box of colored pencils and started to draw for the first time in my life. When I finally got back to Wisconsin, I switched to charcoal and left color behind for a while. Then one day I added a red berry in the beak of a rather surreal bird. And that touch was pastel. After that, I got more and more into soft pastels, which in spite of our common use of that word (pastel meaning pale colors) are vibrant sticks of nearly pure pigment. They look like bright sticks of chalk. They are not the same as oil pastels, which are more like very fancy crayons. I love the way I can smudge and smear soft pastels. Erase the colors, add layers.
But I also love watercolors. Tube or liquid watercolors are also vibrant, not just pale washes. The wonderful graphic novelist Leela Corman does her work in watercolor. Check out her new book Victory Parade if you want to see vibrant color (and read a great book). I have used watercolor a bit but want to work with it more and see where that gets me. I also have done just a little bit of Japanese ink with brushes and would like to do more, circling back to just black and white.
SM: In your flash essay, “Drawing My Mother” in CRAFT, you write about some difficulty you had when first attempting to portray your mother through a visual medium. Did you have any other hesitations about treating personal subject matter within the comics medium? Was there anything that surprised you about it once you began?
JLK: Everything about drawing and writing French Girl was a surprise. My first idea was to do a graphic memoir version of what I now think of as my “all word” memoir, Space, which covers my growing up in Florida during the moon race. I tried that, even published a couple of sections in literary magazines, but it just didn’t work the way I wanted it to. Too many words! And it was a story I had already told. I could not make it visual enough. So I started just drawing, as I described above, and that helped me tap into memories I had not already used in Space, ones I had never put into words. French Girl is more surreal, more dreamlike, because of that. The art helped me reach deeper into the story, discovering both pain and joy.
SM: Speaking of the difficulties in drawing family members, you’ve written about your family previously, in your memoir Space (among other works). Do you believe that the closer we are to someone, the more difficult it is to portray them, in print or art?
JLK: I do think that is true. As hard as we try, stories in word or graphic form reduce the people we know to characters and no character is as complicated as a real human. But to be honest, I think the person I struggle with most is myself. I actually wrote Space after I finished my first novel, The Museum of Happiness, because I realized the more a character was like me, the less I liked her and the harder it was for me to write about her. I thought I needed to explore that idea, to give Girl Me a chance to find herself on the page. And I think I did that with Space but had that struggle all over again with French Girl.
SM: Do you think the mechanics of storytelling change when so much of the narrative is told visually? I imagine the classic witticisms about showing, telling, and clichéd openers may apply a little differently.
JLK: I think my big shock was the one I mentioned earlier—you can’t just say “apple” and draw an apple. Unless you are doing a children’s alphabet book. Something in the art has to fill in the scene, the character, the mood. Add what is not in the words. And the art needs to do a lot of work because the hardest thing for me with comics is how very few words you get.
SM: What is the value of examining the same incident through different media? For example, “Drawing My Mother” describes some events that overlap with the story “The Body Is a Vessel” in French Girl.
JLK: Ah, I am afraid I am guilty of working on my themes—my obsessions—in every available media. I write poems about breaking my back as a kid or about silent films, then about the same events or topics in essays, a memoir, a novel. Draw it in a graphic essay or graphic memoir. I find something different in each version. They are never the same work. It is a bit like a sketch, then a full drawing. A close up, then the full scene. In “Drawing My Mother” the words do the work. In “The Body Is a Vessel,” the art, the images, carry 99 percent of the weight.
SM: From “Drawing My Mother” to Space to your most recent poetry collection, I Want to Tell You, your work is full of the tension between what we can remember or dream versus what actually happens, the women and men we actually become. French Girl also explores this tension but feels, even in its text, uniquely surreal and restrained compared to your other work. Did this quality emerge from the process, or was it a vision you had for the work beforehand?
JLK: In French Girl, it was really a result of the process and took me quite by surprise. But you are right that the wavering, blurred line between fiction and truth in memory is something that obsesses me. The longer I live, the more I think there is barely any distinction at all. We are unreliable narrators of our own lived experience, but that is what makes memoirs so fascinating.
SM: Beyond simply being forgotten, do you believe that memories change over time? Do we remember the event itself or a faded recollection of it? Intuitively, not scientifically speaking.
JLK: Our memories change all the time. Leaving aside the question of whether they are accurate or true or not to start with (i.e., our memories are not body cameras and are subjective by nature), there is no stability to them. Once my mother-in-law told me a story about how during World War IIwhen her husband moved them to New York City to work in a shipyard, he first suggested they live in a lighthouse that was for rent. Her point in telling me the story was how impossible that suggestion was, how ridiculous. She had two small children and the lighthouse, from her point of view, was a toddler death trap. They ended up in a basement apartment. When she told me this story, I didn’t have kids and I thought, Who in the world would choose a lightless basement over a lighthouse? Later, when I had two small children, my memory of her story changed. I was sure when she told me, I had shared her anger at her husband, too detached as a father to realize a lighthouse was an impossible place for toddlers. Which is right? All of them. None of them. And by the end of her life, her memories unraveling, if I had asked her, she might not have remembered the lighthouse at all.
SM: If you could pick a small inexpensive object to represent French Girl metaphorically, what would it be?
JLK: I have a small silver hand, cut from tin, that I bought in Mexico years ago that has a flaming red heart painted in the palm. That. Exactly.
SM: In your book Building Fiction, you write that Rust Hills once called you “the last living metafictionist.” Any plans to carry this title over to the comics?
JLK: I will take that as a challenge! You will have to read the next book and see if I succeed.
STEPHEN MEISEL is a writer living in Atlanta, Georgia. His poetry and fiction reviews have appeared in University of Iowa’s Exchanges: A Literary Journal of Translation, Heavy Feather Review, and the Southern Review of Books.
JESSE LEE KERCHEVAL is a poet, writer, graphic artist, and translator specializing in Uruguayan poetry. Her latest books are the poetry collection America that Island off the coast of France, winner of the Dorset Prize, and the short story collection Underground Women. Her recent essays have appeared in Guernica, The Sewanee Review, Gargoyle, Entropy, Blackbird, Brevity, Atticus Review, Five Points, and the New England Review. Her graphic narratives and illustrated essays have appeared in Waxwing, Quarantine Public Library, and On the Seawall. She loves a good root beer float in an ice-cold frosted mug. Find her on Instagram @jlkerche.
