My mother’s been dead since 1982, two thirds of my life. Today, I am perched on a stool at a table in the Comics Room at the University of Wisconsin–Madison trying to remember what she looked like so I…
When I took up drawing during the pandemic, I wanted to shut out the world, turn off the news and my chattering mind, and just concentrate on moving a pencil across the page. In “Drawing My Mother,” I use present tense to mirror the act of drawing. Jeanette Luise Eberhardy in her essay, “Flash Nonfiction and the Art Student: Sharing Tools to Explore How We Make Art,” writes, “For artists who make things with their hands, their materials provide direct and immediate feedback: No hiding from the result.… The materials themselves teach artists to work with what they have in front of them without distraction. They learn to create without the clutter of unnecessary thought.” In other words, to draw is to be in the moment, in the present.
But from the beginning of the essay, I also use present tense to heighten the tension, to make the reader, too, feel they are “perched on a stool at a table in the Comics Room” trying to draw. I wanted them to feel, as a longtime writer but brand-new artist, how hard this is for me, especially since I am trying to draw a mother who has been dead for forty years. But even in a short essay, I can’t stay in the moment and let the reader in on my mother’s troubled life story. And the classic problem with using present tense is this difficulty in folding in past information, in taking a step into the past tense, without jarring the reader with the return to the less commonly used, less familiar present tense of the main story.
In “Drawing My Mother,” I do this by dipping my toes, quickly, into the past, while keeping the tension and immediate conflict in the present. At first, just for part of a sentence: “I stare at my drawing. My mother is still looking away. When my father got a job in Florida, she did not want to leave her job at the treasury department to move and now, it seems, she does not want to be part of my comic.” But later in the essay, I tell the reader about my mother’s past in the meat, the middle of a paragraph, while either starting in or returning to present tense to keep the reader anchored firmly on that stool.
But drawing in this essay is also a stand-in for the act of writing. In the struggle to draw my mother, I have the perfect ekphrastic subject for the real problem in the essay, which is trying to bring my mother to life with words, not lines. Though I am the author of a graphic memoir, French Girl, that does have drawings of my mother, this flash essay is not a comic. Here we only get to see my mother through words, to follow my struggle to know my mother in words: “Gently, I turn her around to face me.”
Even the final drawing exists only in words.
JESSE LEE KERCHEVAL is a writer, translator, and artist. Her most recent poetry collections are I Want to Tell You (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023) and Un pez dorado no te sirve para nada (Editorial Yaugurú, Uruguay, 2023). Her essays and graphic essays have won awards from New Letters and the New Ohio Review, and have appeared in Guernica, New England Review, Ploughshares, Fourth Genre, Image, and elsewhere. She is also the author of the memoir Space (Algonquin Books, 1998), winner of the Alex Award from the American Library Association; and the graphic memoir, French Girl (Fieldmouse Press, 2024), named by The Washington Post as one of the Best Graphic Novels of 2024. Find her on Instagram @jlkerche.
