Kercheval painted the dreamlike illustrations, combining words and art in new ways.
“Life, if we’re lucky, is long and there is time to learn new ways of doing and seeing,” says Jesse Lee Kercheval.
Kercheval, novelist, poet, essayist and longtime director of the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, can now add artist and graphic memoirist to her resume with the publication of French Girl (Fieldmouse Press).
“I love taking up new challenges,” says Kercheval, 68. In her 50s, for example, she learned Spanish to translate such Uruguayan poets as Circe Maia and Silvia Guerra, whose poetry she loved teaching to her UW-Madison students.
Then she took up visual art at 64. She was in Montevideo, Uruguay, working on an anthology of Uruguayan poetry, when the COVID pandemic hit, and everything shut down. In her rented apartment she wanted to do something other than doomscrolling on her computer. “I bought a box of colored pencils and a pad of paper and began drawing for the first time in my life,” she says. “Before that, my life was words. I kept drawing.”
She produced a drawing a day and her art began to find a following on Facebook. She soon added X and Instagram. She continues to use all three to highlight what she’s working on.
As soon as she got back to the U.S., she began taking art classes with Larry Stevens, an artist and former Middleton High School instructor. “I owe so much to him,” Kercheval says.
From there she took online classes and studied with Amy Kurzweil and Kristin Radtke. Kercheval then took her first, and so far only, in-person class, a semester-long comics workshop with UW-Madison colleague Lynda Barry. “Any class with Lynda is a life-changing experience,” says Kercheval, “and she taught me to combine words and art in ways that had never occurred to me before.”
After publishing individual art pieces that make up French Girl in literary magazines and winning some prizes, she queried Fieldmouse Press about publishing her graphic novel: “Bless them, gave me a contract for the book.”
French Girl is a series of personal stories told with expressionistic, dreamlike illustrations, accompanied by spare, unflinching text, highlighting girlhood, sisterhood, motherhood. “I am always aware that history — even family history — disappears with the people who lived it,” Kercheval says, “except for the history that makes its way into books.”
The title comes from Kercheval’s birth in France, although she was raised in Florida and lived most of her adult life in Wisconsin.
Kercheval retired from UW-Madison in 2023 and is now traveling the world, continuing to both draw and write. “Doing the work itself, the making of it, is the reward.
“At the heart of every work of art is the truth, literal or metaphorical, about what it means to be alive,” she adds. “That search for truth matters.”
Sometimes, the search calls for colored pencils.
Kercheval will be presenting from French Girl on Dec. 4 at A Room of One’s Own.
