Working On Gallery
Vol. 6 - No.6
Guest: Jesse Lee Kercheval
Curator: Naoko Fujimoto
Guest: Jesse Lee Kercheval
Curator: Naoko Fujimoto
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I first learned about Jesse Lee Kercheval’s artwork for the RHINO Reviews Graphic Issue in 2023. She reviewed The Lady of Elche by Amanda Berenguer and Translation by Kristin Dykstra (Veliz Books, 2023). Because of her review, I learned about Veliz Books. They publish translation manuscripts, and I love all their translators. The publishing world is fascinatingly connected. Later, I learned that Veliz Books and Toad Press work together. My first translation chapbook will be out from Toad Press this fall.
Kercheval’s artwork is breathtaking. It is soft and has pastel tones, but some strong volition radiates from her lines. She often posts her drawings on her Instagram account. I highly recommend following her to observe her everyday creative processes. |
RHINO Reviews Graphic Issue 2023
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…the clerk took her time to wrap it all carefully in white paper, then place it all in a large colorful bag before she sent me on my way, as if she knew I was buying myself a present.
Then for the first time in my life, I started to draw." - Jesse Lee Kercheval
French Girl (Fieldmouse Press, 2024)
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I did not know in 2023 that she just started drawing during the pandemic, and I found a strange connection with her. I started translating during the pandemic as if I was finally realizing my “Japanese native tongue” as a gift. It was an abnormal time—some people tried new things and found possibilities in disconnected surroundings with sudden limitations. Do we still remember the act of kneading, palms stuck to gluten? Fingers glued to wet flour lumps? How many people continue kneading from sourdough bread to Croissants? It is exciting that Kercheval completed and recently released her graphic memoir, French Girl (Fieldmouse Press, 2024). She keeps drawing, writing, and translating. Here, I found another creative role model.
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No Boxes
Jesse Lee Kercheval
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I hate being put in a box. Physically. Artistically.
In March 2020, I was in Montevideo, Uruguay, working on an anthology of Uruguayan women poets when the pandemic hit and, between one day and the next, the borders closed and I was locked down in a physical box, a rented 10th floor apartment without so much as a balcony, with too much time to scroll through all the terrible news. My contact with the outside world was reduced to a weekly nervous trip to the supermarket. One week, when I was hurrying to buy groceries, I saw someone ring the door buzzer of an office supply store and be let in. I looked through the window and saw art supplies. I buzzed and was let in. Sure enough, there beside the paperclips was a box of 72 Staedler colored pencils which had made the long journey from Germany to Montevideo. I also bought three pads of paper and took it all to the counter. I did it nervously, masked. But the clerk took her time to wrap it all carefully in white paper, then place it all in a large colorful bag before she sent me on my way, as if she knew I was buying myself a present.
Then for the first time in my life, I started to draw. I kept at it, drawing every day. My only rule was that I had to finish what I started. No tearing it up and throwing it away.
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Art by Jesse Lee Kercheval
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But that was not the first time I crossed the borders between art forms or genres, escaped a locked box. In 1984, when I was admitted to the Iowa Writers Workshop, it was as if I entered through door with FICTION chiseled in stone above it. Poets came in through another, not entirely imaginary, door. Fiction writers were not allowed to take poetry workshops. But one day, I followed the poet Gerald Stern down the hall to his office and begged him to let me in his workshop. Gerry loved the dramatic. I threw myself on the linoleum floor and pulling at my clothes. He laughed--and let me in to his workshop, a life changing experience, a boundary crossing experience.
Instagram @jlkerche
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Then, in the years that followed, I kept wandering, climbing over walls put between genres only to find they were not really walls, just dotted lines on an old map, like the border between two states that is only marked by a rusted sign. I crossed into nonfiction, writing my memoir Space.
I often meet someone who is surprised I am the same person who wrote two books they read, a novel AND a poetry collection. Somehow they think there are two different authors named Jesse Lee Kercheval, though since my name is so unusual (singularly google-able) that seems slightly absurd. But they expect their writers, their artists to stay in one box.
To be honest, I am not sure why I keep trying new forms. My husband says I am restless—and he does not think that is entirely a good thing. I know I like to learn new things—and do things that scare me. In 2010, I decided to learn Spanish and spent a sabbatical year in Uruguay. I fell in love with Uruguayan poetry and this time I crossed a language frontier to become a translator, publishing my first translation The Invisible Bridge by Circe Maia in 2015. And that is what brought me to the rented apartment in Uruguay where the pandemic gave me the gift of art.
Now I have drawn and written a graphic memoir, French Girl which has just been published.
And I wonder where I should wander next. |
Jesse Lee Kercheval is a poet, writer and translator, specializing in Uruguayan poetry. Her most the poetry collections are I Want to Tell You (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023), Un pez dorado no te sirve para nada (Editorial Yaugurú, Uruguay, 2023) and America that island off the coast of France (Tupelo Books, 2019), winner of the Dorset Prize, and the story collection Underground Women (c 2019). Her translations include Love Poems by Idea Vilariño and The Invisible Bridge: Selected Poems of Circe Maia, for which she was awarded an NEA in Translation, both published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. She is the co-editor of the anthology of Uruguayan women poets, Flores raras: Escondido país (Editorial Yaugurú/ Dialogos Books, 2024). Her memoir, Space, was the winner of the Alex Award from the American Library Association. She is the Zona Gale Professor Emerita of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Series Editor of the Wisconsin Poetry Series at the University of Wisconsin Press. Her graphic essays won Nonfiction Awards from New Letters and the New Ohio Review, and have appeared in Fourth Genre, the Los Angeles Review, Image, the Chicago Quarterly Review and elsewhere. Her graphic essays have appeared in Her graphic memoir, French Girl, is forthcoming from Fieldmouse Press. www.jlkercheval.com
August 2024
