Kelcey Ervick is a creative whirlwind and a pleasure to know. She's inspired me to try out my hand with some drawing*, and I certainly hope you'll try it too, after reading this interview--then sign up for more of her wisdom and insight in her sessions at MWW23!

*it wasn't great, and I'm not sure a reader would know what it was, but I was proud of myself for doing it!


MWW:  I love the way you blend images and illustrations with words. Have you always told stories that way? Was it a sort of “eureka” moment or a more gradual intertwining?

KE: One eureka moment I had was reading Maira Kalman’s 2007 book, Principles of Uncertainty, filled with her gouache paintings of everything from an extinct dodo bird to Louise Bourgeois’ bathroom and lettered by hand in her whimsical writing. I’d recently gotten my PhD in English and it was a revelation: the images, the handlettering, the playful prose. I remember thinking, “You can do this?” Soon after, I read Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, which is a haunting personal and literary story of her father’s death told through comics, and I had the same thought, “You can do this?” My visual storytelling is hugely influenced by the openness of Maira Kalman’s pages and the layered, literary narrative of Alison Bechdel’s books.

MWW: How does the incorporation of images enhance or underscore the themes or aboutness of a work?

Visual elements such as color palette, lines (weight, straightness, etc), and visual style (realistic, expressive, etc.) do so much work to underscore the subject matter and themes. You know at a glance if the work is serious and powerful like Kristen Radtke’s precise and sophisticated digital illustrations in Seek You: A Journey through American Loneliness; or filled with personal, humorous social commentary like Mira Jacob’s collage/zine-style in Good Talk,; or brimming with characters and community in the lively ink lines of Ebony Flowers’ Hot Comb.

I also love how images can take on metaphorical meanings and become a visual motif. In my graphic memoir The Keeper, I write about my club soccer team that I played on the 1980s, the Cardinals (named for Ohio’s state bird). Throughout the book I used the language and imagery of cardinals—in flocks, as homebodies, in flight—to reflect the book’s themes of friendship, loneliness, and finding my own path. 

MWW: What is a common misconception people have about graphic novels and writing with images that isn't so?

KE: There are lots, but I’ll address two of them:
That it’s not serious writing. It’s what I thought too before I read Fun Home and Persepolis and Maus. Graphic novels are made in the same medium as newspaper cartoons and there’s an association with lightness and comedy (the “funnies”). Plus there are pictures, which people associate with children’s books, so they seem dumbed down or for kids. I remember reading Fun Home and thinking, you can talk about Virginia Woolf in a comic?

The other misconception people often have is that they can’t draw and therefore they can’t make comics. But I get my students, who have very little experience drawing, to make the most beautiful, hilarious, thoughtful, and introspective comics. Readers just need to know what it is you’re drawing. Draw a car, a house, a bird. Ask someone if they can identify what you drew. Yes? Great. Start making a comic!