Writer and Comics Artist Marnie Galloway with Carol Tilley
In a class I teach at the University of Illinois for future librarians on helping readers find comics they’ll enjoy, I regularly share a two-page spread from Marnie Galloway’s mini-comic Medusa. I love how Galloway depicts Medusa both visually and conceptually, an outsider who so wants to be accepted for who she is. Medusa is visibly exasperated, wounded, certainly less fearsome than her usual mythological portrayal. Her lightly patterned cerise features erupt from the minimalist setting rendered in cool blues. Galloway’s clear evocation of what it means to feel peculiar in the world resonates with me and my students, many of whom respond with a knowing enthusiasm.
I’m not sure which I read first, Medusa or Mare Cognitum, but whichever it was made me fall in love with Marnie Galloway’s cartooning and literary sensibilities, which she has continued developing in works like Particle/Wave and In the Sounds and Seas. In the past couple of years, I’ve also enjoyed getting to know a little more about Marnie through following her on Twitter. Consequently It has been my immense pleasure to be asked to interview Marnie for ABH. I hope you’ll enjoy my conversation with Marnie.
You’ve mentioned in other interviews that you find nourishment and inspiration in poetry and literary fiction. What authors or books have been nourishing you recently? Between parenting and the pandemic, have you even been able to read? I know reading hasn’t been easy for me this past year.
It has been such a challenge to read consistently for the past five years or so, which took on the weight of an identity crisis because I think of myself as Such A Reader! I became a parent in 2016, and between parenthood and the emotional/mental space the last presidential administration took up I all but stopped being able to read for pleasure.
Around the new year I decided to replace podcast listening with audiobooks, which has been a lifesaver for my reading life. I’ve been galloping through books, it’s marvelous—it feels like throwing compost and sunshine and water over fields that have lain fallow for too long. Ishiguro is one of my favorite authors to re-read, and his new book Klara and the Sun haunted me for weeks after I finished it. I wasn’t expecting it to have so many things to say about parenthood and care work!
I also recently read and loved The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa, Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk, My Autobiography of Carson McCullersby Jenn Shapland, and the new translation of Beowulf by Maria Dahvana Headley, which was a complete delight.
I also have a soft spot for science nonfiction; Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake, which is about fungus, completely blew my mind. The only hitch about audiobooks is you can’t really linger in the language of a passage because it passes by at the pace of conversation, so I’m sure I missed some important texture in the books I’ve read recently, and poetry just doesn’t work for me in that form. I need to be able to underline and re-read.
Tell me a little about young Marnie. How did you like to spend your time?
I was a quiet, smart kid, and very isolated as a contained unit with my brother and sister. My family moved a lot—I lived in Texas, Connecticut, and Virginia when I was very little, Alabama for elementary school, Arkansas for middle school, and back to Texas for high school, plus I spent summers with my dad, in San Antonio but also North Carolina and Arkansas.
My mom is brilliant and loving, and so hard working—she started college when I was in third grade, and got her PhD by the time I was a sophomore in college—and also she spent those years living with extreme PTSD, depression, and periodic suicidal ideation & suicide attempts, all of which were a huge and openly discussed part of our home life. (She is candid talking about that time now, which is why I feel comfortable sharing it.)
Even when I made friends I felt very apart from my peers as a kid, and didn’t join many extracurricular activities until high school, and only then because college applications were on my mind. All of the things I loved doing were things I did by myself anyway—drawing and reading, mostly, but also going deep on movies and tv. I used to give myself projects; when I was in third grade I watched all of Hitchcock’s movies after finding Marnie in Blockbuster. (Not a good one to start with!) I watched Auntie Mame over and over until I could recite most of the dialog along with the movie.
One summer I lived deep in the woods in central Arkansas without my siblings, just me and my dad, and I spent all day alone while he was at work watching only game shows from the 1970s on The Gameshow Network, reading only Victor Hugo novels over and over, watching only Peter Sellers movies, listening only to Billie Holiday.
I wasn’t exclusively engaging with anachronistic culture—I can sing from memory the theme song to Hey Dude or Fresh Prince of Bel Aire like any self-respecting geriatric millennial—but that was how I got through an often lonely childhood.
As a kid, did you think of yourself as creative?
I don’t think I thought of myself as creative, even though I made things all the time! Both of my parents make things: my mom quilts, weaves, embroiders, and spins fiber, and she plays guitar and sings beautifully; my dad is a builder, his career was in construction and he is a very skilled carpenter and tinkerer, and he liked drawing with me. Making things was just kind of what you do, a part of life. You breathe, you cook dinner, you make things. It still feels that way.
You’ve lived in so many places! Aside from your own house, where do you feel most at home?
Oh gosh, places exist outside my home?! This is a hard question—between the last year of COVID seclusion, and the last five years of being at home with little kids, “other places” has become an abstract idea!
If I’m not at home, I want to be walking around the city. If my destination is within 3 miles, I walk. For a decade my husband and I spent our Friday date night meeting up after work downtown and walking the 8 miles home (later only 6 when we moved out of Rogers Park), debriefing after the work week and laughing and stopping in somewhere for a bite to eat. I didn’t own a car as an adult until after my second kid was born—the delay was partly to save money, partly because bus & train infrastructure is so convenient, partly for environmental reasons, but honestly, mostly because we wanted to build a life around walking as much as we could.
In spite of all of the very obvious problems, I love Chicago so much. Getting to be fully in this city I love by walking everywhere makes me feel deeply connected to my neighbors and neighborhood and city around me. Chicago is the best.
In thinking about your body of work—whether a longer-form comic like In the Sounds and Seas, a short comic like Medusa, or even your illustration work, I’m taken by the patterns, repetition, and rhythm that abound. As a reader / viewer, I find them to be grounding, almost meditative, but also propulsive, electric. How do you view their place in your art and writing? Is there any connection to your background studying logic?
Since I was little I’ve loved aesthetics of dense abundance and heavy patterns—from Where’s Waldo to Edward Gorey to laying outside on my stomach as a kid and looking closely at the variance in the texture of moss.
Looking closely is meditative for me as well; I’m not a religious person but sitting and observing something close enough to draw it is a prayerful act for me. It is a gesture of love, it creates love, to look with that much care. I love that the more I look, the closer I observe, the closer I get, the more there is to discover.
Learning about fractals as a kid, thinking about expanding the area of visual attention outward as easily as inward, blew my little mind and got me on a path of interest in math, which got me into logic.
I wouldn’t say that my college background in logic informed my later work as a cartoonist beyond honing my ability to articulate my thoughts clearly and write with confidence (which isn’t nothing!), but both interests do emerge from the same core. It has been a useful challenge to learn to cartoon with simpler gestures and forms, but my heart will always be in that dense visual rhythm.
Do you find that making comics affords you the same kind of “looking closely” / meditative / spiritual moments that you might experience looking at some natural element or in reading someone else’s exquisite words?
I know I’m making something good when I get that feeling, yes! It doesn’t always happen, sometimes pages just need hours thrown at them to get finished—so much of making comics is just production logistics—but I know a page is really working when I get that extra charge of something bordering on transcendent. I worry this sounds silly, but when my brain and heart line up on a page, the act of creating the image is more than the act of creating the image.
I can reread older comics and know by looking which pages had something extra happening on top of the mark of the ink. I don’t know if that translates to the reader’s experience, but I feel really excited when I get that for myself.
How has being a mother changed how you think about your comics and creative work?
Becoming a mother has changed me and my creative work in ways I wouldn’t have anticipated, especially the last year and a half of parenting through the pandemic, which was a raw, nerves-flapping-in-the-wind parody of what parenthood had been like before. I became a parent a few days after my 31st birthday, and now I am 36 and I have 3 kids, ages 5, almost 3, and 6 months. I spent most of these past 5 years full time at home with my kids (childcare is so expensive!), working nights and weekends fighting to keep alive the creative practice I worked so hard to discover in my 20s.
It’s impossible to disentangle what changed because I became a parent and what changed just by virtue of getting older and having the perspective of time away from the grind, but I feel like I am much more grounded in what I have to say as an artist and cartoonist now compared to when I was in my 20s and staying up ‘til 4am to finish inking a page before going to an office job the next day.
Parenthood has changed my scope of understanding. I want to set my children up for vibrant, empathetic, deeply feeling lives well past my own lifetime. I want to be a good ancestor. I want to make work that I will be proud of on that scale, rather than measuring my worth (like I used to) on the annual cycle of awards and comic conventions. That sense of generational scope has helped me know what projects to say yes and (more importantly) no to.
I feel more acutely aware that I only have X many more books to make in my lifetime, and I want each of them to be worthy of that life spent. It has made me more ambitious and more focused. I want my kids to be proud of me, you know? It is a real gift to have that perspective.
Which comic of yours would you recommend to someone who wants to know who you are and what you’re about? Why?
I spent the majority of my years making comics on the graphic novel In the Sounds and Seas, which I think it stands up as the most complete artistic statement I have yet had the opportunity to make. It is a wordless epic in the form of an ocean adventure that explores what happens when an obsessive creative project fails.
I am also proud of Particle/Wave and Burrow, two short comics I have made since becoming a parent. Particle/Wave is a two-sided comic that collides a pair of autobio comics about family, identity, grief, and the moon; Burrow is a poetic fiction comic that explores postpartum identity dissolution and reassembly.
They all are reaching towards what I want to make, but I still don’t think I have made the thing that I am supposed to make yet. I am still in this absurd career because I think I have something meaningful to contribute in this medium, and I don’t think I’ve made it yet. This fall my oldest will be in kindergarten and we will be able to get my younger two into childcare, so I will be diving back into my work over the next couple of months. I’m excited to share what comes next.
Marnie, thank you for spending some of your time chatting with me. I hope we get to do it in person one day.
Thanks again so much for the time and care you have spent on this conversation. It has been such a treat to get to talk with you!
About Marnie Galloway
Marnie Galloway is a Chicago-based cartoonist and illustrator working primarily in fiction and poetic comics. Her first graphic novel In the Sounds and Seas was published in 2016 by One Peace Books, a collection of the Xeric Award winning self-published series. It made the Notable Comics list in Best American Comics, and was mentioned in the Best Comics of 2016 round-up by the AV Club. Other comics of note include Particle/Wave, published by So What? Press; Burrow, self published with support from the Pulitzer Arts Foundation; and Slightly Plural, a short collection of poetry comics.
To learn more about Marnie, visit her website; to purchase her comics, go to Radiator Comics.
About Carol Tilley
Dr. Tilley is an associate professor in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In addition to teaching future librarians, she is a comics scholar, focusing on comics history and readership. She is a past president of the Comics Studies Society and was a judge for the 2015 Will Eisner Comics Industry Awards.
To learn more about Carol, visit her website or follow her on Twitter.