An Interview with Summer Pierre
"Where ego ends and where vulnerability begins"
We had the pleasure of zooming into one of Summer Pierre’s presentations about drawing diary comics and book reviews last year and have since greatly enjoyed her birding comics and diary comics on Instagram. Below, she discusses how a daily art practice helps to diffuse perfectionism and the joys and challenges of making personal, nonfiction comics, such as the difficulty in gauging where ego ends and where vulnerability begins.
Describe your comics journey—how did you get into making comics?
I made comics as a kid right up until college when I thought I had to get “serious” and do something that had some prestigious future (ha ha). So I did everything else for the next 20 years: poetry, fiction, film, photography, illustration, music, nonfiction…until all of that dried up and I found myself back to comics about 9 years ago. It was like finding myself home. Something inside me was like: where have you been? Lucky for me, comics use all of the skills and modes I had been honing using all those other art forms. I’ve never looked back!
How did you develop your "voice"/unique comics style?
A lot of drawing writing drawing and writing, and finding out where I needed to go. My previous 20 years of working as an artist had been about pleasing an audience, a market, or an editor. I made a promise to myself with comics that it would be entirely about finding out where I wanted to go first and letting the rest follow (if it did!). What I’ve learned is that there are no short cuts to finding your voice other than to just keep doing the things YOU are interested in doing regardless of others ideas and desires. Some things that helped: making comics a daily practice with very simple tools: a pen and paper, short time spans, and nothing else. No ruler, no pencil and eraser and not a lot of time to overthink. I still go back to this when I get stuck. Most of my "blocks" come from overthinking and perfectionism. This idea of just starting with what you have and with specific limits (like short time frames) has helped me continue making work more times than I can count!
What are some of the joys and challenges of making nonfiction comics?
The profound joys of making nonfiction work have been seeing something emerge that was once invisible. I don’t make work because I think I have a particularly fascinating story or I’m especially interesting as a person, but because so much of my life I felt wasn’t seen—and I’m trying to make it visible to myself. That I’m able to do this at all feels like a miracle. I also just love looking at life and finding out how it works—not just mine, but others. I've been doing this my whole life—it's endlessly fascinating! Some of the challenges of making nonfiction comics are the challenges of any life in the arts—it can be strangely lonely, hard to gauge sometimes where your ego ends and where vulnerability begins. When your material is “life”—sometimes it can be hard to know when to stop making something of your life and just live it. I need breaks and joy and fresh air like anyone who works—this is always a challenge to know when you need to let go and simply let yourself live for a while without the need to narrate or make something of it.
Are you working on something now?
I’m working on a memoir about my mother, who was a stagehand & rigger in the rock ‘n’ roll industry for 30 years and my chaotic childhood. I’m also doing an ongoing diary of my birding adventures, which I post to my Patreon. It started out very lighthearted, but if I’m being honest, it is turning into a book of its own. I’m hopeful these will become at least an issue (or two!) of Paper Pencil Life, my ongoing comics series.
Summer Pierre is a cartoonist living in the Hudson Valley of New York. She is the author of the Eisner nominated memoir, All the Sad Songs, and the highly acclaimed autobiographical comics series Paper Pencil Life. Her comic on the letters of Sylvia Plath, for Newyorker.com, “Sylvia Plath’s Last Plan,” was a finalist for the Slate Studio Prize. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, NewYorker.com, PEN American, The Comics Journal, among other places. She is currently at work on a new memoir for Fantagraphics.