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5.14 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 1 0 3 By Lynnell Edwards DRAWN TO STORYTELLING D anica Novgorodof describes herself as an "artist, writer, graphic design- er, horse wrangler and marathon runner." Currently living in New York City, the 33-year-old Louisville native and graduate of Ballard High School and Yale Uni- versity works as a freelance graphic designer, illustrator, teacher and artist, and is the author of four graphic novels, most recently Te Undertaking of Lily Chen, about the emergence of an archaic marriage ritual in modern China. In April, Novgorodof had her frst solo exhibit in Louisville and appeared at the Kentucky School of Art at Spalding University, where she'll be teaching a special course in narrative drawing during May and June. Can you venture a working defnition of a graphic novel? "A graphic novel is a novel-length form of comics in which a narrative story is told through pictures and text. Will Eisner, one of the frst graphic novelists, defned comics as 'sequential art,' so graphic novels are sequential art in a longer format. In a graphic novel, there are more pictures than text — as opposed to a chapter book with illustrations, for example. People often associate graphic novels with the more literary end of the comics spectrum." How do the words and the images work together in a graphic novel? "I most often start a new work with an image in my mind, around which I build a narra- tive. For example, Te Undertaking of Lily Chen began with a vision of a dark, desolate graveyard in the mountains of China, with one gravesite marked by a ribbon tied to a pole and slapping in the wind. From that initial image I begin to imagine characters and write the story. What I write is something between a script and a short story, with characters' dialogue and visual descriptions for the drawings. I've learned that it's best to try to nail down the story as much as possible before starting to draw, because while it's easy to edit or move chunks of text around or tweak bits of dialogue in a text document, each page of drawing takes me more than a day to compose, and it's a real drag and waste of time if I then decide to cut or rewrite a piece of story I've already spent so much time drawing. Tat said, it's unavoid- able that the story will change and develop as I'm making the artwork. Sometimes a piece of text just won't translate well into imagery, and I'll have to change it, and sometimes I'll have new ideas about the storyline and will have to rework the images to ft." Te subjects of your graphic novels are wide-ranging — tragedy on an Oldham County horse farm that brings together two unlikely friends (Slow Storm); the struggles of a military family in Oregon (Refresh, Refresh); and now Te Undertaking of Lily Chen. What is it that draws you to a story, calling you to develop it in a full-length novel? "Sometimes people will ask me if I'm planning to do a sequel to one of my graphic novels, and my answer is always, 'God, no!' I have the patience to see a long project through — Te Undertaking of Lily Chen was my longest, at fve years — but once it's done, my impulse is always to do something drastically diferent. I need to feel that wonderment and curiosity about a topic to commit myself to making a book about it, especially because the drawing phase is so labor-intensive. "Many things draw me to a particular story, make it worth the work. First, there must be complex, troubled characters with important problems to work out. Second, I have to be drawn to or in love with the place. In Slow Storm, the setting is the horse country east of Louisville where I rode horses all through my teenage years; Te Undertaking of Lily Chen is set in the stunning mountains of northern China that I admired through ancient Chinese art as a student and then visited when I was working on this book. I get many ideas from traveling and some ideas from reading. Te ghost-marriage premise for Lily Chen was derived from an article in Te Economist about a black market for corpses in China. I dwell on things for a long time; I nurse obsessions with certain topics. I'm drawn to stories that bring together several of my obsessions into one nar- rative. For example: women who defy gender roles, plus the Kentucky landscape, plus horses, plus war. I've been interested for a quite a while in the First Kentucky Cavalry of the Civil War, and I hope eventually it will manifest a graphic story or novel." Can you say more about how we "read" a graphic novel? "I think the important thing in a graphic novel is to have the images and the text work together in such a way that they aren't redun- dant. If you draw a picture of a man getting on his horse, the text doesn't need to say, 'Juan got on his horse.' I think it's interesting when the text provides a literal reading at the same time that the images provide a metaphorical read- ing, or vice versa. I also think it's interesting when the text and the images simultaneously tell two diferent sides of the same story. For example, a character might say, 'I'm having a great time at this party,' but the image shows her talking to a sleazy guy and looking miser- able. It's the use of subtext that you would fnd in any storytelling technique. As another example, in the prologue to Te Undertaking of Lily Chen, the images show a young man run- ning to tell his parents that his brother has just died in an accident, while at the same time the text describes the death of another young man nearly two millennia earlier. Te two concur- rent narratives explain the premise to the book in two diferent ways. "A common mistake in reading a graphic novel is to read the text but skim over the images, or to forget to 'read' the images at all. Tis is a problem because, in a good graphic novel, the images will tell at least half the story and include a lot of details that you won't pick up from reading the text alone." What do you think has contributed to the tremendous rise in the popularity of graphic literature in the last several years? "Comics and graphic novels have really started to gain respect as a literary form, beyond their superhero origins. Te more quality work artists make, the more readers will want to consume it, and the more publishers will publish it, and the more artists will make it. Young people, who generally seem more open to visual/narrative and experimental art forms, have really boosted the genre in the past several years, and librarians and teachers have begun to recognize comics as legitimate and valuable reading material. It's also become a lot easier to create and self-publish comics now that you can serialize your work on a blog or website, without printing fees or a publisher. Many published graphic novelists begin their careers by gaining followers online." Lynnell Edwards is the author of three books of poetry and is an associate professor at Spalding University. 80-112 BACK.indd 103 4/18/14 11:34 AM