An Interview with author and artist Marnie Galloway

1. What initially drew you to comics?

I came to comics a little sideways, almost by process of elimination. I have always drawn, keeping illustrated diaries since I was a kid, but I tried a lot of different things before realizing my home was comics. I went to a year of an MFA program for artists’ books shortly after undergrad, and I learned a lot that I still put to use, but I personally didn’t respond to the material preciousness of that medium—I wanted things I make to be really accessible, more at home in a library than a museum. I worked for a few years at a wonderful letterpress studio here in Chicago, and I loved the craft and physicality of that medium and the community of printmakers I found myself among, but I really missed narrative. I eventually started blindly making a book the way I wanted to make it, and I realized when I was in the middle of it that I was making a comic. I learned more about the world of alternative comics and felt electrified—here were other artists making work the way I wanted to make them, experimenting and trading and playing with the materials and ideas. I never looked back.

2. Please tell us about your creative process, including any inspirations.

I wish I had a coherent creative process, but each project feels like learning from scratch. Every book has its own I usually start with a question that is at the core of the story I’m working on. I read a lot about anything connected to that question, literary fiction and poetry and nonfiction, to get a hook into a story that helps me think through the question I want to sit with. It’s a big pain of a process that sometimes takes a year or two of reading and mulling things over, I wish it were more mechanical!

3. Please tell us about In the Sounds and Seas, and any other work you’d like to share about.

“In the Sounds and Seas” is a wordless comic that follows three sailors as they build a ship in search for mythic creators, the singers of the song that weaves together to create the world. The central question I was thinking about in that book was, “What happens to obsessive production when it fails?” The book was made obsessively, in minute 1:1 scale drawings; it was the first comic I ever made, and I learned a lot about what works and doesn’t work for me artistically while making it. I had my first child the same month “In the Sounds and Seas” was published, so, maybe unsurprisingly, I had a lot of questions to think through about this new phase in my life. Since then, I have made some shorter comics, mostly about family and identity and parenthood. “Particle/Wave” is a pair of poetic memoir comics about grief and the moon; “Slightly Plural” is a collection of short comedic and poetic comics about pregnancy, birth, and parenthood; and “Burrow” is a fiction comic about identity re-integration in the raw months of caring for a baby.

4. Where can we find more information about your work?

My website is www.Marniegalloway.com, but I have been really enjoying sending out a newsletter with a free substack, https://marniegalloway.substack.com. I’m writing the script for a new graphic novel right now, which I sometimes talk through on my substack, but mostly it’s diary comics about parenting three young kids. It has been fun to stay connected with readers this way!