Amy E. Casey on “Wilderness”

It takes a long time for me to finish a poem-comic. And so, “Wilderness” is a project that comes from a whole litany of artistic influences that shaped its being. 

I always start with the text of a poem. This one began at a writing conference, as an exercise that got tucked away in a notebook in the spring of 2018. Then, the following fall, certain circumstances led me to an hour of writing in a sculpture garden in Milwaukee where an open-air writing desk sits, unassuming and ready, in a lush grove. I wrote more lines there, in another notebook. Those two different drafts came together as the raw material for the poem I was ultimately compelled to write. I was thinking about encountering the natural world. Understanding our human frailty under the gales and bites and vastness is so frightening, so sensual. It stirs us to awe. Physical and emotional wildernesses wait for us all, to enter with vulnerability, to teach us. Such encounters necessarily encompass risk, but also exaltation. I felt the power of giving myself over to that, and the words came from that certainty.

The drawings, then, I worked on all winter long, my back against a window crystalline with frost, wrist guiding black pen over paper. It’s important for me to create images by hand, to stay unrefined, because I want my readers to see the truth that I feel in each line. Each panel takes me one to three hours to complete, depending on complexity. Form language echoes accumulate from panel to panel to assert a sense of familiarity, even in the geographically disparate environments of the piece. I was going for that feeling of Have I been here before?  

By the time spring came around again, I was at work on the final step--photographing the originals and turning them into a digital product. I am grateful for the year of reflection and work that built this poem-comic on its own slow, contemplative time.