Angus Woodward on “The Witchy House”

I’m a writer, but recently creating visual art has become almost as important to me as creating prose. Maybe a year ago, I started to make drawings based on old photos. These photos showed people and places that were important to me at some point when I was growing up – my family of nine standing on the back deck in 1970, or my dad standing next to the old car he had decorated with fake zebra fur. I began spending more and more time on these drawings because I found that making them was a way to really think through a memory, almost like I was reliving it.

I realized that touching these memories with my pen gave me ideas for writing about them. And so I drew “The Witchy House” and then wrote words to go with it, and it became my first foray into graphic narrative. I am now working on a series of similar pieces, under the working title What Happened Here?

One of the challenges of creating “The Witchy House” was that the reference photo shows the house in 2019, when the fence I’d been thrown over was long gone. I rebuilt it with my pen. That’s the only element of fiction in an otherwise completely true account.