'Stay Brave' with Jesse Lee Kercheval
‘Stay Brave’ is an interview series by woman-identifying creatives for woman-identifying creatives to inspire bravery in the creative life. [Created and curated by Leah Umansky]
How do you interpret the phrase, "Stay Brave?"
To always take risks with your artistic works, never settled for what is comfortable or what you have done before.
As a woman-identifying writer, what are the ways that you “stay brave” in your life?
I always want to try something new, even something that scares me--being scared is a good sign.
Who is someone in your life who models “staying brave” for you?
The late W.W. Norton Editor Carol Houck Smith who started as a secretary at Norton and ended up Vice President and worked until the day she died at 85, publishing writers she believed in. She would travel anywhere and was always ready to do anything.
What writers, artists, and/or musicians do you look to to foster a sense of “bravery?”
Right now, Joan Mitchell, the American abstract painter and Charlotte Salomon, the Jewish artist who created an autobiographical series of paintings Leben? oder Theater?: Ein Singspiel (Life? or Theater?: A Song-play), the largest known artwork made by a Jewish person who died in the Holocaust.
What’s a piece of advice you would pass on to your younger self about “staying brave?” What’s something you know now, that you didn’t know in the past?
Do not stay in a box. We are taught to define ourselves to narrowly. I am a poet. OR a novelist. Not both. I am a writer or an artist. Not both. I can't learn a foreign language. Or a musical instrument. You can do any or all of those things.
Can you remember a time in your life where you realized your own bravery? How did you use it to propel you forward?
When I was ten, I fell from a tree and crush four vertebrae in my back, spend a long time in bed then in a back brace. It made me realize all the ways we are more than our bodies. I could read and write and imagine, flat on my back in a hospital bed.
What do you do when you aren’t feeling brave? What inspires you or motivates you?
I try to think of something I haven't done, maybe something maybe as small as walking a different way home, and do it.
In what ways would you like to be more brave in your creative life?
I would like to push my visual art, something I only started in 2020 during the pandemic. I have a graphic memoir French Girl coming out soon but would like to do an exhibition, to creative larger works.
What is your proudest moment of bravery?
When I decided to learn Spanish at age 53--and did it which led to all the translations of Uruguayan poetry I have done and my thinking of Uruguay as my second home.
What are you currently working on?
Trying to work in watercolor (the drawings in French Girl are all soft pastels), finishing a book of prose poems, working on a book of essays, and translating several different poets.
Thank you, Jesse !
Jesse Lee Kercheval divides her time between Madison, Wisconsin and Montevideo, Uruguay, She is a visual artist, writer, poet, and translator. Her recent book include the poetry collections I Want To Tell You (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023) and the Spanish language collection, Un pez dorado no te sirve para nada/ A Goldfish Buys You Nothing (Editorial Yaugarú, Uruguay, 2023) and the story collection Underground Women (University of Wisconsin Press, 2019). Her translations include Love Poems by Idea Vilariño, and The Invisible Bridge: Selected Poems of Circe Maia, for which she was awarded an NEA in Translation, both published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Her memoir, Space, was the winner of the Alex Award from the American Library Association. She is the Zona Gale Professor Emerita of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Editor of the Wisconsin Poetry Series at the University of Wisconsin Press. Her graphic memoir, French Girl, is forthcoming from Fieldmouse Press. Find her: X: @JesseLKercheval Instagram @jlkerche
Leah Umansky is a poet, writer, curator, writing coach, artist and teacher. Her new collection of poems is OF TYRANT out now with Word Works Books. She earned her MFA in Poetry at Sarah Lawrence College and has curated and hosted The COUPLET Reading Series in NYC since 2011. Her creative work can be found in such places as The New York Times, POETRY, Bennington Review, American Poetry Review, Minyan Magazine, The Academy of American Poets' Poem-A-Day and others. She is a writing coach who has taught workshops to all ages at such places as Poets House, Hudson Valley Writers Center, Memorial Sloan Kettering and elsewhere. She is working on a fourth collection of poems ORDINARY SPLENDOR, on wonder, joy and love. She can be found at www.leahumansky.com or @leah.umansky on IG.
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Love this interview. Wonderful to learn more about Jesse!