About

Jennifer de Guzman is a writer and comics editor living in the San Francisco Bay Area. She writes stories about sad girls, seawater, bottomless wells, airborne plagues, and horses. You can find links to some of them them in the Selected Works section or read them at her Scribd page.

She also writes "Life in Comics," a monthly column for Publishers Weekly Comics Week, and collaborates on "Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now," a comics column on Robot 6, with her husband, artist Brian Belew.

Portrait by Brian Belew.

What Are Possible Impossiblities?

“The Poet ought rather to chuse Impossibilities, provided they have Resemblance to the Truth, than the Possible, which are Incredible with all their Possibility.”
- Henry Fielding, quoting Aristotle in The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling
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From Words, to Songs, to Pictures

Check out Tobias Wolff rocking out to John Darnielle singing his much-beloved Mountain Goats song “Woke Up New.”

Via GalleyCat, where there’s a brief disussion of song lyrics as literature. “What have song writers learned from regular writers?” it asks, but when it comes to song writers like John Darnielle, I think there is a great deal “regular writers” can learn from them. A song like “Woke Up New” distills a moment and a barrage of emotions into something compelling and touching. I suppose there is a kind of John-Cheever-like profound simplicity that is both specific and general enough for the listener to empathize.

Songs are often inspirations for me when I write, whether it’s just a matter of mood or more explicit appropriation. Of the latter is my story “Minx Mouse Monster,” inspired by the Rasputina song “The New Zero” and “Fancy Dress,” the comics story I collaborated on with Brian Belew, written for Image Comics’ Put the Book Back on the Shelf: A Belle and Sebastian Anthology.

The story is based on the song, “The Model,” and it was a challenge to take all the images packed into it  (read the lyrics at B&S’s website here). I tried to follow a thread of narrative in the song, while working in references to other parts of the song in the background imagery (including the harpsichord of the instrumentation). How successful was I? You tell me. You can read the whole story at my Scribd page. If you look, you can find a negative review by Douglas Wolk at Salon.com; my biggest quibble with it is that he doesn’t get that people are wearing masks because “a fancy dress,” as it’s called in the song, is what you call a masquerade party in the UK and Ireland. As I saw it, the song is about the identities we put on that keep people from knowing the self that we are to ourselves.

Brian and I have another story based on a song coming out in an Image Comics anthology, This Is a Souvenir, the Songs of Spearmint and Shirley Lee. The song is called “A Leopard“ and is about lost childhood.

May 13th, 2009 | Category: Comics, Music, Writing

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