Finding Your Own Walden Pond: An Interview with John Porcellino
Jennifer M. Brown, Curriculum Connections -- School Library Journal, 6/12/2008
John Porcellino has created comics since he was an elementary student. In high school, at about the same time that he began the autobiographical King-Cat Comix, he discovered Thoreau’s writings. With Thoreau at Walden (Hyperion, 2008), Porcellino embraced the chance to immerse himself in the man's writing again, especially in the journals that the naturalist wrote while living on Walden Pond. From March 1845 to September 1847, Thoreau conducted what he called his “experiment in living,” and the ideas he developed about man and nature, and man and society, were eventually published as Walden; or, Life in the Woods. In his graphic-novel approach to Thoreau’s ideas, Porcellino suggests—through bare-bones illustrations and judiciously chosen quotes from the writer-philosopher—that everyone has his or her own Walden: a place that allows him or her to retreat from the world for a while and discover one’s true beliefs. Here the author talks about Thoreau’s lasting influence on his own life and work.
Was Thoreau an inspiration to you?
Thoreau has been an inspiration to me since my high school years. The first time I tried to read Walden, I was a junior in high school. After the first three pages, I thought, “This is the most remarkable book I’ve ever read.” Walden is very dense, and it has that 19th-century flavor. Despite the fact that I knew it was important, [at 16,] it was hard for me to get through. Since then, Thoreau has been a major inspiration for my life and work.
"Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads."
Did you have a good time going back through Thoreau’s writings for this book?
Thoreau at Walden (Porcellino) © 2008 by John Porcellino
I reread Walden, took lots of notes, and underlined passages. I also read a few of his essays that are in sync with what I envisioned for the book, certainly “Civil Disobedience.” I arranged [Thoreau’s quotes] thematically on note cards and tried to work out a way of organizing them; they aren’t chronological because I mixed and matched. I wanted to arrange the book by the seasons, to follow nature over the course of a year.
The trick was figuring out a way to take the essence of what Thoreau was thinking and writing about and put it into this book. I wanted the text to be in his words. In order to keep things consistent from panel to panel, and to keep the flow going, I added punctuation. In the end, there was just one section where I couldn’t get it to work without adding two or three words.
You usually create both the words and pictures in your work. Was it difficult working with someone else’s writing?
I don’t think it was hard from the standpoint of “these are somebody else’s words”; it was difficult in terms of "how do I put this down?" I felt a need to do justice to this man’s work—understanding that I’m making an 88-page comic out of it. Even though I was writing about [Thoreau’s] life, because of my experiences and my connection to his writings, this book is as personal as anything else I’ve ever done. It was a joy.
Thoreau at Walden (Porcellino) © 2008 by John Porcellino
In an interview about your volume of King-Cat Comix (Drawn and Quarterly, 2007), you mentioned that some selections were included to maintain the “flow of time.” Was that also true for Thoreau at Walden? I’m thinking of the wordless sequence where Thoreau and the owl fall asleep together in the woods, and then, a season later, Thoreau’s statement, “I rejoice that there are owls.”
It was important to have consistent images to help show the progression of time: Thoreau’s connection to the owl, for instance, and the whippoorwill, and to his house in the snow, and in the spring, and as the leaves are falling.
One of the important moments in the book is when Thoreau goes into town and ends up in jail [which became the inspiration for “Civil Disobedience”]. People have this idea of Thoreau as a total recluse, or a misanthrope—that he wanted to escape society, or be on his own all the time. He certainly valued solitude, but I think what he was trying to do was—and I put this in the [author’s] notes—he wasn’t trying to escape society but to improve society.
When Thoreau goes to jail, that’s a turning point….What I was trying to show was that the experience in jail led to a change in his thinking. His time at Walden was coming to an end; it was time to engage and bring his philosophy into the world.
It’s amazing the way you are able to recreate that feeling of pausing and observing the light playing off of Walden Pond, the experience of a snowfall, or the sound of owls in a tree outside Thoreau’s window. Did those series of wordless panels take some experimentation? Or do you wait until you know just how it will look before setting pen to paper?
Usually I have a pretty clear plan of how things are going to go before I start working on the page, and that’s for no reason other than that comics are really difficult to edit. If there needs to be 3 extra panels and I’m 10 pages in, it’s difficult—especially because I don’t use a computer. The process requires that I work things out beforehand.
If you could give young people one piece of advice about how to express themselves creatively what would it be?
To me—and this was something that I probably got from Thoreau over the years—it’s to really try to learn to be aware of what’s inside you, because what’s inside you is different for everybody. Every person who tries to express that has a different starting point. That’s the great thing about creativity: what some kid puts down on paper will be different from what anybody else does. At the same time, I think everybody has a tendency to worry, what if I do this and nobody likes it? There’s a tendency, as Thoreau says, to “follow the beaten path.” Find that spark that’s unique to you and express that. Really, in terms of Thoreau, that was a big part of what he was talking about, too.
