By Shaenon K. Garrity |
by Haldeman Team photography (Sarabande, November) blends poetry and comics to create a narrative about his youth football team and the history of the Civil War battlefields where they played.
As a poet, what made you decide to create this memoir in comic book form?
I worked on it as a poetry collection for almost two decades, and it continued to take different forms. There was a narrative in my mind, and I thought the reader should know what it was about. So I wrote explanatory entries for each section of poems. And then, noticing how many graphic novels my own daughter was reading, I thought I could take these little essays and draw them. I studied comics that seemed to do what I wanted to do, seeing how they used space on the page to create silences or tonal shifts, and tried to learn from them.
How did you go about researching Virginia history?
I grew up in Virginia, so I knew some of it, but there was so much more that I hadn’t seen. I started this book with the title of the poem “Team Photograph,” but I couldn’t write a book that was just poetry about 12-year-old me playing soccer. I started to investigate what else was going on in my life, and one of those things was hypnagogia (daydreaming). That’s when I started seeing people in my room at night.
Then one day, while looking at a map, noticing how close Bull Run Regional Park was to the battlefields, I had this memory of referees asking us to check the football field for shells. . From there, the book took on its own initiative. He began to explain himself to me as he wrote it and became his own living creator.
Can you talk a little about “seeing ghosts”?
In Virginia, I saw soldiers, old women, all kinds of different beings. I’ve lived in Iowa for about 20 years now and I still suffer from hypnagogia, but it’s not in the form of people. It’s more in the form of lights and sounds in my room. When I returned to Virginia to research this book, I was staying on a farm near the James River, and the first night I went to bed there was a woman there. I wondered why are people showing up in Virginia near these places?
What made you decide to draw the characters as wolves?
It’s for my brother Ryan. Ryan loved wolves as a child. He was killed in 2012. I was asked to do an illustration a few months after his death, and I drew the character with a wolf’s head. I liked the way it looked and what it represented. I sometimes feel very doglike. So now all my characters have wolf heads.
A version of this article appeared in the 10/24/2022 issue of Publishers Weekly under the title: Footballs and ball cartridges
