Motherhood, grief, and time | enigma, mundanity, and conflict.

Two startlingly different and startlingly beautiful works of comics poetry from Fieldmouse Press.

About the Project

FIeldmouse Press is a nonprofit comics publisher based in the sunny hills of Grass Valley, California. This is our fifth Crowdfundr project, this time to support the publication of two new books that are a part of our Summer 2024 season. 

The goal of this project is to raise the funds to print French Girl by Jesse Lee Kercheval and Hot House by John Hankiewicz. We've carefully budgeted printing costs, design costs, and accounted for hidden variables and potential additional fees (like recent paper price increases). We've got everything ready to go, but we need your help to make these books a reality!

About The Books

French Girl by Jesse Lee Kercheval - 244 page softcover graphic memoir; perfect-bound, full color throughout

French Girl is a graphic memoir told in a series of stories that blend boldly expressionistic and dreamlike colors with spare and unflinching text. Exploring Jesse Lee's relationship with her mother, her childhood, her own motherhood, and the passage of time, French Girl is a reflection on the material and immaterial ways that our families affect us.

Jesse Lee is an award-winning poet, writer, and translator who splits her time between Madison, Wisconsin and Montevideo, Uruguay. Jesse Lee Kercheval is the author of 18 books, and is a translator of Uruguayan poetry into English. Her translations include work by Circe Maia, Idea Vilariño, Tatiana Oroño, Javier Etchevarren, and many others. French Girl is Jesse Lee's debut graphic memoir; stories in this edition have appeared in New Letters, Booth, and The Adroit Journal.

Advance Praise for French Girl

"With dreamlike drawings reminiscent of Chagall, Kercheval welcomes us into her meditation on family history, motherhood, grief, love, and displacement, rendered in colors so beautiful they're almost edible."

— Leela Corman, author of Victory Parade, You Are Not A Guest

"The pages of French Girl could be framed and hung in a museum, but lucky for us they are bound in our hands, sequencing a creative vision. With this gorgeous marriage of minimalism and expressionism, Kercheval conjures dreams, fairy tales, and persistent aches; a witness to the surreal pain of lost worlds and the exuberant beauty of remembrance."

— Amy Kurzweil, author of Artificial: A Love Story

"French Girl is an arresting and beautiful memoir that evokes the infinite complications of daughterhood and motherhood in raw, gorgeous color. It pulses with heart, figuratively and literally."

— Anthony Doerr, author of All the Light You Cannot See

"Jesse Lee Kercheval has reached all the way down to the very bottom of a lake called Story and rescued the faces once forgotten there. And French Girl is the beautiful tale these faces have been waiting their whole lives to tell."

— Sabrina Orah Mark, author of Happily

Hot House by John Hankiewicz - 100 pg, smyth-sewn hardcover; black and white

An unnamed man and woman live in a house together but rarely interact. Each of them attends to mundane tasks such as laundry and sweeping. Then time, space, and reality all warp around them in unexpected ways as they confront past selves, suffocating dust storms, and an environment that's as claustrophobic as it is familiar.

John is a printmaker, painter, and cartoonist from Oxford, Ohio. John has been self-publishing his comics since the mid-1990s, and has been published in such anthologies as Kramer's Ergot, Mome, and Ink Brick. His enigmatic, elegant, formalist comics ask readers to approach the medium from the perspective of viewing a collage. Sparkplug Books published his collection Asthma in 2006, and his book-length comic Education was published by Fantagraphics Underground in 2017.

Advance Praise for Hot House

“Step into Hot House, where domestic tensions echo household chores, chasing memories of relief. John Hankiewicz’ crystalline drawing puts everything in its place, hidden or forgotten. His precise cartooning hands you objects subjectively, inevitably broken, can anything be repaired? You’re holding it right now.”

— Chris Cajero Cilla, author of The Sleep Gas

"If you're new to Hankiewicz's comics, read this and discover one of comics' most singular, enigmatic, beautiful cartoonists. If you're already familiar with his complex and fascinating oeuvre, you'll be happy to see the plastic laundry basket again."

— Kevin Huizenga, author of Curses, The River At Night

About Fieldmouse Press

Fieldmouse Press is a nonprofit publisher of comics and literature, based in Grass Valley, California. Founded in 2019, Fieldmouse Press is committed to expanding the reach and appreciation of the comics arts. This is us at SPX 2022! You can see Daniel (left) and Alex (right), our President and our Publisher (respectively), along with our first season of books. We founded Fieldmouse Press because we love comics, and wanted to give back to our community.

Picture Credit: MariNaomi @ CAKE 2023

Since 2021, Fieldmouse Press has published 10 new comics from indie and alt comics legends like Ariel Bordeaux and MariNaomi, as well as new and upcoming artists like Phoebe Mol and Noëlle Kröger. Here's another picture from CAKE 2023 - at this show, we had the U.S. debut of MariNaomi's I THOUGHT YOU LOVED ME. Mari (left) was a featured guest! 2024 has already been a great year, and we're hoping you can help us make some beautiful new books!

Backing the Project

Backing a Crowdfundr campaign is a little different than other crowdfunding platforms you might be used to. Click the perk you're interested on the right hand side of the page, and add it to your cart. You'll check out after selecting the perks you want, and money will be collected immediately. You can add multiple perks to your cart before checkout, so if you want multiple books but not the whole season, (or if you want multiple copies of the same book), you can do that before checkout. Shipping and fulfillment costs are applied during check-out when you support the project.

One of our goals when publishing comics is to make sure our artists are treated equitably, so we've already paid our artists advances on royalties and offer an artist-centered royalty for all of our books.

Funding Goal

Our funding goal is $7,500 USD. These funds will be used to directly pay for printing and transportation of the books back to our warehouse, as well as for processing fees and additional unforeseen expenses. Here is the breakdown of our costs:

We're offering a variety of packages to help fund this print run, but we need your help to make this season a reality. 

Risks

Fieldmouse Press has successfully funded and fulfilled multiple campaigns through Kickstarter and Crowdfundr, so we have the experience of crowdfunding under our belts. We are working with the amazing folks at White Squirrel Distribution to help make sure that packages get out quickly and efficiently. We were able to complete our campaign for our previous season on time and with no damaged items on returns.  We have done all the pre-work to make sure that this campaign with be successful.

However, risks remain, especially with transportation and the uncertainty of the COVID pandemic. Books may be damaged on transit or may not be printed to specifications. We are working with a Chinese printer for this season in order to reduce total costs, but that increases the risks inherent in overseas shipping. As we experienced with MariNaomi's I THOUGHT YOU LOVED ME, customs holds and delays in port can happen, and we've baked in extra time to have books to you.

We expect to be able to start shipping books in September 2024 but have given ourselves until October 2024 to completely fulfill this campaign. We promise to keep our supporters up to date with any news, including delays and uncertainties, as we work through the campaign process.