Novelist and comics writer Alisa Kwitney, known for her work on ‘The Sandman Presents’ and ‘G.I.L.T’., has just released a new series called HOWL, from Independent publisher Ahoy Comics. In collaboration with artist Mauricet (‘Star Wars Adventures’, ‘G.I.L.T’.), HOWL is a witty bohemian sci-fi that can best be described as ‘The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’ meets ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’. The five-issue series is set in Greenwich Village in the late ‘50s, home of poets, artists, musicians, sci-fi writers, their put-upon partners — and the extraterrestrial spores that are secretly taking them over.
We recently interviewed Alisa about her work and how this series is her feminist take on the ‘frustrated beatniks on a rampage’ trope. She also talked about the inspiration behind the story of HOWL – her own parents, but specifically her mother.
“This may be my most personal work yet, as it is loosely based on my mother’s stories and letters about the period when she lived in the Village with my father, the science fiction writer Robert Sheckley,” said Alisa. Along with the release of the series, Alisa wrote a short but sweet essay about her mother Ziva, who partly inspired the tale, which is being published in the back matter of issue #2.
We love a good “story behind the story”, and were lucky enough to be given the opportunity to share Alisa’s essay before issue #2 is published, which you can read below!
By Alisa Kwitney
No matter what genre you write in or prefer to read, the fact remains: People are mysteries, even the ones you know best. And not just other people. Live long enough and you can be dumbfounded by an old picture or letter or journal entry: Who the hell was I? Why was I dressed like that? Did I really believe that thing I wrote with such conviction, when it contradicts everything I remember about myself at that time?
Writing memoir, said my onetime teacher Joyce Johnson, contains more fiction, and fiction more autobiography, than any writer cares to admit.
Joyce, who was 21 when she began dating Jack Kerouac, wrote about the experience of being a woman and a writer at the epicenter of Beat culture. My mother, Ziva Kwitney, never wrote about her own experiences in the mid to late fifties, when she lived on 44 Perry Street in a cold water walk-up apartment with my father, Robert Sheckley, an up-and-coming science fiction writer.
Still in her early twenties, she worked as an advice columnist for Seventeen and an assistant editor on Men’s Adventure, and between 1956 and 1972 she was the first to read Sheckley’s short stories and novels and to offer feedback. She was also responsible for shlepping all the groceries up the stairs and cooking almost all the meals and for keeping the apartment clean.
Decades later, a thirty-something Ziva would write articles about the sexual revolution and feminism for Ms. and Cosmopolitan and collaborate on a front- page article for the Sunday New York Times and a book on sexuality, Catalogue of Sexual Consciousness. In 1978, she wrote an introduction to a book of photographs, Frostbite, that ruminates on the connection between carnality and mortality.
But for every piece she finished, there were a score that she began and abandoned. Ziva had the same relationship to writing that Sisyphus had to that boulder he was condemned to keep rolling up the mountain, only to have it careen back down again the moment he reached the top.
Along the way, Ziva became a psychotherapist who gave her clients autobiographical writing assignments and encouraged me to write dialogues between the warring halves of my self. She wrote letters and journal entries so witty, wise, and inventive that they feel like essays and snapshots of a particular kind of bohemian Upper West Side moment in time.
I do not know how Ziva would have written her own story. I assume it would have been psychological, witty, and wise. It would almost definitely not have contained fungal aliens.
In the beginning, neither did my version of her story. I began to interview my mother in 2017 or 2018, as the first signs of Alzheimer’s appeared, terrifying me. I knew my mother’s stories like I knew my own, but it had never occurred to me that there would come a time when I couldn’t check back with her. Which street in the Village? How long did Bob spend in Mexico before coming back and apologizing? What was Harlan Ellison like as a young fan of Robert Sheckley?
I don’t think she ever fully gave up on the idea that she would find a way to tell her story, next week or next month or next year. Is that a good thing? Camus said we must imagine Sisyphus happy, but let’s face it, Existentialists have a strange sense of humor.
A few weeks before she died this November, she asked me, out of the blue: Are you still writing? At this point, she struggled with expressive aphasia, which meant that the words that had eluded her for so long on paper now danced away when she wanted to speak. We found other ways to communicate—through music, through old letters I read to her, through the telepathy of our lifelong conversation.
But every once in a while, the words came through. Are you still writing? Oh, yes, I replied. I’m writing about you.
