Renken’s ‘Graphic The Novel’ takes an otherwordly journey

Life is messy, that’s for sure. And it’s up to us to mop up the crumbs and the spillage and re-assemble it all into something coherent.

The obstacles faced by the unnamed narrator in Keven Renkin’s Graphic The Novel are, on the surface, insurmountable. His beloved wife has died of cancer; as the book opens, he’s just left her funeral and is awash with grief and hopelessness.

And the narrator is getting older, getting fatter and more infirm, and feeling increasingly useless in a society he isn’t sure the wants to be a part of any more.

And then something extraordinary happens.

Renken’s book is visual, albeit without much in the way of illustrations, aside from Justin Groom’s intriguing cover art. “I was very insistent it was called Graphic The Novel, not The Graphic Novel,” Renken says. “The really great graphic novels, if you think about it, tell this amazing story, with pictures. I thought to myself well, I could tell the same story – but I could do it without all the pictures.

“Being a writer, I just liked the notion of the words painting the pictures. It’s a novel that wishes to be a graphic novel, and it’s a graphic novel that dreams of being a novel. That’s what I tell everyone when they ask me.”

It is, in a way, a story of redemption. The narrator, with the aid of his bizarre couch-potato pal Bernie, stumbles up on a way of not only finding purpose, but making sense of the world.

As with most thrill-ride fiction, the journey itself is just as enjoyable as the final destination.

Renken, who taught drama at the Pinellas County Center for the Arts (PCCA) for three decades, wrote this intense, visceral book following an especially stressful time in his life.

It was the fall of 2020, at the height of the pandemic, before the vaccine had been introduced. “Within 20 days – not even a whole month – I left my job after 31 years, my father died of Covid, and my hard drive crashed and I lost the entire book I was working on.”

He simply wasn’t comfortable abandoning virtual teaching to return to the classroom, as was being ordered. So he resigned.

“It occurred to me how much we define ourselves by what we do,” Renken recalls. “And when that was gone, there was this big hole. I’m 64, and I started thinking out how society has less and less use for people as they get older, that we don’t have much left to contribute.”

His despair, and his grief, went into the DNA of the protagonist of Graphic The Novel.

The book’s other themes, immortality, theology, role-playing, perhaps even the wide world of comic book superheroes – all emerged from that notion of having nothing left to contribute.

“Of course I thought, well then, what if something happened where all of a sudden you are a contributor, but it’s way more than you even expected?” he says.

What do the events in Renken’s tale add up to? In the end, that’s up to us.

“I wanted to intimate stuff, but I wanted the readers to figure it out. I never wanted to come right out and say where the blood came from, or who the other immortals were … I figure my audience is smart; they can figure it out without being told.”

Simple twists of fate populate Graphic The Novel. And, Renken says, its creation came about similarly.

“I was a little terrified to write at first, because I’d just lost that other book! And it took me a lot of money to get it back. I was in a stuck place, and that lasted for about nine months.”

By then it was the fall of 2021. “Out of the blue, the University of Tampa called me and asked me if I would come teach there. I’d been vaccinated by then, and I said absolutely. And of course, they say ‘Oh, by the way … class starts in six days.’

“And the very act of having to make that happen … it was like it jumpstarted me. All of a sudden I was a teacher again; I need to start thinking of myself in terms other than what I do for a living.”

Cue the floodgates. “All I wanted to do was write. I started on Nov. 1, and I wrote like a madman for six and a half months.”

Graphic The Novel is available at Tombolo Books, via Amazon and through St. Petersburg Press.