The Listener
David Lester is a musician, an artist, an activist, a graphic designer and most recently, a graphic novelist. His first graphic novel, The Listener, has been nominated for the Forward Reviews’ 2011 Book of the Year Award in the graphic novel category. I met with Lester at a local Vancouver coffee shop to talk with him about the book, as well as his many other projects.
The Listener is the story of an artist who escapes to Europe after one of her sculptures inspires a Vancouver activist who dies while trying to make a political statement. While there, she meets a couple who were part of the state election that began Hitler’s climb to power. The book required an extensive amount of research:
“I really got into the time frame of the 1920s and the early 1930s, and did a massive amount of research on that, including accessing archives that are online from Germany and from the particular state, [Lippe], where my story takes place. You can actually see the photos of Hitler in Lippe and no one would have printed these anywhere because they’re too obscure in the grand scheme of what occurred, between the Second World War and the Holocaust. Nobody cares about a small state election or fuzzy pictures of Hitler then, but I was able to access that as reference material to draw from.”
Lester also immersed himself in the music and art of the time, and looked at many posters, both pro- and anti-Nazi. Several posters from the Lippe election are reproduced in the book. I asked Lester what his reaction was, looking at these images as a graphic designer: if he was able to think about them critically as design work or if he looked at them as artifacts. He said that he really loved the work of John Heartfield, a German designer who created anti-Nazi posters. As for the pro-Nazi posters, he ended up looking at them as both political graphic design and historical artifact:
“When I was looking at the work that the Nazi’s did, their graphic designers, I looked at it with interest and thought about how the Nazis effectively portrayed themselves as heroic individuals, for example Hitler and how they doctored his appearance. So I found it fascinating for the psychology of it and the historical side of it, and wondered why these designers put their talents towards fascism.”
Lester has been politically aware since he was ten years old, when he would read the daily newspaper and follow what was going on in the world, including the anti-Vietnam War movement:
“I was influenced by an older brother and what happened in the 60s and so it was very hard to avoid being interested in politics. I was compelled by the state of what was going on in the world, and that feeling hasn’t changed since I was a kid.”
Lester’s political awareness permeates not only his written and design work, but his music as well. He performs in the indie rock band Mecca Normal, along with Jean Smith, the lead singer. Mecca Normal’s lyrics are overtly feminist and the band has been credited with inspiring the riot grrrl movement. I asked Lester what it was like to be part of not only that movement, but the birth of punk.
He first explained his involvement in the rise of punk rock, creating posters and album covers for the Vancouver punk band D.O.A.:
“I understand now what longevity is when I can look back at something, not nostalgically, but a time that was very significant culturally like the rise of punk-rock in the late 70s, early 80s. […] I did a lot of graphic design work for D.O.A. and a lot of political posters back then, and often the punk movement combined politics and art at the same time, either doing benefits or songs about a particular issue.”
Lester then tells me about Mecca Normal’s influence on the riot grrrl movement:
“We had performed a lot in Olympia, WA where the main founders of the riot grrrl movement were based. They would come to our shows at a time when they were emerging in their own right as musicians and political activists. I think they were inspired by our bold combination of music and politics, and the sight of a man and a woman working equally together. Mecca Normal as the metaphor for a world of possibilities. So you realize you had an effect on that initial moment and riot grrrl went on to become an international feminist movement, including England and Australia and Europe. So you realize you play your little tiny part in these things, but you can never know where it is going to lead. It’s exciting to know that it’s possible to affect change with the work that you do, in your own sort of small, small way.”
Lester and Smith are currently writing new songs to record on an album this year, with a west coast tour in the fall. Some of their most recent performances have been part of The Listener’s book tour:
“We incorporated Mecca Normal into the book launches. [… ] Jean did an adaptation of my book for the performance and it involved theatre, songs, images from the books and talking about the graphic novel. […] Then we would go into a set of Mecca Normal songs. […] We did it twice at UBC in front of creative writing classes and we did it at all the book launches in Canada.”
It took Lester seven years to create The Listener, and although he had a previous book published with Arbeiter Ring Publishing, he didn’t know that they’d accept the graphic novel:
“Seven years to make a graphic novel without any idea of whether it would be published, or whether or not I would even finish, or whether I was perhaps insane for even attempting it. […] Maybe I’ve wasted seven years of my life drawing pictures of Hitler.”
Having met with success in his first attempt, Lester is now working on a second graphic novel. This one shares the story of the last months in the life of Emma Goldman. Like The Listener, it will weave the past with the present, with a main character who visits the places in Toronto where Goldman lived out the last few months of her life. Lester described the theme of the book:
“It’s also about the idea of someone who never gives up. Right until they drop dead they are an activist and they have their beliefs and they never get down-hearted—well, they may get down-hearted, but they don’t give up.”
