Jailed American journalist Danny Fenster spent six months as a political prisoner during the 2021 uprising in Myanmar. For much of his incarceration he battled boredom and fear, subsisting on meditation and podcasts on an SD card smuggled through the mail, sent by his girlfriend, Juliana.
Now, nearly five years after his release, he has collaborated with his cousin Amy Kurzweil, a famous The New Yorker Cartoonist and graphic memoirist, on a long-form interactive comic the edge I spoke with Kurzweil via email about his role as artist and storyteller in this ambitious long-form project, the responsibilities inherent in telling someone else’s story, and how he created rich, multi-layered drawings using only pencil.
The Verge: Your work often focuses on family history, like yours Grandmother’s Survival in the Warsaw Ghetto And Using AI to recreate your grandfather’s voice. How was your experience helping tell Danny’s story?
Any Kurzweil: When Danny was first imprisoned, I called my friend Ahmed Naji, a writer who was imprisoned for nine months by Egypt’s authoritarian regime in 2016. He told me that the experience of unjust imprisonment can be worse for outsiders. You care about the detainee but you have no idea what is going on. I’m not sure I believe it, but I appreciate Ahmed’s endorsement. do not know There was a special kind of torture. That was part of my motivation for wanting to collaborate with Danny on this piece. I wanted to know what it was like to experience it, to know it in detail, and to allow myself some informed imagination of the reality I had been staring at in my mind with my eyes closed.
As you can imagine, Danny’s case was a big part of my family’s life in 2021. Along with Juliana, our family formed a sort of impromptu SWAT team dedicated to figuring out what to do. We met regularly with our embassy, and met with every resource we could think of. (We were organized — we had a Slack channel!) We met other people who had experienced this particular torture, and we connected with a community of people invested in the mission of #BringDannyHome and #ProtectThePress.
But we didn’t really know what Danny was experiencing. There was a close connection between our mundane everyday realities and the unknowns of Danny’s detention. I vividly remember spending early-morning meetings with former ambassadors on vacation at Disney World with my brother’s family, standing in line for It’s a Small World while posting about my cousin’s incarceration. The fallacy of this experience had a profound effect on everyone in my family. We felt out of control. Helping to create a work of art that bears witness to the details and details of what happened feels deeply grounded. This is healing. This is one reason why creative and immersive storytelling is so important: it gives us a long-lasting sense of being, Oh, it was like that.
How does this creative collaboration work between you and Danny?
Danny is a gifted writer, and I was happy to tap into his willingness to document his experiences and his openness to doing so in a multimedia way. We started with conversations, and worked together to figure out the pieces of her experience that might translate well to the story. the edge. We knew we wanted to highlight the importance of storytelling and media, both as a way to deal with uncertainty and as a way to connect people across literal and metaphorical lines. Danny started by writing the prose, then we worked together to adapt a selection of his essays and prison journals into a comic script on Google Docs, and then I started sketching.
Tell us about your drawing process.
Drawing has always been my way of connecting with a sense of truth, for two reasons. The first is that drawing is embodied. It helps me feel and convey emotions. Second, drawings show details.
Danny sent me all the relevant photos from Myanmar that accompanied his journals, including a few sketches, but no public photos of Ansein Prison. Together we looked at the panopticon on Google Maps satellite view and he showed me his ward and told me where it happened. He made me many maps—of his and Juliana’s apartments, his ward and his cell, but the only other visual resource I could rely on was a collection of drawings by Mong Fu, an ex-prisoner in a different ward.
When I draw something I can’t see, even in a simple way, I need answers to a lot of questions: What was the floor of your cell made of? What was the structure of the walls and what was written on them? What did you see from your cell bars? Where was your bed and where did you keep your things? Oh, you really were one The New Yorker Put in your cell for six months? cold Every drawing needs to be revised. Sometimes Danny needed to see me draw something — in detail — before he remembered what the place actually looked like. That wall was high, and there was barbed wire on that wall, and there was grass, and there were no trees. This comic required more back-and-forth revisions of drawings than I’ve ever worked on. This is partly why I drew the finale in pencil.
But it was very gratifying when I would actually get something right, and I would think, Wow, drawing is the most magical technology out there.
“But it was so gratifying when I’d actually get something right, and I’d think, Wow, drawing is the most magical technology out there.“
How did tech play a role in your drawings?
Danny and I relied heavily on texting to share photos and clarify things while working. We were able to spend some time working in person and sharing notes, but most of our action happened with us across the world from each other: me in the US, Danny in Vietnam, where he was recently living. We also organized (somewhat chaotically) all of our visual and textual resources into Google Drive folders.
I draw by hand. I love the direct relationship with the paper, and I especially love drawing with pencil because of the friction and feel of the line. I do a lot of tracing, like how I held the paper up to my computer screen to trace Danny’s handwriting from scans of his prison journals. For my final, I drew the underdraft in blue pencil, and then I would “ink” with blackwing pencils, which are thick and produce beautiful ink.
A good scanner (and good scanner software) is very important: I use Epson wide format with Epson Scan2 software. Then in Photoshop, I discarded the blue pencil underlayer and tweaked the levels, so the darker pencil became more contrasty without losing grayscale and texture. Photoshop also became my canvas for playing with layouts, and figuring out how the flow of layers would work in the final animated version. I’m obsessed with how pencil marks look on a digital screen, and I think “inking” in pencil saves me a lot of process headaches and preserves the initial feel and flow of a spontaneous drawing.
How was technology a part of Danny’s experience in prison?
The first thing Danny said to me when I got out of prison, which I’ll never forget, was that it was nice to be without his phone. That’s not to minimize the suffering, but to witness Danny like this, breaking out of prison seeing that he was offered something. One of the questions we wanted to explore with this story was: If we are so inundated with information, stories about suffering, hardship and injustice, how do we actually respect an individual news story? In a democracy, we need access to all these stories, but how can we? maintenance About any of them?
That’s to say nothing of all the untold stories. Danny and I are only in a position to tell his Myanmar story because he was very fortunate to be an American with some resources. We think the answer here has something to do with the craft and emotion and immersion, which we hope the story offers the reader, but it also has something to do with the mindset of the recipient of the story.
The climax of this comic includes a story Danny receives from Juliana that really hits him: a This American Life A story about another American imprisoned abroad. Danny had lost constant access to pen and paper, the primary technologies he actually relied on to make meaning and fill his time, so he was meditating, preparing his mind for boredom, and then here comes… a podcast!
