An Interview with Franky Frances Cannon
Describe your comics journey—how did you get into making comics?
I'm one of those cheesy, passionate creative-types who really did begin drawing and writing as soon as I could hold a crayon; I remember waking up in the middle of the night when I was four (I have since confirmed this with my parents) to scribble a “poem” that was likely illegible crayon shapes, about the man on the moon and cheese. I have always been equally interested in art and writing, and therefore comics and other hybrid text-image mediums feel the most compelling to me. When I was in first grade, I won a school-wide art contest with a visual poem of my dog. In retrospect, the painting and poem are quite terrible, but it felt exhilarating to win an award and $100 at the age of seven. It's been downhill ever since! No, but seriously, I have been a creator and admirer of comics since my early days, and the enthusiasm continues. Admittedly, I have never been able to make money as an artist or writer, which is partly why I have always kept a 'day job' and worked on my creative projects on my own personal time. My day jobs have been mostly related to literature and art, but not always: I've worked as a journalist, a professor, a director of a poetry nonprofit, a barista, a baker, a cheesemonger, and many other odd jobs. My teaching career has allowed me to share my passion for comics with my students; I have taught graphic literature, hybrid media, visual poetry, and comics, to students ranging from sixth grade all the way up to graduate students in an MFA program. Everyone loves comics!
My specialization in literature and art is creative nonfiction. I have an MFA from the Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program (a three-year companion program to the Iowa Writers Workshop), and during my time pursuing this degree, I began writing several books that I was fortunate enough to find publishers for. It can be very tricky to find editors, publishers, and agents who are interested in hybrid media, particularly the weird mediums that fall between the lines of standard market categories. My work usually slips even further beyond the categories of comics, graphic literature, or graphic memoir—my work approaches the world of illustration, in that I often type my text and accompany prose or poetry with separate illustrations. This is in contrast to more straightforward graphic novels, in which the text and imagery are fully integrated.
The three graphic-text books of mine that are out in the world are:
Walter Benjamin Reimagined; A Graphic Translation of Poetry, Prose, Aphorisms, and Dreams
The Highs and Lows of Shape-Shift Ma and Big-Little Frank
Each of these books are, to put it simply, odd! The Walter Benjamin book is a graphic translation, which is a form of illustrated creative nonfiction, or illuminated literary response—there are so many different ways to try to explain the method and genre. The Highs and Lows book is my illustrated memoir. I don't often call it my “graphic” memoir because the book alternates between text and image, so the word “illustrated” feels more appropriate. Tropicalia is a collaboration between a writer from the Philippines, Mookie Katigbak Lacuesta, and myself. I like to describe our writing and art-making process as a game of literary telephone: Mookie would write a poem, I would write a poem in response, and then I would create a painting in response to my response. Confusing? Yes, but the collaboration was fruitful, pleasant, and surprisingly easy. By “easy,” I mean that our individual creative work seemed to function well as a conversation.
Outside of these book projects, I'm an active doodler, journal-keeper, and comic creator. I carry several notebooks around with me at all times, and if you're ever in the same room as me, watch out, I might sketch your portrait. One of my favorite ongoing projects is to write graphic book reviews. Sometimes, I illustrate a review of a book that I happened to enjoy or find particularly thought-provoking, and sometimes I am commissioned by a press, journal, or author to write a graphic review. I publish these here and there, and most of them can be found on my website.
How did you develop your voice/unique comics style?
My “voice” in comics is figurative, sketchy, literary, moody, and text-heavy. How did I develop my style? I'll start here: I never went to summer camp. (My parents divorced when I was four, and because they moved across the country from one another, whenever I flew to stay with either parent, they wanted as much time as possible with my sister and myself). Instead of a sleepaway camp, my dad, who works year-round, enrolled us in summertime day classes at an arts school in Portland, Oregon. This is my roundabout explanation for the origin of my artistic style; my art education began in earnest when I was eight or nine years old, at this summer daytime art camp: the Multnomah Arts Center. I loved it! Somehow, we convinced the school to allow my sister and me to enroll in adult art classes. I sampled all sorts of mediums, including cartooning, calligraphy, oil painting, watercolor painting, metallurgy, ceramics, wood-working, intaglio printmaking, relief printmaking, and so on throughout my preteen and teenage years. What a gift! Then, when I moved to Vermont in 6th grade, I attended a very artsy-fartsy high school, The St. Johnsbury Academy. The school is free for locals, but is also technically a private boarding school, so we “townies” were able to take all manner of fancy art classes that I assume were funded by the tuitions of the “dormies,” or at least this is my memory of how the school functioned. I took all of the available art courses, including darkroom photography, anatomy and figure drawing, fashion design, printmaking, and a dozen other delightful subjects. To be honest, this high school spoiled me for my undergraduate art classes at the University of Vermont, where all of my teachers exclusively taught modern art, and seemed to take no interest in any figurative art.
It's been a challenge for me to try to sort out my own style amidst all of this artistic training. In a way, I feel that I'm bursting with too much information about what art has been, what art is, and what it could be, to be able to find my own distinct style. I also can't help but hold onto the traditional, realistic, figurative styles of my high school art teachers at the Academy—I so admired their attention to traditional “fine art” technique, craft, and history. On the other hand, when I sit down to doodle and create comics, I also instinctively weave in fantastical and goofy elements, and I'm highly influenced by the comics that I read. I could write an entire essay about all of the graphic novelists, comic artists, and zinesters that I adore, but I'll drop a few of my favorites and move on: Lynda Barry, Alison Bechdel, Tillie Walden, Maira Kalman, Brecht Evans, Julie Doucet, Genevieve Castree, Elise Gravel, Sarah Mirk, Michel DeForge, and everything ever published by Drawn and Quarterly.
What are some of the joys and challenges of making nonfiction comics?
The joy of nonfiction comics is that I can be honest, vulnerable, and messy. The challenge of nonfiction comics is that I have to be honest, vulnerable, and messy. It's often scary to share my work with the public, particularly those who are closest to me. I don't worry too much about the judgments of strangers, but I'm afraid of hurting my loved ones. After I published my memoir, The Highs and Lows of Shape-Shift Ma and Big-Little Frank, my mother threw a tantrum (understandably) and I felt guilty for months, until I attended a nonfiction comics panel with Alison Bechdel, and she explained that although she worried about her mother's reaction to writing Are You My Mother?, she ultimately felt compelled to push through the discomfort, and that it would have been even more uncomfortable to not write the book. I'm paraphrasing—this was many years ago, but I walked away feeling a bit more confident in sharing my work, even with my family.
Are you working on something now?
I've been working on a graphic novel for a few years, titled Vernal Thaw. The book is autofiction, but it's easier to call it a novel until I hammer out all of the details. The novel is underway—I have written the bulk of the text, art is incomplete. It's the first project that I've experimented with using pen and markers, instead of pen, ink, and watercolor, and I'm not certain that the artwork I have created so far fits the tone of the book.
Vernal Thaw follows an improbable romance between Franky—a young adjunct professor haunted by several encounters with violent men, and Vera, an older woman bruised by her childhood in homophobic Soviet-era Ukraine, and by her careers in the male-dominated fields of engineering and medicine. Franky and Vera try to reconcile their individual traumas and their mutual desire for romance and partnership. This narrative traces their entangling and unraveling through vignettes of love and tumult. I might also throw a murder in, just for fun, which would certainly push the book from “autofiction” squarely into the “fiction” realm.
Other than this manuscript, I've been working on smaller projects, such as comics for the local Burlington, VT newspaper, Seven Days, such as this review of ice cream shops in the area:
I've also been contributing short autobiographical comics to the coolest comics newsletter, the Ladybroad Ledger, which is an an annual free comics newspaper showcasing the work of femme and nonbinary Vermont cartoonists. There is an upcoming Nonfiction Comics Festival in Burlington, VT, where I will be exhibiting my books and comics, including a recent zine that I created as a block-print.
Frances Cannon is the Managing Director of Sundog Poetry, as well as a writer, artist, and instructor. She has previously taught at the Vermont College of Fine Arts, Champlain College, the Vermont Commons School, and the University of Iowa. She has an MFA in creative writing from Iowa and a BA in poetry and printmaking from the University of Vermont. Her published books include: Walter Benjamin: Reimagined, MIT Press, The Highs and Lows of Shapeshift Ma and Big-Little Frank, Gold Wake Press, Tropicalia, Vagabond Press, Predator/Play, Ethel Press, Uranian Fruit, Honeybee Press, and Bitten by the Lantern Fly, forthcoming with Finishing Line Press. She has worked for The Iowa Review, McSweeney’s Quarterly, The Believer, and The Lucky Peach. Her writing has been published in The New York Times, Poetry Northwest, The Iowa Review, The Green Mountain Review, Vice, Lithub, The Moscow Times, The Examined Life Journal, Gastronomica, Electric Lit, Edible magazine, Mount Island, Fourth Genre, and Vol. 1 Brooklyn.
Franky Frances Cannon's website
Instagram: @frankyfrancescannon
Twitter: @francesartist
Links to additional work:
I love Franky's work and this is a great interview!