RIYA : I loved your graphic memoir, Flying Couch. What do you hope is the main takeaway for readers of this memoir? And then I know you just finished your upcoming memoir, Artificial, (congratulations on that) so I would love for you to share your vision for that as well.

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AMY : Okay. The main takeaway. Well, I guess for my first book, I wanted people to understand how the past affects the present, especially in terms of family history and family inheritance.

I would say that was the main takeaway from that book. Or the reason I wanted to work on it was because I wanted to understand how the story that I’d inherited was affecting me in my life and my identity. And I also felt a mission to document stories of the Holocaust because you know, people are getting further and further away from that historical period, and Holocaust survivors are dying.

When I worked on that book, I knew that generation was in their 80s, 70s, and 90s, and you know, now that it’s been seven or eight years since I’ve published it. I started it almost fifteen years ago, and now that feels even more relevant. That that generation is moving on. So as time passes, I feel even more, that I’m glad that I undertook that endeavor.

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RIYA : Yes, that was so powerful and moving for me when I read Flying Couch: how your memoir reflects the impact of a major historical event of trauma-the Holocaust-on multiple generations, including lives more than fifty years later.

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AMY : And for my next book, I would say there’s some similar motivation. How does the past affect the present? What do we do with history that is not documented? That’s a question that I had, especially for my second book, because my grandfather also was affected by the Nazis, but I don’t have very much access to his story of everything: how it affected him, what he went through.

I have very little information about that. So that’s another thing that comes up in the second book. I would say that the goal of the second book is trying to understand how technology can help us connect to the past, and how these new forms of technology can help. What are the liabilities of these algorithms that preserve certain information, but don’t have access to other kinds of information? These algorithms have a way of casting a kind of an illusory spell, like the illusion that you’re talking to a person through a large language model. And what’s actually happening when you talk to a computer that simulates somebody’s voice. I wanted to unpack all that, and make it more understandable to people, make it a little bit less strange, you know?

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RIYA : Yes, today technology is such a big part of our everyday life in so many ways.

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AMY : Yes, and it’s kind of very sci-fi to talk to a computer that resurrects somebody’s voice. But I wanted to make that less strange, more comprehensible, and also make it relevant to human life. People have lots of fears, alarmist fears about AI – a lot of which are relevant, but some of which I think are not grounded in the reality of what these algorithms are and what they can do. So I wanted to offer an engagement with AI that’s more grounded, more specific, and less scary than people tend to talk about. And then I also just kind of wanted to get to know my family members. So working on the project, I got to know my father better, I got to know things about my grandfather that I didn’t know before.

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RIYA : That is fascinating: so in this memoir, you explore your family relationships more, but then there is also this AI element.

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AMY : Yeah, I wanted to write a good story, something that would be entertaining, and interesting, and make people think…something that would also help people think philosophically about the kinds of questions that AI brings to the surface.

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RIYA : I can’t wait to read this new memoir! I want to shift gears a bit: I know you’re also a cartoonist for The New Yorker, so would you share with us: what’s your favorite part about that?

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AMY : My favorite part about that is actually the community of New Yorker cartoonists that I get to be friends with. You know, being an artist, you don’t get a workplace in the way that some jobs, people have workplaces. So I’m mostly working on my own, at my desk, in my home. But I have this virtual community of cartoonists that I get to talk to constantly.

We’re constantly talking. And we’re all working on other projects because it’s hard to make a living just solely doing New Yorker cartoons, because there’s so many people that do it, so you only sell so many cartoons. So all of us do other things, and it’s really fun to be able to share that with each other. Like, what are you working on? Actually, the teacher that is going to be teaching with me at Interlochen this summer, his name’s Navied Mahdavian--he has a book coming out in the fall that I helped him with. So we get to share – you know, we get to teach together, we get to share the fact that we both have books coming out. And I met him through The New Yorker, and I met all of my cartoonist friends through The New Yorker. So that’s the best part.

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RIYA : That sounds like a pretty wonderful community. So my next question for you is: how do you choose what to include in your graphic memoir, and what not to include?

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AMY : A lot of it has to do with how the parts fit together. I think you start with what feels most important emotionally. What is the aspect of the story that feels like the core for me personally? So if I have feelings that are strong about these details, or these memories, I start with that. And then you’re like, what would pair well with that essential piece? What parts of my grandfather’s story do I need to include, because they pair well with a part of my story that I want to include? Or for example, in my first book, there are parts of my grandmother’s story, and I always ask myself: which stories feel most essential? And then there’s other parts of her story you need to understand in order to understand the most essential parts.

And then what are some essential parts of my story? And what do you need to understand about me in order to make sense of them? And then how do I put those together in a way that is interesting? So it’s almost like a quilt, I would say. And you’re kind of just going – going along through the process and making decisions as you go. And sometimes, you’re really attached to one scene, and then by the end, you’re like, oh, I don’t need that. You have to cut it, and then that’s kind of sad, but – but you have to do it.

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RIYA : I love the metaphor of the quilt, and how you patch together stories of different family members in the memoir…beautiful! Now I know that writing a graphic memoir is a complicated and long process, so how do you motivate yourself?

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AMY : Yeah, it is long. I like to do things in chunks. I divide up the book by chapter, obviously, and I definitely try to celebrate when I get to the end of a chapter. But even getting to the end of a page, you try to feel like you finished something, and you have a little celebration feeling. So I think just divide things up into chunks that you can undertake, and then you’ll feel like you accomplished something when you get to the end. It’s pretty hard to do that for so many years.

I think for me, it helped that once I became a professional in this field, I applied for grants and residencies. A residency is an opportunity to go somewhere, usually somewhere really beautiful, where they also feed you, give you a place to live, and you get to spend time with other artists. And you’re working on your project while you’re, you know, having, like, a nice community with other artists.

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RIYA : That’s so neat.

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AMY : Yes, that really helps motivate me. So I had a number of those kinds of opportunities that helped me keep working on that book. You know, a lot of the difficulty is that you’re alone. You’re alone with the project. So the more opportunities that I had to work with other people or be near other people, that kind of kept me going.

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RIYA : You already talked about AI, but how do you see graphic novels evolving over time? And do you think AI will affect the creation of graphic narratives in any way?

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AMY : Yes, I think of AI as a tool that we can use. So I think that it’ll become one tool among many tools in our toolkit. But I don’t think we’re going to abandon drawn by hand. Doing things with our hands, I feel like that’s an essential thing for an artist. But I feel that AI will help us make certain parts of our process easier, or maybe give us inspiration or ideas. For example, sometimes I’ll ask the image generation software, DALL-E 2 – I’ll have some idea in my head, and I’ll ask it to, do something. For example, the other day, I was drawing something that was supposed to look like a sculpture of a tangle of legs.

And I couldn’t quite visualize it in my head: what does a tangle of legs look like, if it were a sculpture? It was just hard for me. I think there are some artists who can just pull that image into their mind and draw it, but I found that difficult. So I asked it to create an image for me. And it didn’t do very well. I was disappointed, you know. But I was like, oh, it would be great if I could have lots of different examples of images. And then I could use them for inspiration. So you kind of work with it. It’s not like I’m copying everything that the AI does. Instead, I’m asking it to give me some visual examples.

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RIYA : That’s such an interesting idea; using AI to fuel your own creativity.

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AMY : Yes, I think there’ll be more things like that. There are also these generative fill tools. I don’t know if you’ve heard anything about generative fill, where, like, in Photoshop, you can just say, I want to put a dog on this rock, you know. And then Photoshop will fill in a dog, and it’ll give you a bunch of examples. So I think that’s another tool that artists can use. I think for cartoonists, I don’t know how interested we’ll ultimately be in algorithms that do the drawing for us, because I think the whole point of cartooning is that you’re making the lines with your own hand.

Even if you’re working digitally, you’re still kind of – the movement of your arm makes the line on the screen. I think that’s an important part of cartooning. So I don’t think most cartoonists are going to want their work to be replaced by computer generated lines.

But I think there’ll probably be some cartoonists who are using that in creative ways, like mixing their own lines with the lines of the AI. That might yield some cool stuff. But mostly, I think it’s going to make our work more efficient. And there’s all kinds of technical things that are super annoying that you have to do when you write a graphic novel. For example, sometimes you need to extend the lines around your page by an eighth of an inch, because you have to – it’s not worth going into the details, but you have to do very stupid tasks like that, that can take forever, in order to fit the specs of whatever publication that you’re trying to print with. And it just takes so much time, and it’s very uncreative. And in cases like that, I think better AI could help just make that happen in the click of a button. And we’d all be better off. So I look forward to that.

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RIYA : That is very true! Now, I’m sure many people have probably asked you already, but I am curious: who’s your biggest inspiration?

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AMY : My biggest inspiration is probably Alison Bechdel, who wrote this book called Fun Home, because she’s a graphic memoirist: she’s very personal, and very deep in how much she goes into her mind, her emotions, and her family. She’s also very literary. She’s not afraid to write comics that are really complex and have references to lots of other books. And she’s just a very philosophical cartoonist.

She likes to think about ideas and weave that into her work. And then on completely the other hand, I’m really influenced by Lynda Barry, who we talked about in class [at Interlochen]. And everything with her is very much about just getting your ideas on paper, doing everything by hand, and trying to not edit, not think too hard, not edit too much, just kind of vomit your drawings onto the page, and don’t judge yourself. I think that’s really helpful, that approach is about the joy of drawing. It doesn’t matter if your drawing’s good or bad, as long as you’re just doing it.

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RIYA : This is my last question: what’s one piece of advice you’d want to give to someone who’s interested in creating graphic narratives, or more specifically, writing a graphic novel or memoir?

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AMY : Okay. One piece of advice. Well, you have to write about something that you really, really care about, that feels really personal to you, that is very emotional. I think that’s the kind of thing that keeps you going--if you’re emotionally invested. Being connected to the topic is something that’s really essential. Chances are it’s going to be challenging to get to a position right away where you have structural support to finish a project; you’re going to have to be working on your project on the side, while you figure out what you want to do to make money.

That’s just the reality of life today. So it has to be a project that feels – I don’t want to say therapeutic, but that you have an emotional motivation to complete. It’s not just about what you think would play well in the market. It has to really be personal, or you’re not going to come back to it. Just finding that really essential topic or idea. And chances are, if you feel really strongly about something emotionally, there’s an audience for it. There are people interested. We’re not that unique, you know. If you care about something, other people will probably care about it too.

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RIYA : That makes so much sense: that’s great advice. When I think about the works that I have been drawn to, I think I’ve loved them because I connected with the experiences in that story.  Thank you for this inspiring conversation; I can't wait to read Artificial.

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