Jailed during the 2021 coup in Myanmar, American journalist Danny Fenster spent six months as a political prisoner. For much of his incarceration he battled boredom and fear, subsisting on meditation and podcasts on an SD card smuggled in by mail, sent by his girlfriend, Juliana.
Now, nearly five years after his release, he collaborated with his cousin Amy Kurzweil, a celebrated New Yorker cartoonist and graphic memoirist, on a long-form interactive comic for The Verge about his imprisonment. I chatted via email with Kurzweil about her role as an illustrator and storyteller in this ambitious long-form project, the responsibilities inherent in telling someone else’s story, and how she produced rich, multilayered drawings using only a pencil.
The Verge: Your work often focuses on family history, like your grandmother’s survival in a Warsaw ghetto and using AI to re-create your grandfather’s voice. What was your experience like helping to tell Danny’s story?
Any Kurzweil: When Danny was first imprisoned, I called my friend Ahmed Naji, a writer who had been imprisoned by Egypt’s authoritarian regime for nine months in 2016. He told me that the experience of unjust imprisonment can be worse for people on the outside; you care about the detained but have no information about what’s happening. I’m not sure I believe him, but I did appreciate Ahmed’s validation that the not knowing 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 his experience was like, to know it in detail, and to allow myself some informed imagination of the reality I’d blindly groped at in my mind.
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 kind of impromptu SWAT team dedicated to figuring out what to do. We met regularly with our embassy, and called on every resource we could think of. (We were organized — we had a Slack channel!) We met other people who’d experienced this special torture, and we corralled a community of people invested in the mission to #BringDannyHome and #ProtectThePress.
But we didn’t really know what Danny was experiencing. There was a profound disconnect between our banal daily realities and the unknowns of Danny’s detainment. I have a vivid memory of taking early morning meetings with former ambassadors while on a vacation in Disney World with my brother’s family, standing in line for It’s a Small World while posting about my cousin’s imprisonment. The disorientation 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 testifies to the details and specifics of what happened feels profoundly orienting. It’s healing. This is one reason why creative and immersive storytelling is so important: It gives us a prolonged feeling of being like, Ooh, that’s what it was like.
An early sketch of the prison yard.
How did this creative collaboration work between you and Danny?
Danny is a gifted writer, and I was happy to take advantage of his desire to document his experiences and his openness to doing it in a multimedia way. We started with conversations, and worked together to figure out the slice of his experience that could translate well to a story for The Verge. We knew we wanted to highlight the importance of storytelling and media, both as a way to cope with uncertainty and as a way to connect people across literal and metaphorical bars. Danny began by writing prose, then we worked together to adapt his essays and selections from his prison journals to a comic script over Google Docs, and then I started sketching.
Kurzweil’s sketch of the prison yard, with annotations from Fenster.
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