Will Betke-Brunswick’s debut graphic memoir is a loving and gentle depiction of familial relationships and their complexities, amidst a cancer diagnosis, college, coming out, and navigating loss. Will’s expertly placed humor, along with quirky penguins and birds, guide the reader through the emotional journey of A Pros and Cons List for Strong Feelings.
Sydney Allison Hinton: It’s lovely to connect with you. Thank you so much for taking the time for a conversation. I know selecting and narrowing your work for a manuscript can be a daunting process. What made you decide to pursue the topic of your mother, juxtaposed with your gender and coming-out journey, for your debut book?
Will Betke-Brunswick: The first story I wrote for the book was “Our Song,” which ended up as the first story in the book. It was part of a longer comic about my mom’s support through a bad Pokémon card trade, where I lost my treasured Venusaur in an attempt to make friends. I wanted to write more about our relationship, and felt like the ten months between her diagnosis and death were an important time in our relationship. I included coming out as genderqueer since that was the time when I was coming out. Talking about gender was always a part of my relationship with my mom, just like talking about art and math were also part of our relationship.
Hinton: That feels like such a gift, to have been able to talk openly about gender with your mom. What advice or little moments of caring have stuck with you most from those conversations about gender? If you feel comfortable sharing.
Betke-Brunswick: In the book, my mom makes a crossword about the gender-related words she has learned, she laughs with me as I retell stories of weird gender moments, and she welcomes and loves my trans friends. The advice I saw my mom share was to be playful! Gender can be silly and absurd and fun — like most things.
Hinton: That sounds like expert advice. I’m glad you have so many wonderful memories with her. In your book, you briefly mention you love pteranodons, while reading a book with your mother. Was there any particular reason you chose to use birds for your characters? And why penguins?
Betke-Brunswick: I love drawing birds, especially flightless birds! I think walking birds are funny, and are inherently a little awkward. That felt appropriate for my family. I originally drew my mom as a penguin because drawing her as a dead human was too emotionally difficult, but I could draw a dead penguin. I am less interested in drawing mammals (other than bats and whales), since I think people interpret them automatically as cute and relatable in a certain way. People expect mammals to smile and frown, to have expressive eyebrows, and to make certain gestures with their hands, arms, and front legs. Drawing flightless birds frees me from so many expectations and gives me more space to play. I like drawing herps too, so there may be alligators in a future project.
Hinton: That makes perfect sense! And it isn’t something I’d considered when thinking about animals, especially mammals. I love this! More space to play. Can you point to an example or two from the book where you discovered something in the narrative through this kind of play, that might not have otherwise been possible?
Betke-Brunswick: I laughed while drawing my mom, a penguin, wearing goggles. She learned to swim when she was 21 and from then on loved swimming laps and splashing in the water with my sister and me. It makes sense to draw a penguin swimming. However, a penguin wearing goggles and a swim cap emphasizes both the goofiness of our time in the water, and that she took swimming seriously enough to always wear her goggles.
Also, as my mom gets closer to her death, the feathers on the ends of her wings become more frayed. I wanted to show her body getting sicker. As a penguin, frayed feathers let me convey that she was sick but in a gentler way than my memories of her human body about to die.
Hinton: The swimming scene was definitely one of my favorites for that reason. I have always been drawn to (pun totally intended) graphic memoirs by authors such as Art Spiegelman, Alison Bechdel, Craig Thompson, etc. because they give the reader a different reading experience than placing only words on a page. What are some of the challenges people don’t initially think of when composing a graphic memoir? What challenges did you encounter that you didn’t anticipate?
Betke-Brunswick: I heard the advice to talk about what size pages you are drawing at the beginning, so it is not a surprise to the publisher at the end. But I also should have asked about DPI [dots per inch] since I draw digitally. I originally had the book at 300 DPI, but my amazing friend Oliver helped me switch it to 600 DPI when Tin House requested 600.
In terms of memoir, I didn’t expect to enjoy spending time with my mom while I was drawing her. I also didn’t expect to have as much anxiety about the book coming out. I knew it would be vulnerable and exciting, but I didn’t realize I would also be terrified.
Hinton: What would you say you're most terrified about, and why?
Betke-Brunswick: I’m terrified my relationships with my family members as I depicted them in the book won’t be understood. I want them to be read how I intended them to be read — flawed but lovable all the way through. And I had to let this go. Letting go was scary, but always good practice for me.
Hinton: I can totally relate with that for nonfiction, and I can imagine how much more amplified it is with drawings alongside it too. Have you always been interested in creative nonfiction within the comic form? What compelled you to write in the nonfiction genre, rather than something completely made up?
Betke-Brunswick: As a kid, I found Maus on my grandparents’ bookshelf and read the whole book in their study during Passover one year. It was the first graphic novel I had ever read (except for maybe Amelia’s Notebook?). My grandparents were also Holocaust survivors, and their sentences mirrored Vladek Spiegelman’s. I like creating nonfiction because it is a way for me to interpret and share what I see and experience. So many funny and sad things happen, and I need to make them into art.
Hinton: Oh my, I haven't thought about Amelia’s Notebook in YEARS. That really opens up a rabbit-hole of elementary school memories. I noticed there is a subtle thread of music all throughout your memoir that connects you to your mother. If you had to pick a song or two (past or present) to encapsulate your memoir, what songs would you pick and why?
Betke-Brunswick: Savage Garden’s “I Knew I Loved You” is the song playing from the radio in the beginning of the book. My mom told me the chorus — “I knew I loved you before I met you, I think I dreamed you into life” — described exactly her experience of loving me. And at that time, I thought, “Yeah, totally! That makes sense. The singer is talking about gestational love.”
I listened to the Troye Sivan songs, “HEAVEN” and “YOUTH” on repeat while drawing this book. They had good energy and focus for me. You could certainly connect the choruses of each of these songs (“So if I’m losing a piece of me, maybe I don’t want heaven,” and “My youth, my youth is yours”) to the themes of the book, but that was subconscious! I just got stuff done when I listened to them.
Hinton: Now that I have the physical copy of your book in my hands, I see all the beautiful nuances of the color palette that wasn’t in the digital ARC. I was curious what made you choose this palette? Did Troye Sivan’s album cover for “Blue Neighbourhood” inspire that scheme at all, or was that subconscious like you previously mentioned?
Betke-Brunswick: I definitely didn’t connect the colors to the “Blue Neighbourhood” album cover! But it is amazing that it is also blue and orange. The blue color in the book was originally (at the very beginning) a bright purple. I changed it to blue after the first time I printed some pages. The purple didn’t print well, and also it made the whole book a little too neon. I love neon, but the book needed to be more grounded. The blue calmed it down and made the book more solid and real. And orange is my favorite color, so I used it for emphasis, emotion, and flair.
Hinton: I love hearing about creative processes like that. What is your next project, now that Pros and Cons is newly out in the world?
Betke-Brunswick: I have been excited about creating my series of gay vegan four panel love comics and a sad zine about what grief feels like thirteen years after my mom died. And I’m always drawing animals and monsters.
Will Betke-Brunswick is a cartoonist and author of the new graphic memoir, A Pros and Cons List for Strong Feelings, from Tin House Books. Will’s work has appeared in the new print edition of Trans Bodies, Trans Selves; How to Wait: An Anthology of Transition; and the websites INTO and Autostraddle. A former high school math teacher, Will lives in Colorado.
Sydney Allison Hinton (she/her) is a writer based in Illinois who graduated from Fresno State’s MFA program in May 2022. Her writing focuses on marginalized bodies, mental health, dating, and her family history with pageants. Sydney is published in Under the Sun and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. You can find her on Twitter and Instagram.
Author photo: Tin House