Given the title, you’d expect that Téa Mutonji’s short story collection Shut Up You’re Pretty (paperback) would be inspired by what’s being going on with women lately. But in the following email interview, Mutonji explains that wasn’t the point of these connected short stories…until it was.
Towards the end of 2017, writer and musician Vivek Shraya received some graphic transphobic hate mail from someone she didn’t know. It’s an experience she’s chosen to share in the graphic novel Death Threat (hardcover). But given the nature of the story — and, admittedly, Vivek’s unavailability — I wondered what it would be like to draw something this personal about someone else. In the following email interview, Death Threat artist Ness Lee discusses what it was like to draw this graphic novel, why she wanted to do it, and what she hopes people will get out of reading it.