Presidential Candidates, Patients, and Cartoonists Who Happen to Be Women

An account of our whirlwind trip to New York

This is Emily Writes Back, a newsletter for brilliant people, by Emily Sanders Hopkins.

At the Algonquin on Sunday, here I am (“first known Black woman New Yorker cartoonist”) with Amy Hwang, the first Asian New Yorker cartoonist that we know of. Check out some of Amy’s hilarious cartoons here. What I find special about Amy’s cartoon style/voice is the wicked combination of deliciously chunky (chonky) drawings (love the rounded framing she sometimes does) and succinct, funny-true captions. It’s like each one aims to be a mural or textile design AND a gag cartoon.

For the picture above, we asked the photographer to “please make our heads the same size.” I think she almost succeeded in honoring our request.

Here’s a fancy and lucky sentence: I spent Sunday afternoon in Manhattan in the Oak Room of the Algonquin, filming for Liza Donnelly’s documentary-in-the-making about the New Yorker magazine’s women cartoonists, Women Laughing.

Despite the hot lights in an airless room on a warm day, I wore a thick mohair sweater, now among my most expensive items of clothing ever, purchased just minutes before in a panic at the Lincoln Center J Crew store. My friend Amy Reading, when I’d asked her a week ago what I should wear to this thing, had advised a low-cut jewel tone blouse with black pants, but it turned out that I didn’t have such a thing.

“Oh, I’ll pick something up in the city,” I told myself. Afterall, New York is known to have stores.

We arrived on Saturday afternoon and saw two wonderful one-man musical shows at Playwrights Horizons. Between the shows we went out for dinner, and then afterwards for drinks with our cousin Diane Davis, the Broadway and screen actress/union leader/tireless political volunteer for the Dems/and possessor of one of the most gorgeous singing voices ever.

When we started talking politics, Marshall mentioned that we like to point this out: Kamala Harris is the highest-ranking woman in the history of American politics (because she is), and that put Diane in mind of a recent unpleasant political conversation she’d had at a doctor’s office and the letter she’d felt compelled to write in response. She brought up her letter on her phone in the bar and read it to us:

I love her.

Fast forward to the day of the women cartoonist roundtable filming. A slow start. A hair appointment, an unexpected annual Polish Day Parade that closed down 5th Avenue, etc.

My people on an empty street

A police helicopter hovers over 5th Avenue

Roundtable of Women Cartoonists

The idea: to gather ten women cartoonists together to sit around a table for conversation about our art, the cartooning business, the New Yorker, womanhood, cartoons, etc. What could go wrong?

Subscribe to find out!

No, I’m just kidding. I’ll tell you: nothing went wrong. I arrived a bit early, thanks to my knight in shining armor Marshall Hopkins, who along with our daughter had calmly brought $59 lace-trimmed undershirts to my dressing room moments earlier. (Since I’m on the topic of money, I’ll mention now that I’d earlier that day purchased a small passionfruit iced tea from Starbucks for $7.51. I am now a country mouse, unused to the unrelenting money-sucking machinery of the city.)

Liza’s idea was to get 10 cartoonists around a table for conversation about art, jokes, the cartooning business, the New Yorker, feminism, cartoons, etc. I’d come in from Ithaca, five hours away. Victoria Roberts had come from her home in Mexico. Roz Chast from whichever leafy nearby suburb she lives in, and Maggie Larson came, I think, from Harlem, and there was also Amy Hwang, Bishakh Som, Arantza Pena Popo, Liana Fink, Emily Flake, and of course Liza Donnelly herself. I so admire Liza’s way of taking herself (and us) seriously, of writing the first book about women cartoonists at the magazine, Funny Ladies, and then its sequel Very Funny Ladies, and her work to keep the conversation about women in this field prominent in a variety of spaces.

There was red and white wine and bottled water. There were black ink pens and big sheets of Bristol board paper to draw on. We took seats and all picked up pens and began to doodle. Gosh I am rusty! I don’t tend to cartoon much lately and haven’t submitted a batch of cartoons to the New Yorker in ages, maybe a year.

We covered many topics. Liza doggedly pursued the feminist line of questioning: “Do we still need to talk about sexism in cartooning when half of the current batch of cartoonists at the magazine are women?” She passed around the table some of her favorite cartoons from the past, cartoons on the topic of sexism.

We talked about how we got our starts, favorite cartoons, representation in cartoons, the business of cartooning, etc. We also got very far off topic at times too. It was fun. It didn’t feel incredibly relaxed, but it felt like this would be a good group of women to meet with every Wednesday evening for drinks without the film cameras. It did feel like a gathering of kindred spirits.

Roz Chast was funny, giggly and wry, and made us all laugh. Many of us took the opportunity to tell her about a cartoon of hers we especially love. Roz pointed out that cartoons are not just a joke with a drawing stapled on. She said that we cartoonists actually love to draw and to create worlds with our drawings. If we draw a drawer, she said, we want you to almost feel the old TV remotes that must be inside that drawer. So true. That IS what is fun about drawing, when you can be deep into it enough, and happy and relaxed enough, to be entertaining yourself as you do it.

Victoria Roberts, beautiful soul and one of my personal favorites, champion of art and artists, was thoughtful; she remarked on how important it is, as an artist, to feel that you are home at a publication. Tall and calm Amy Hwang, who I fell in love with, is one of those people with a perpetual sparkle in their eye and what seems like a wry and generous way of looking at everything.

Bishakh Som, who goes by Rani, is cosmopolitan (an Indian born in Ethiopia and raised mainly in America) and elegant with her long, witchy black hair and slim and backward-bending posture reminiscent of a fashion sketch. At the end of the shoot, Rani’s piece of paper was crowded with interesting and beautiful drawings of all sorts of people. “Now that is a cartoonist who is NOT rusty,” I thought. She’s currently working on another graphic novel and is in the penciling stage, she told me. Then she’ll ink and then she’ll hand paint the drawings with watercolors. She’s the real thing. I mentioned to her that she must be earning good karma for all her work (graphic novels sometimes exhaust me just looking at them, because of the thousands of hours I know must go into making them), and she quipped something like, “That’s the whole reason I’m doing it, for the karma.”

Arantza Pena Popo, a small beauty whose piece of paper at the end of the shoot was covered in energetic, painterly portraits connected by swoops and beveled black clouds, was the youngest among us. She submitted her first cartoons to the magazine when she was just 19. She talked about at first trying to aim her work to what she thought New Yorker readers must want—sophisticated white dad jokes. Ha! When you see her work—autobiographical, reflective, colorful, joyful, confident—you know she has outgrown that young insecurity. (Sneaking myself into the magazine was the thrill I got from cartooning.) Arantza hasn’t been submitting to the New Yorker lately but is busy being an artist and is now doing a residency in Vermont.

Maggie Larson looks like the kind of person I most like to draw in cartoons. Her nose is adorable and interesting, with a slight bump (she broke it, she told me when I complimented her on it), a sauciness but also a grandeur. Her hair was attractively asymmetrical, covering one black-lined eye flirtatiously, and she wore a suit vest. Why don’t I ever wear think to wear menswear? It is such a good look. Maggie said something during the roundtable conversation that I loved, about how lucky it is to get to draw for a living, to draw funny things we think up and then to see them in a magazine a few weeks later. She described the morning seven years ago when her very first cartoon appeared in the magazine and she went on a surprisingly difficult search for a newsstand that carried The New Yorker. When she finally found one, I think on her third try, she bought the entire stack, leading the cashier to ask why. “Well let’s see it then!” the cashier demanded when she learned. I remember my own such morning—the dash to 8th Avenue to a store that carried magazines along with the gum and cigarettes and breakfast sandwiches. I remember clutching the four copies I bought as I walked back to my apartment in ecstasy. That week, whenever I saw someone on the subway reading The New Yorker, it took all my strength to not tap them on the shoulder and suggest they flip to page 27.

I sat next to the absentmindedly charismatic Liana Fink, an original, whom I’d met once before in 2018 when she was on a panel of women cartoonists at a Society of Illustrators exhibit organized by Liza. Liana is one of Marshall’s models, he’s said. He loves her artistic relentlessness. Since I last saw her, she’s become a mother. She strikes me as being both delicate and sharp. I love her faith in her own mind, her spare and funny drawings. Life is hard and the world is weird, best to be yourself and do what you want to do—that is the wisdom I take from Liana. She asked Emily Flake, “How do you draw a cat?” and I couldn’t tell if she was joking or not. But I think she was not joking. She filled her paper with firm drawings of funny dogs and other animals, including a cat informed by Emily’s demo, and then started on a fresh piece and drew a tight and attractive scene, I think set in an apartment.

Next to Liana was Emily Flake, whose life has intersected with mine by whisps. We lived within a block of each other for years in Baltimore, when she was an art student and I was an adjunct writing teacher at Johns Hopkins. Her cartoons and mine started appearing in the magazine around the same time in the early 2000’s. We both like to wear a bright red lip, although it’s more fabulous on her, with her bare face, startling blue eyes, and mane of reddish hair. Emily founded a residency for women humorists—the St. Nell’s Humor Residency— in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, where I used to do prison work and where my good friend Ingrid lives. How cool is that, to create support for women humorists, a place for them to work in peaceful sorority with other humorists? Emily is busy.

All of the successful working artists are doing five things—embroidery and books (Roz), monologues and cartoons (Victoria), standup and teaching and cartooning (Emily), advertising work and cartooning (Amy), editorial work and fine art (Arantza), and so forth.

And now I must dress for my day of fundraising for a hospice! See?

xoxo