TtD supplement #292 : seven questions for Frances Cannon

Franky (Frances) Cannon is a writer, editor, educator, and artist based in Edinburgh, Scotland and Burlington, Vermont. She is the Reviews Editor for Poetry Wales, an editorial reader for The Kenyon Review, and an affiliated scholar at Kenyon College, where she recently completed the Mellon Science and Nature Writing Fellowship. She has an MFA in creative writing from Iowa and a BA from the University of Vermont. She is the author and illustrator of several books: Walter Benjamin Reimagined (MIT Press), Fling Diction (Green Writers Press), Willow and the Storm (Green Writers), Tropicalia (Vagabond), The Highs and Lows of Shapeshift Ma and Big-Little Frank (Gold Wake), Sagittaria (Bottlecap), Predator/Play (Ethel), Uranian Fruit (Honeybee), and Grotto (above/ground). She also has a chapbook forthcoming with Ethel: Bitten by the Lantern Fly; and a book forthcoming with Valiz: Queer Flora, Fauna, and Funga.

Her poems “Consider the orchid,” “East Wemyss,” “Self-portrait as the five of cups” and “Scandal” appear in the forty-eighth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poems “Consider the orchid,” “East Wemyss,” “Self-portrait as the five of cups” and “Scandal.”

A: Consider the orchid:
It’s important to complicate the narrative about our human relationship to ‘nature’—so much of our language and worldview has historically painted nature as other, as an untouchable ideal, wilderness as ‘unspoiled’ and pristine, flowers and butterflies versus man and machine. I am drawn to stories about species which expand and confuse this overly simplistic view of nature—I’m fascinated by beings that hold both the beauty and the bite. 

East Wemyss:
This is a tribute to the people in my life who are proud nerds, celebrating the strangeness of language and science, noticing details that are generally overlooked, such as fossils in an abandoned mine, and insect music.

Self-portrait as the five of cups:
This poem is the result of a prompt that I gave to my own students during a workshop that I co-taught at the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop this past summer. I'm interested in tarot as a creative, generative historical material—not as a divinatory tool, but as a thought-provoking tool for visual and mental stimulation. I’ve taught a few courses in various contexts using tarot cards as prompts for short fiction and poetry, and in this case, the prompt was to write a self-portrait poem in 20 lines (10 syllables each) in conversation with the tarot card that picked you. I’m lucky if I find the time to write a poem while my students write.

Scandal:
This poem makes me laugh—although it conveys the story of violence and drama, it’s also a simple story about life in a small town in the Midwest. While teaching at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, I experienced the village as if on a theatrical stage or a sitcom—every minor conflict felt exaggerated and amplified by the local gossip. This gossip included the conversations amongst my students, my colleagues, the townsfolk, and the campus newsletter.

Q: How do these poems compare to some of the other work you’ve been doing lately?

A: Ah! My creative work shifts through genres as though through seasons or tides; I wrote a flurry of poems leading up to this chapbook, and now I am mostly writing nonfiction, fiction, and illustrations, as well as a wide range of editorial projects.  I’m primarily focused on editing an anthology titled Queer Flora, Fauna, and Funga, forthcoming with Valiz Press in 2026. Keep your eyes peeled midsummer! I’m often motivated to write poems as a creative response to intense life events, moods, adventures, misadventures—I would be thrilled if an idea for a poem presented itself soon, but I’m also content to wait for the inspiration to come naturally. In the meantime, I’ll be writing, editing, and drawing.

Q: How does your work in different forms—poems, fiction, nonfiction and illustration—interact? Do you see each of these as separate threads, or are they in conversation? 

A: Themes bleed together between these varied forms, and most of my work is hybrid in that it incorporates text and image together. The forms of poetry and prose stay relatively separate, although I tried an experimental ‘conversation’ between these forms recently—I wrote a poem that encapsulated the mood and plot of my unpublished novel manuscript. I enjoyed the challenge and the result; this type of poetic constraint is fruitful for me.

Q: How did you get to the point of working such hybrids? Do you have any models for the kinds of work you’ve been attempting? 

A: I have always been inclined to blend forms and genres. I’m inspired by many hybrid authors; a few that come to mind are Lynda Barry, Alison Bechdel, and Bianca Stone. I read a lot of graphic novels; Drawn and Quarterly is perhaps my favorite publisher of comics and illustrated texts. 

Q: With a handful of published titles, whether as author or illustrator or both, as well as your current works-in-progress, how do you feel your work has progressed? Where do you see your work heading?

A: There are a handful of forms and genres that I have been working towards throughout my writing career, and I haven’t yet achieved—one is to create a fully realized graphic novel/graphic prose book. All of my hybrid works include text and image in various formats, such as single-paged pieces of visual poetry, or typed prose with alternating illustrations, but I have not yet been able to carve out the time and space required to create a graphic novel in which all of my text is fully integrated into the visual art composition, handwritten and incorporated into the design of the page. If that sounds confusing, it is! I find that creating graphic texts is three times as much work as the mediums of writing or artmaking on their own—the synthesis of the two feels like another medium all its own. SO, that’s a goal of mine. Another goal is to publish a full-length book of fiction, either a novel or book of short stories. I have books in many genres and forms, including autofiction, poetry, and nonfiction, but I haven’t written more than a handful of short stories, and I’ve been sitting on my novel for too many years. Time to get this book out there, it’s like a guest that has overstayed their welcome. 

Q: I’m curious about your movement between Burlington, Vermont and Edinburgh, Scotland. How do you engage with these two very different literary landscapes? Do you see a shift in influence or engagement impacting your work at all, as you spend time in each?

A: I have spent two decades in Burlington, on and off, so I am more familiar with ‘the scene’ so to speak, but every time I move away I feel as though I have to re-acquaint myself. It’s such a small city (a town, really), which means that everyone knows everyone else in the literary world of Vermont. There are only a handful of literary publishers, and only a few bookshops and performance venues that consistently host literary events in Burlington, including Phoenix Books, and a roaming open mic that migrates around various coffee shops and bars. I have a lot of affection for this scene, and in contrast, the literary community of Edinburgh currently feels vast and intimidating, because it is so new to me. However, that means I have a lot to explore, and there are many more possibilities; countless bookshops, performance venues, literary festivals, living rooms, pubs, publishing houses. I have attended a few open mics at a bookshop called Typewronger, which is a tiny and truly delightful space (although it gets a bit crowded!) I also often attend readings and book launches at the Portobello Bookshop, Lighthouse Bookshop, and Toppings & Co Booksellers. So much more to learn and explore. I also find that the creative work I have produced in Scotland is less personal and more research-based; perhaps because I don’t have as many interpersonal connections there (yet), so the subjects that I seek and find are in libraries, botanical gardens, museums, and other archives. 

Q: Finally, who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?

A: Very recently, I ‘discovered’ the work of Eva Baltasar, a Catalan poet and novelist. I found her books on the shelves at one of my favorite bookshops in London, Gay’s the Word. Three slim novels—I’ve consumed the first two: Permafrost and Boulder—and I can’t wait to read the third, Mammoth. I have been reading a lot of poetry collections, piecemeal; I just started a new job as the Reviews Editor for Poetry Wales, and this requires researching new titles from global poetry presses, and reading short samples and poems rather haphazardly. I wish I had time to read every new poetry collection in full! I did manage to read and thoroughly enjoy Joelle Taylor’s C+nto, with the added layer of seeing Taylor perform their new collection, Maryville, live in London recently. Taylor rewrites the history of the underground queer culture of London to include a utopian butch lesbian bar. More, please!