Creative Portland

Kaitlin: [00:00:00] Hey there. Do you think of yourself as a creative person? If you found yourself here and you're curious, you are. This is Creative Portland, the podcast made for you by the all volunteer team who organized the Creative Mornings Speaker Series in Portland, Oregon. I'm your host, Kaitlin, and I'm really glad you're here.

Each episode, we are going to share a talk from one of the most generous, inspiring, And creative people in this city. You'll hear from people doing things you probably already think of as creative. People who paint, write books, illustrate comics, style photo shoots, make music, even sing opera. There are others who run companies.

A few who've broken world records, some who organize festivals, even a rodeo. [00:01:00] They interrogate sorrow, they create joy, they play. I'm confident you'll take away something different from every person on this show. Each of these talks was originally recorded in front of a live audience. So, sometimes they mention things that are on a screen, but those are pretty minor.

Today, you'll hear from Vera Brosgul, who spent many years working in feature animation at Laika, and is now writing and drawing books full time, including her first graphic novel, Anya's Ghost. She gave this talk at Wacom in February 2024. You can find more of Vera's work linked in the show notes, and at verabee.com. That's Vera, V-E-R-A-B-E-E-dot-com.

Vera Brosgol: I'm Vera. I am a children's [00:02:00] author and illustrator, uh, living here in Portland, Oregon, but I was not born here. I was born in Moscow, Russia. My family immigrated from the USSR in 1989 to upstate New York pretty much as soon as we got here, my dad left the family. Uh, so I was raised by a single mother of three in a country where we didn't know anybody and none of us spoke the language.

This is me. I look, I look pretty happy here, probably because I'm coated in pets. That was, that was how my mom tried to make it up to us. , but this is a little bit more, , accurate, um, of how I felt as a child. Uh, it was, it was pretty rough. We left everything behind in Russia. We left as refugees. So we were pretty poor.

living in an affluent, , part of the state. I had hand me down clothes from church. My family ate weird Russian food that I never wanted my friends to come over and sample. I had a pet rat on my head, which is a separate story [00:03:00] entirely, and I had an accent. It was obviously pretty difficult for me to make friends.

I got bullied pretty badly in elementary school, and I didn't feel like my mom had the space to help me with it. So I kept it all to myself. Instead, I would disappear into drawing. Is this maybe something some of you can relate to? Yeah. Um, it was how I escaped from reality, and it was something I put my heart and soul into.

I really, really loved it. It was my favorite thing in the entire world. It was just for me. But people noticed that I was doing it all the time. Every second of every day. And they started to say, Hey, this is pretty good. And my tiny little kid brain interpreted that as, You are good. And I, I really wanted people to like me.

I will admit it. I still do. I want all of you to like me, which is why. You're all, [00:04:00] yay.

I wanted friendship. I wanted a connection. Just like everybody else. So I started drawing. For others, not just for myself. I would take requests in school. It was usually a cat. Sometimes the cat would be on a skateboard. Um, and I would give those drawings to my classmates as gifts. And people were suddenly nicer to me.

This is not a great way to make friends, but it got the job done. It gave me people to sit with at lunchtime, kind of softened the bullying a little bit. And that's what, that's what I, that's what I needed at the time. That's what mattered to me. I also loved reading in addition to drawing. I was fortunate enough to live right across the street from my elementary school so I could go to the library every single day and I spent tons of time there just devouring book after book.

Uh, there weren't a lot of [00:05:00] comics in libraries the way there are now. Uh, this was the nineties. , there was one comic book, there was a volume of peanuts that every kid in the neighborhood was just taking turns checking out over and over and over again. Um, so I just, I just ate that one up and Calvin Hobbes was free in the newspaper.

Like I said, we didn't have a lot of money. Uh, so that was how I, that was how I found comics. Through those I found, uh. One of, like, two bread related Calvin hobbes books for you to enjoy. It's very cute. It's really cute. Um, I also, uh, really, really love these two books. They're really important to me.

Matilda by Roald Dahl and Catherine Called Birdie by Karen Cushman. , I felt pretty powerless as a kid. My family was Frequently moving around, my mom was always trying to find a better job to make a better life for us. And, but she'd often move us in the middle of the school year. Which was not ideal for a shy kid like me.

Uh, she wasn't home much, and my dad was [00:06:00] completely out of the picture. So I felt really yanked around by forces I couldn't control. But these were kids who had power. I don't know if anyone's familiar with Matilda, but she, she's literally telekinetic. She's amazing. I loved watching her triumph over All of the horrible adults in her life, especially when she discovered her psychic powers.

And she was also a weird little kid who hung out at the library, like I did. Catherine Colberti, um, is not as well known of a book. Um, it, it did win a Newbery Honor, I think. . But I, I love it. I totally recommend you check it out. Lena Dunham adapted it for Amazon, I think. Catherine is just a medieval badass.

Uh, she's defending herself from all the horrible men her disgusting father's trying to marry her off to. It's really dark and funny and gross. There's like a flaming toilet and hangings and it's really morbid. That's the kind of kid I was. And I was just thrilled when the New York Times asked if I [00:07:00] wanted to illustrate a review.

of my favorite book. This is the book that I picked. And I know this is really small and hard to read, the whole thing's on my website, if you want to scrutinize it. You should definitely go get the book from the library, also. So anyone who reads a lot, , will start thinking about writing their own stories.

Um, that definitely happened to me. Some of the stories I wound up making were in comics format. This is the webcomic I made in high school. It was called Return to Zender. Please do not look it up online. You can, you can find it, but I don't stand behind this. Um, but I put it online and it was the first time I had complete strangers.

reading my work. Um, I had my first audience and it was really, really exciting and through that I met other, , comic artists my age. Because I didn't have a lot of, , kids in my high school who were doing this kind of thing. Those were some of my, um, first sort of real close peer friends. that I'm friends with to this day.

Um, and I even [00:08:00] had a few short stories published while I was in college, uh, in something called The Flight Anthologies. And this is how I got a literary agent. Uh, she represented the anthology and she said she'd take a look at any projects anyone from the anthology, uh, might come up with. But, I, as I mentioned, am a first generation immigrant.

Are there any other first generation immigrants in the audience? Got a handful? Alright. Are there any, um, sort of, , type A nerds in the audience? Come on. I don't believe you. Alright, well, the thing with first generation immigrants is a lot of us have a preoccupation with stability, for some reason. And independence.

We really want to be able to take care of ourselves and maybe take care of our parents. So I needed to be really practical. , art was obviously the thing that I was the best at, the thing that I loved, which was great. But I needed to find a stable art job. Does anyone know what those are? Anyone have one of those?[00:09:00]

Um, yeah, this was, this was going to be tough. , I'd never met an author. I never had an author come to my school or anything, so that didn't seem Like a viable career option. Uh, but I liked other forms of art just as much as books. , I watched a ton of animation as a kid in Russia. My mom was a little, was a little fancy, so she showed us the good stuff.

Um, you can tell from these pictures that it's Russian because it's gray and brown and everyone looks a little bit hungry. They're by a guy called Yuri Norstein. He's incredible. The films are super influential on me. And you can and should look them all up on YouTube. First chance you get. , and after we moved to America, I watched American animation.

You can tell it's American because it's colorful and everyone is smiling and has enough to eat. Um, and I, I loved them. Yeah, it was great. , and from the library books across the street, there would be these, , behind the scenes books. I don't know. I don't know if anyone ever saw these, for all the Disney movies, these [00:10:00] like, big, beautiful, hardcover books telling you how they made all these films.

And from those books, I learned that there were tons and tons of people all working together on these movies, with all different kinds of art jobs. But they all seemed to like, be okay, like they had houses and families and health insurance, and I was like, Alright, okay, that's, that's gonna be me. I can be one of those guys.

Um, so that's what I decided, , to study in, in college. So I went to a school called Sheridan in Toronto for class, classical hand drawn animation. , this was 2002, just as the classical hand drawn animation industry was dying. But, um, I wasn't too worried about that. I went there, and I made, um, A short film, uh, for my final thesis.

And making that film was very, very informative. Uh, you do all the work by yourself. So you try every step of the animation process. From writing, to design, to animation. And I learned very quickly that I actually hate animating. I do not want to be an [00:11:00] animator. I did not want to be an animator. I'm not very good at it.

Um, but there was a part of the process that I absolutely loved. , that seemed like it would be a really good fit for me. Uh, so if you take a comic and you turn it on its side, you get something called a storyboard. Does anyone know what a storyboard is? A few of you do. Does anyone want to tell anyone?

Tell everyone what I get third graders to answer this question. Come on. No? Alright, fine. I'll tell you. It's not a secret. Um, storyboarding is taking a script and translating it into visuals as part of planning out a film. Animation is incredibly slow and expensive. These movies cost millions of dollars so you really want to make sure everything you're shooting is going to stay in the movie.

So the storyboard artists basically visually put the screen on film with drawings before it's [00:12:00] animated. And that was the perfect job for me. It was basically making comics for a movie. It was awesome. Um, and on the strength of that very odd little film that I made, , I got my first job on another very strange, odd little film called Coraline here in Portland.

Um, I was really lucky. Uh, Henry Selick saw my student film. And he's like, that, that's, that's the girl for me. Um, I think he really liked that I'd never worked anywhere else, so he could mold me into exactly the kind of weirdo he needed. Um, but I got to work on Coraline, that's why I moved to Portland, and it was just my dream job.

I was, I loved the book, I loved the crew, I loved the town. Um, yeah, it was amazing. I worked on Coraline, I worked on Paranorman. The Box Trolls, and Kubo and the Two Strings. Um, I was at Leica for ten years doing store boards the entire time. It was amazing. This is, this is, this is the, this is the crew of one of the movies.

This is the crew of the Box Trolls. And this is how many amazing artists [00:13:00] I got to work with every day. I'm somewhere in this pile. Can you see me? We're just, we're just gonna stay on this slide until you find me. Okay, I'll help you out. I'm right there. I'm so happy. I'm super happy. Because Like, I'm finally not alone.

There's only maybe five storyboard artists on a team like this, but there are so many other kinds of artists. There's people who make tiny costumes, tiny wigs, who do the lighting, the editing, the animating. And anytime I got lonely or bored, I could just walk to some other part of the building and interrupt somebody and see what they were doing.

It was really, really great. I'd finally found the community and the friendship I was craving with some of the most creative and talented people I'd ever met. But, I was not telling my own stories. , I did not write Coraline, unfortunately. , I did still make comics in the evenings after work. No one was paying me to make them.

Uh, so there was no pressure and no deadline on any of them. I made an entire graphic novel in my free time, as you do. [00:14:00] And, uh, it was about a grumpy Russian teenager named Anya who falls down a well and meets a skeleton, , that is haunted by a ghost that follows her to high school. It is inspired by my experience growing up as a Russian immigrant who was really ashamed of where they came from and didn't want anyone to know how different their families were.

The ghost part I just added to make it more entertaining for myself. , and thanks to that literary agent I mentioned before from the anthologies. I was able to find a publisher for this after it was done. Um, Anya's Ghost did well enough that the publisher wanted me to make some more books. People thought these books were good, and they were willing to pay me for them, which is really, really exciting.

Uh, it was a really validating feeling for me. So, I said goodbye to my wonderful animation community. Mind you, it took me years to get brave enough to do this. It wasn't like an overnight thing, but I wanted to Give it a shot to do this full time. [00:15:00] So I said goodbye to everybody and I quit I didn't think this part through very well, and I immediately got incredibly lonely So I did what you do when you get lonely, and I got a dog Anyone else solve their problems this way yeah, this is my dog.

His name is Omar Um, this is Omar wearing one of the sweaters that I knit for him. You can tell from his facial expression that he absolutely loves it. And is so grateful because he was really cold. Um, so yeah, that became my amazing new life. Um, I make children's books and I hang out with my little, little assistant and I have lots of free time for hobbies like knitting, I love knitting, , and I've made several children's books as well as graphic novels, make picture books, um, and they're all really personal in some way, inspired by my love of knitting or of nature, I love being outside.

[00:16:00] Or of putting weird stuff into jars, that's another one. Uh, but probably my most personal book is a graphic novel called Be Prepared. It's a memoir, about a Russian Orthodox summer camp that I went to when I was nine years old. Um, so this camp was going to be the answer to all my prayers. It was going to be full of other Russian weirdos.

Who would know exactly what I'd been through, and we'd all be best friends, and have an amazing summer together. , obviously, that would make a very boring book, and that is not what happened. I got to this place, and I found itchy uniforms, and forced marching, and, uh, chanting in Russian. We weren't allowed to speak English at all, which was pretty difficult, actually.

Uh, there would be hours of church service, all in Russian. Again, I couldn't really understand it. There was no running water. So we were brushing our teeth in a creek. Uh, I don't think that's legal anymore. And no, no plumbing. So the bathrooms were a real, a real [00:17:00] scene. The outhouse was basically a big pit toilet with four toilet seats all in a row.

Um, and no door. So it just opened out onto the woods. And I think like every single Spider in the, in the entire forest, like to congregate in the middle of the toilet paper rolls. It was awesome. And it was called the, it was called the Hollywood for some reason, I, I still don't know. And they said it with a Russian accent, so it was Gollywood.

The Gollywood. It was, uh, it was rough. Uh, this book was a story about me desperately molding myself to, to try to get other people to like me. Instead of being patient and listening to my intuition and choosing friends correctly. , and this book found an audience with, , other kids who, other kids who hadn't liked summer camp.

Weird people, um, or adults who used to be weird people, weird little people. And that felt really, really great. , so now books, this thing that had been my wonderful, peaceful escape from bullying and [00:18:00] animation, they were my bread and butter. Do you like what I did there? Come on, it's like 90.

My books, my books now had to support me financially. I wasn't working in animation anymore, so there was all this pressure on them that had never been there before. And by my amazing childhood calculations, how well my books did directly correlated to my own worth. Obviously, this is great for my mental health.

Now, I'm, I'm a, I'm a really curious person. Um, I have lots of hobbies, none of which I get paid for, which is what makes them hobbies. Um, I love to know how things are made, whether it's ceramics or yarn. or sweaters, or food. I really, really love food. This is the part where I get really excited. Um, I love food.

Uh, my favorite food is probably bread. This is photographic [00:19:00] evidence of that that's a crust of Russian bread in the background. My, we didn't have like proper teething stuff, so my mom would just Give me a heel of bread. Explains everything. Uh, by the way, this is what all my baby photos look like. This is from the 80s.

Uh, I'm not some kind of a vampire from the dust bowl. Um, so yeah, uh, I started baking my own bread in 2017 when I was working from home and I had all that aforementioned free time. Um, did anyone here bake bread? Yeah, you kind of have to be, like, around. You gotta keep an eye on it. It helps a lot. , so this is my very first attempt.

I was so proud. I took a picture of this monstrosity. It's, it's hideous, but it was edible. Uh, and I was stoked. Like, I just, I totally caught the bug. I made this bread. And then I proceeded to make lots and lots. A really terrible, terrible bread. I don't know if you can tell from these photos how gross this [00:20:00] was.

It was really, like, gummy and dense and disgusting. And it had these, like, creepy holes in it. Every time I cut it open and I saw these holes. I have that thing where you're scared of holes. And I was just, like, doing it to myself on a regular basis. Uh, so what I was doing wrong over and over and over again, I found out later, was I was under proofing my bread.

That's what this is. Uh, anyone familiar with proofing? The bakers here in the room know what proofing is? Okay, anyone who's not a baker, proofing is the stage where you have, pushing up my invisible glasses, you've developed all the gluten in your dough with kneading or folding or whatever you're doing, and now you're just waiting for the yeast, the sourdough or the commercial yeast to eat all the starches in the bread, and then they, they like burp it out as carbon dioxide and let the bread get like big and, And fluffy, that's what makes bread light.

And I was in a hurry, I was so excited to get to the baking part that I was putting all this pressure on [00:21:00] my bread to be ready and I wasn't waiting long enough for, uh, it to rise. That's what, that's what it's supposed to look like when you do a good job. Um, so when you're thinking about making bread, you're probably picturing lots of activity.

You're imagining bakers who are waking up at four in the morning, and they're toiling away in clouds of steam and flour, and they're pulling, like, dozens of loaves of bread out of hot ovens and burning all their forearms. , by, by the way, I'd like to just take a moment and, uh, pause to look at these arms.

This is Jennifer Latham from Tartine Bakery. Jesus Christ. Okay, moving on, moving on. Um, the The key step, the key step to good bread is actually stillness and awareness. First, you create all the right conditions for your bread, and then you watch and you wait for the dough to rise.

That's a good [00:22:00] sign. It's peaceful and it's quiet. You feel it. And you study it, and you trust your intuition. I animated, look. I hate it. I hate it so much. , so when you work really hard at anything, you eventually get better. And I got better. I stopped making that horrible, , gummy disaster bread. I made This bread, real bread.

I made it all the time. I made it every few days and I would give it away to my friends and neighbors so I could immediately make another batch. I was completely obsessed. Um, when COVID hit and suddenly everyone became interested in the same thing I was interested in, um, you can imagine I was thrilled.

I was biking all over town giving out sourdough starter to anybody who wanted it, like a yeasty little Johnny Appleseed. I don't know, I don't know that any of them ever actually made the bread, but I was just, I was so stoked. And then [00:23:00] shit got real. I got a grain mill. I started buying 25 pound bags of whole wheat berries to mill my own flour.

Look how happy I am. That is how happy bread makes me. I still made, made bad bread sometimes. this stuff is, uh, over proofed actually, I think. It collapsed. But mostly it was pretty good. And even if it wasn't, that was okay. That's what I really like about making bread. The thing with a book is that once it's printed, it's fixed.

It's unchanging. It's just the way it's going to be forever. , that's all it's ever going to be. But bread is different. Bread is alive. Bread is ephemeral. It'll be eaten in a matter of days, or even hours if it's really, really good. And then you're on to your next batch, and you take everything you learned from the last batch and carry it forward.

I find that very forgiving. [00:24:00] And it's very good for my mental health. Um, and I really love feeding people. It's really satisfying to me. It's my love language. It's how I show people I care. But then I started to hear, You could sell that! Did you ever notice how that's a universal compliment in capitalism?

This is great! Why don't you turn it into money? And the second you do that, it's assigning a fixed value to the thing you're making. Yes, it also gives you the ability to make more of whatever that thing is, but you're trading it for something, whether it's money or acceptance. And I'd been trading art for those two things my whole life, and it was putting a pressure on it that I really didn't like.

Um, and I wanted to keep bread free from that. No pressure, no deadline. I just wanted to trust my intuition, and trust the dough, and try to get some of that same feeling I used to have when I was drawing as a little kid. So, [00:25:00] um, in 2019 I was busily working on Memory Jars, a picture book, when I got an offer I could not refuse.

Um, I got a call asking if I wanted to be head of story on Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio adaptation being made here in Portland. Uh, how many of you would say no? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So I immediately, uh, paused. I put a, put a hold on the book contract. My editors were great about it and I jumped on the opportunity.

It was, yeah, it was just. job of a lifetime. It was so great. It was super fun. Um, but it really cut into my baking time. And at this point, my standards were like, up here. I was really picky. I was, I can't eat New Seasons bread anymore, I'm sorry. Ever again. I was really picky. Uh, so I found out about Starter Bread from a co worker on Pinocchio.

Um, and while I was on the movie, I subscribed to their CSB. Which is a community, community supported bakery, kind of like a CSA. Uh, so with Starter Bread once a week, you [00:26:00] get a whole loaf of fresh, whole grain sourdough bread delivered to your door or porch, uh, made by hand with local grain. Um, it's a no waste business model, and it is fucking delicious, as you all know, right?

Yes. That was so good. Yes. You should absolutely subscribe to it. Uh, , starter bread is Matt Kedzie and Xena Wallace. Uh, and they are some of the most passionate, creative, and hilarious people that I know. They care deeply about their work and their community, and they're thoughtful and generous and kind in everything they do.

I could talk about how much I love them for hours. Just to watch them squirm. They're right over there.

They're amazing. In 2022, I was all wrapped up on Pinocchio and back to working on my books. but I was at a real low point in my life. , I was nursing a broken heart. Wah! I felt the pressure to keep [00:27:00] working on my books. I had these deadlines. I needed to do it. I needed to pay my mortgage. but all I wanted to do was cry.

And I did. I cried a lot. Um, but I wanted something nice in my life. And I'd been stalking starter bread on Instagram since I'd subscribed. So I coyly asked Matt if, he would teach me how to make bread in exchange for free help at the bakery. , and he said yes. So I started helping out and it became the absolute highlight of my work week.

I was learning something new. I love learning. I was making friends. I got to touch dough and eat delicious stuff. And it really helped heal everything that was wrong with me. That was great. Um, so I'm just going to take a little, little pause to acknowledge the massive amounts of privilege on display here.

Thanks for hanging in with me. I'm fortunate to have had a paid for education, uh, which enabled me to make art for a living without any debt. That's a huge deal. I work really hard, but I've definitely gotten super lucky in my [00:28:00] career and benefited from systems that support cis white people. It's a huge privilege to have had the freedom to work for free just to learn how to do something I'm excited about.

I'm really fortunate to be able to navel gaze like this and look for self actualization instead of just survival. I'm really aware of that and I'm grateful that these are the particular flavors. Um, but my problems are also real and they're heartfelt, and maybe some of you can relate to them. Uh, I felt really weird about drawing at this point.

I loved it, but I realized I no longer did it for fun. It was only ever for work anymore. It was always for an audience, so that would be for Instagram or to give it as gifts to friends, or for money, so freelance illustration or working in film or books for publishing. So I wanted to try something new. I love trying things that are new.

, more writing and less drawing. Also, drawing is [00:29:00] physically horrible for your body. So is baking, by the way. I'm not that smart. Um, but I'm currently working on a prose novel. , for middle grade, uh, which is really exciting, absolutely terrifying. I don't know what I'm doing, um, but it's, it's a real challenge and it gave me a break, uh, from drawing that I really, really needed.

And funnily enough, because of that, there was no more pressure on drawing, so I started drawing for fun again recently. And sometimes I show it to people, and sometimes I don't. I'm showing you right now. I also have a meditation practice that is super important to me. If anyone wants to talk to me about Vipassana, I will.

Absolutely. Join my cult. The key to that That is stillness and awareness. First you create the right conditions, you get really quiet, maybe go somewhere warm, and then you watch and wait for the sensations to rise. [00:30:00] It's peaceful and quiet. You feel it and study it and you trust your intuition.

I love thinking about all the different parts of my life and the ways that they overlap. Being patient with myself when I want story ideas to come, the way I'm patient with my dough, finding community in baking, like I found in an animation, feeling peace and flow in meditation, like I do when I'm quietly shaping bread, sharing my work with readers, and feeding people delicious snacks.

, there are so many ways to be creative, and they all feed into one another. But, this comment, the comment I'm starting to get again is, this is good, you could sell it. Um, so am I going to make a baking book? That's what my, that's what my editor wants to know. I mean, I could, they'd probably pay me to do it, , but I do when I don't want to.

On one hand, it sounds super fun to just draw [00:31:00] bread and bakeries all day long for a year of my life, but I also see the value in keeping it separate. It feeds me in a lot of other ways. And I think that's really delicious. The end. Thank you.

Kaitlin: This podcast is produced by the all volunteer crew who bring you Creative Mornings events in Portland, Oregon. You can reach us at morningsportland at gmail. com and watch the videos of all the talks that are featured on this podcast plus others.

to the Regional Arts and Culture Council, whose 2024 grant funding helped us launch this podcast. Thank you also to our sustaining partner, Wacom, who make each of these original events possible, [00:32:00] and to Kova Coffee, who caffeinate everyone who attends. Thank you to Johnny and Simon of Weird Wonderful for their audio production and podcast wizardry.

And just a huge hug to each person who's been part of the Creative Mornings Portland volunteer team over the years. Thank you to Antha, Rogan, Shemisa, Charlie, Chelsea, Christopher, Crystal, Elizabeth, Hannah, Yvonne. Joan, Julia, Kavir, Laura M, Laura N, Leah, Lucy, Sarah, Sumit, Tyler, and Vinny.