This Spring series of podcasts began with Diana Evans, who took us back to the 1990s. We'll be hearing from Takiguchi Yūshō and the translator Jesse Kirkwood, Holly Edwards and Joel Cox over the next few weeks. But for this episode we welcome Bruna Martini and her graphic short story One Day at at Time.
Martini says that this story of looking after a young child was drawn from her own experiences – but she had to go back to the notes she took at the time to remember it properly.
\"There are some moments that are really beautiful and full of joy,\" she explains, \"and they tend to replace the moments where you're angry or bored, or simply don't know what to do. So there is a really helpful trick that the brain does, where it only gives space to good memories.\"
Parents may tell themselves that their children will be perfect, Martini says, but even the perfect child will have to go through the necessary steps of development, and those steps \"bring a lot of problems\".
It wasn't that she wanted to focus on the negatives, she continues, she just \"wanted to take a step back and look at the situations and maybe laugh, because laughing is the perfect solution\".
Looking at what was happening like she was reading a comic or watching a film helped her feel \"a little bit in control\", Martini says. But it wasn't long before she wanted to get back to her work, declaring \"I have spent too many months without drawing, I do not feel myself.\"
We'll be looking at another kind of work next time with Joel Cox and his story Variable Rewards.
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