Announcer: Welcome to COFAC's podcast on this year's theme, Lighten Up, Humor and satire. Today we'll hear from Elizabeth Lily, picture book illustrator, animator and adjunct professor in the Department of Art and Design. 

Elizabeth Lilly: I started illustrating as a really young kid, I think. I used to make birthday cards for like my friends and family and draw like little characters, little animals and mice and things like being part of the card. But I didn't think of myself as like, I am an artist like I used to just read all the time. I was always reading Harry Potter and reading novels. And I think I thought I was going to be a librarian. And then I did realize I had some art to go and graduating high school. I didn't think I could be like a starving artist, like I was very practical and my parents are both engineers, and it just didn't seem like a real path to be an artist. So I decided to be an architect. And I was like, Wow, I can draw some and I, you know, have a salary and stuff. So I went to architecture school and then I realized that I missed drawing characters. I missed making work that spoke to people and spoke to children and connected with people in an emotional way. 

So we went back to school. I thought I was going to be an animator. And then I kind of realized that I had more fun making the stories and writing their stories and the characters for my films. Then like finishing the animation. So I kind of switched over to illustration and picture books, which is like the storyboarding phase of animation, but intensified. 

And I kind of also realized I was drawn to making media for children because the subject matter is so wide ranging, you can make a picture book about just about anything, and it doesn't have to be so serious. And just connecting with with children through your work is so special and it's so magical, and I just love it. 

I finished in the spring a book called Let Me Fix You a Plate, and it just came on in bookstores in the beginning of September 2021, and it's about my family growing up. So I'm biracial. My mom is Colombian and my dad is white. American grew up in the South and West Virginia, and we used to travel every year between my home in Maryland in like the suburbs to my grandma's house. My mama and papa in West Virginia. And then down to Florida to see my Colombian grandparents in that family mobile in Apollo. And it's about the food that they used to make for us in the homes that they would welcome us into and kind of that sense of people showing their love through food, even when you don't quite have the language to connect with each other. 

I also recently started the final stages of animating a short film that's about also another family story. It's about my dad growing up in West Virginia and kind of wanting to escape this like very small world that he was born into, into a larger world of pursuing a career that didn't exist in his small town. 

My first two books are in bookstores now. My first book was published in 2018. It's called Geraldine, and it's the story of a giraffe girl named Geraldine, who moves to a human town and she's the only draft in her school. So that came out a few years ago. My second book, Let Me Fix You a Plate. It's out in bookstores now. Both of them can be found in any major booksellers or an Amazon or in the local bookstores and libraries. 

My animated film, you can find pieces of it on my website www.Elizabeth-Lilly.com. And there's also a gallery show going on right now in the Center for the Arts on the second floor. There's the Holtzman MFA gallery, and you can see a lot of my original art from my book, as well as clips and production art from my animated film. 

I tend to use humor in my picture books a lot. I was really drawn to the medium of picture books and children's media in general because there is like this lightness and fun and whimsy to it. You don't have to be so serious all the time about any subject that you deal with, but I'm drawn to dealing with hard subjects in my work. So like, I had a lot of really difficult times and moments in my childhood and a lot of sadness and loneliness. And I think a lot of kids deal with those hard emotions more than adults give them credit for. And by making, you know, a really hard time into this silly story about not fitting into the school bus and having to stick her head out the window by kind of like having this filter of whimsy and fun and humor and lightness, you can really get into a hard subject and explore it without feeling such an oppressive weight of those emotions, you can kind of spend time close to it in a way that's a little bit easier and kind of takes that burden off. So I really like to blend humor in and sort of harder emotions as a way to process them and hopefully come out the other side feeling like you can deal with it a little bit better. 

In Let Me Fix You a Plate, I don't know if I would say it like funny, like ha ha ha funny like that, but it looks for the little moments of brightness in sort of like everyday experiences that you might not think that much about. So it's like the story of this road trip that we used to do every year, and it was usually in the ten day public school break. We would go from one house to the other, and in the space of ten days, we'd be on the road for like 40 hours, you know, thousands of miles round trip.

I was talking to my mom about it after she had read the book and she was like, I hated that trip. It was so long and we were so tired all the time. And I think at the time, it was hard on me to like I wanted to be home and be with my friends. But in retrospect, there are so many special moments and like little funny moments or fun moments that I appreciate now in retrospect. So I feel like it helps to think about those little things and holding onto those precious gems of moments that maybe when you're older, if you're a kid, or maybe if you're a parent looking back on it that you wish you could like, hold on to, you know, like really appreciating those moments of lightness in like a dark or a hard time.