There comes a point in nearly every job interview I’ve ever partaken in where the question inevitably arises: “What are you? Do you want to keep pursuing graphic design, or is it your dream to be a writer?” I understand where the question is coming from. A desire to know where to place me, to be reassured that I am focused on the job I’m being hired to perform. I know they mean well. Regardless, it feels like the same invasive question as when someone or some form asks me to pick an identity – Black or Latina. In both cases, I am both, all, everything, everywhere all at once, and each identity informs the other.
When I first graduated college with a degree in Graphic Design and a minor in Creative Writing, I originally had my eyes set on working in magazines. But combining the two sides of myself this way wasn’t the magical ideal I’d built it up to be. I should have realized this sooner when even in college, I separated them and did two thesis projects. The design thesis (branding research on intercultural communication between the U.S. & Latin America) led to my first job at the World Health Organization. The writing thesis (a magical realist short story collection) later became my first published novel, High Spirits. Writing skills were used to make the mockup copy for my design project compelling and believable. Design skills were used to format the stories into a bound book and create a cover that eventually got noticed by a publisher. From the beginning, it worked better for me when I split my brain in two, using one discipline to bolster the other.
Design has always felt more analytical to me. Like a puzzle I’m trying to solve. It doesn’t belong to me; it’s more like a tool I know how to use. As design theorist Beatrice Warde put it, it is a glass vessel that needs someone else’s substance to fill it. Writing, on the other hand, feels more personal. It is what I’ve been doing to express my emotions since I was journaling in middle school. It belongs to me; no one can tell me how to wield it. It is the substance itself.
This duality is handy at my current job as a designer at Fenton, a full-service public relations agency. When designing for clients, I always think from a storyteller’s perspective. How do I make this sequential? How does this GIF move from one frame to the next? What is the visual narrative being told? Inversely, I’ve gained marketing skills that I can use to promote my own writing (like best practices for social media ads and how to create a Mailchimp campaign). Having the financial stability to only write when I’m passionate about something, rather than to pay the bills, is another plus. It also doesn’t hurt that I work remotely, which means last summer I had the flexibility to close my work laptop and swiftly throw on my author hat to review copy edit notes on my second book, The Girl, the Ring, & the Baseball Bat. I was also afforded the flexibility to take some time off to speak at writing conferences and to travel to Chicago to pick up my American Library Award.
A couple of years ago, I did an alumni event at my college, helping students with their portfolios speed-dating style. I was paired with a young girl whose eyes lit up when she saw me. “You do what I want to do!” I remember her expressing to me. She said she also wanted to write fiction and be a graphic designer but she wasn’t sure if she should pick one or the other. She’d never seen anyone do both before. I laughed, remembering how it felt to be the only graphic design student in my writing classes, meant primarily for film and animation students. “You can absolutely do both,” I told her. “You can do whatever you want, actually.”