We recently connected with Jenny Bee and have shared our conversation below.
Jenny, appreciate you joining us today. Can you tell us a bit about who your hero is and the influence they’ve had on you?
“Heroes” are interesting to me. When I was a child all my heroes were fictional persons and I felt very weird about it. I would lie and say athletes like Tara Lipinski were my heroes, because other kids had real-world heroes, but the reality of it was my heroes were all characters who were far more real to me than Tara Lipinski. I’m 33 now and I can tell you very little about Tara Lipinski (sorry Tara). I can tell you that Sailor Moon’s names are Usagi Tsukino or Serena Tsukino depending on the country you’re in. Her favorite food is riceballs or donuts depending on the dub. Her birthday is June 30th (she’s a Cancer), and her favorite class is gym. The point being, even today, my childhood hero (Sailor Moon), continues to occupy a large space in my head and my heart, even though she is not “real” by the standard of being tangible. Sailor Moon taught me the most important lessons that permeate themes of my creative work as well as my general life philosophies. She taught me to always count on your friends, and always trust that they love you, even when they seem down and out. She taught me that empathy is a more powerful tool for breaking down barriers and removing obstacles and enemies than any magical crystal super-weapon, and that’s something a person cultivates within themselves. You don’t need a talking cat to give that to you. It would be pretty cool if they did, though.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
At my core I am a storyteller through and through. I endeavor to do this across all media, whether I am creating video games, writing sketch comedy, making a web series, or creating motion and graphic designs, which I do in my day-to-day. All art is communication and the most effective communication is done through the use of narrative. I got into art and writing because I feel passionately that communication, especially ethical communication, is a last vestige of humanity in our rapidly self-isolating culture. To ethically communicate, I follow a set of humane storytelling principles I’ve codified in a Humane Storyteller’s Manifesto, which is a piece I’m incredibly proud of. It’s available for download for free on my patreon, jennybeedesign. I make sure these principles are present in everything I make, from my visual novelette on Steam, “Equivoque”, to experiments in the medium such as my former daily zine on instagram “Doctor’s Gentle Requests”, to my daily work for NY1, as I serve on a task force for the LGBTQ+ Resource Group.
I have an upcoming collaboration that will be called “LoxCap.” It doesn’t have a social media presence yet, but I just would like to start sowing the seeds!
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
A story I experienced and sadly, many of us femme-presenting and women experience, that demonstrates my resilience is the very sad and tired one of misogyny. I have countless examples I can provide of micro-aggressions to overt sexual harassments that have happened to me in my industry, but I’ll go with one that provided a good learning experience, and was pretty funny in the retrospect. I was working as an intern at a media company and I was out with a couple of other interns, just hanging out after work. We all began talking about work, as is inevitable in these sorts of situations, and our takes on the other interns, which were all positive. Then this one intern came up. I hadn’t worked with him at all, but he seemed nice, so I said as much. In this moment, the other interns exchanged looks and then told me that this intern had been outing small mistakes in my work to management at every possible opportunity. I was shocked, and also very appreciative of my friends in this moment, who took a risk in telling me this. I say this was a funny story because the only detail I knew about this person, aside from their college, was the fact that they worked at Ninja New York. So I had not only been sabotaged, I was sabotaged by a ninja. Come on. That’s pretty funny. Since this happened, I’m incredibly direct with people, especially when I mess up, and I’m super appreciative if a person takes the time to point out a mistake I’ve made to me directly. I can’t improve if I don’t know what I’m messing up, and somebody taking the time to tell you to your face and not just going to your manager is a decent thing to do. I like to think that learning from that whole experience and taking it in stride counts as a kind of resilience.
What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?
A lesson I had to unlearn? This is a very difficult question, as I feel learning as a whole is basically just one big process of unlearning all your bad habits. It’s so hard to unclench your fists and let go of things that you don’t realize you’re clutching onto so, so tightly. I think the biggest one I can think of in recent memory is the notion of “objectively good”. For so long I had this notion of a story being “good” and that the “good”ness of a story could be a quality that was objective. I was, in retrospect, so obviously clinging to basic Robert McKee/Pixar/western/cis-het/patriarchal story ideas so tightly that I didn’t realize for the longest time that this was such a bias. In no way was it “objective”. It’s very embarrassing to admit. I’m happy to say I no longer think this way, and now endeavor to evaluate everything by an individual metric, as unique pieces of art. It’s still very difficult though. We all have our own tastes that we fall back on when we look at art, and unlearning is a slow process.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://jennybee.design/
- Instagram: @jennybeedesign
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybeedesign/
- Other: https://www.instagram.com/drsgentlerx/ (additional project via ig)