We recently connected with Brianna Wheeler and have shared our conversation below.

Brianna, appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

My most meaningful project to date has been publishing my memoir, “Altogether Different.” It’s the culmination of my late grandmother’s lifelong genealogical work braided into a memoir of her passing. In her work she discovered an ancestor named Dangerfield Newby. Newby was the first man in John Brown’s army to die during the raid on Harper’s Ferry, the incident that begat the Civil War. History will say the first man to die in John Brown’s party was a Black man, which is correct, but Dangerfield was also mixed race, with an enslaved Black mother and a white father. My mother is black and my father is white; making this connection with Dangerfield was groundbreaking in exploring my mixed identity, which was fractured after the deaths of mother and grandmother. In organizing my grandmother’s research and cataloging the highs and lows of my own family’s battle over her estate, I was able to process not only my own my own outrageous privilege but also the sacrifices that privilege required of my ancestors. And I was able to tell their stories, and hopefully honor them, through a biracial lens.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I’m an author, but I’m also a features, arts and culture, and cannabis writer for a number of pubs, namely Willamette Week, Portland, Oregon’s premier print newsweekly. It might not seem like I took a linear or logical route to news paper writing, but now, as I settle into more of a memoirist vibe, the path makes perfect sense.

I’d spent my first working lifetime in restaurants and playing in bands. When music lost it’s shine I doubled down in the kitchen thinking I wanted to go all in on a culinary career, before deciding the physical demands weren’t really sustainable and pivoting to office work in my late early 30s. I wrote and illustrated three zines about this time in my life, “Success, Volumes I, II, and III”

My second working lifetime was spent writing copy. I’d ditched the kitchen and took a few community college courses to build out a white collar resume. I soon found my groove in copywriting, which was often folded into other titles: online marketing, social media, and even office management. The ten years I spent in office jobs was concurrently spent building up a solid side hustle as a culture blogger. I even kept a popular blog of my own, “The Portland Burger Blog,” where I reviewed local burgers and fries in the interest of, well, eating awesome burgers, but also becoming a better writer altogether.

After my son was born in 2015, I quit my office job and committed wholeheartedly to my side hustles, forsaking traditional gigs once and for all. I really disliked work environments, wage disparity, spoiled managers, etc. I wanted my son to see that it’s possible to thrive in the arts, so I focused on work for either myself (freelance contracts with low stakes) or my community (newsletter type contributions to local pubs). Eventually I felt confident enough to pitch my larger local newspapers, and before I knew it, i was writing the cannabis column for Willamette Week, which since 2020, I’ve earnestly maintained as both a fun, engaging place to learn and laugh, and a platform for cannabis, health equity, and social justice advocacy.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

The most rewarding part of being a creative is the communities we create. I love feeling like part of an infinite cultural tapestry that, like, tells the story of humanity, rather than just a cog in someone else’s money making machine.

In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?

In my opinion, well, in a lot of people’s opinion, chipping away at that war budget and providing universal basic income would bring a creative utopian energy to the nation that string pulling capitalists don’t really vibe with. Nationwide decriminalization of cannabis, prison abolition, fall of the patriarchy, you know, just girly things.

Contact Info:

• Website: briannawheeler.com
• Instagram: @briyonceflipy
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/briannawheeler/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9QKKfTjgRbnjOMuBQanCJw
• Other: wweek.com portlandburgerblog.com