We were lucky to catch up with Eric Brandenburg recently and have shared our conversation below.

Eric, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. How did you learn to do what you do? Knowing what you know now, what could you have done to speed up your learning process? What skills do you think were most essential? What obstacles stood in the way of learning more?

I have had a long and meandering path to get where I am now. I was very interested in writing from my early teens, became interested in acting and performance in high school and have always been interested in the visual arts but only started focusing on that much later. Making progress in all three areas has taken a very long time and a lot of work with many selbacks. The first part of this involved learning the craft in each case. For writing, I studied literature and have written my whole life eventually writing a number of plays that were performed by small theater companies in New York and Los Angeles, an illustrated novel for children and a grown up sci fi thriller both of which I’m now trying to get published and a humorous sci fi podcast about life on the Moon several hundred years from now, Tales from the Moon, which I also produced and performed. For acting I was in plays through high school and college and then attended drama school and for the visual arts I have basically learned on my own, working mainly with digital media. In all three areas, writing, performing and the visual arts, I’ve had to learn patience but also had to embrace the freedom to fail. I’ve worked on certain projects for years only to take them out again, and then junk them and start over when I realized I could do much better taking another approach. The main thing I wished I’d learned early on is how to relax in what I’m doing. and to embrace the process and which includes recognizing that regular failure is part of the learning process. My main obstacle has been myself.

Eric, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I was born in southern Oregon into a family that was very focused on both the arts and the sciences. Our mother had been an aspiring poet and writer and our father was a doctor who was an avid amateur painter who was also keenly interested in astronomy, geology and history. I always wanted to write, felt like I really started to find myself when I auditioned for my first play and became interested in visual arts much later mainly as a way to help tell stories. My day job has been in the IT field but I have found there that the ability to build a narrative is key when creating a vision for executing a large project or figuring out how to write a program to step through a set of tasks. My current creative projects are two novels, one an illustrated novel for children and one a thriller for grownups, about people trying to understand and adapt to dramatic advances in technology. I’m currently seeking an agent for those. The main places to get a sense of me and my work are at my web site erictbrandenburg.com where you can see some of my art and a summary of some of my projects and talesfromthemoon.com where you can listen to my podcast about people on the Moon in the future dealing with challenges ranging from dating clones and cyborgs to how to deal with immigration from an Earth that’s gone through a lot of dramatic challenges. I believe, given my background in both technology and the arts, that I have a unique voice and perspective on our current time in history. Who would have thought we would find ourselves confronted by robots, colonies in space, self driving cars and hearings on UFOs in congress even as we are left wondering whether, with all this progress has made us any happier or wiser.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

I had an idea for a book for children featuring a boy and his dog who discovers the family couch can fly and I started writing and also creating illustrations for it, all the while knowing I had no idea what the actual market for children’s books was like. I persevered through a mixture of pride and stubbornness and ended up with a long book in verse with a number of illustrations. Only when that was finished did I bother to attend conferences for writers and illustrators of children’s books and start to learn the business.. After a lot of conferences and workshops, I started over and ended up with a prose Middle Grade novel with some passages in verse and a lot of illustrations which was far superior to the first version and I’ve gotten very good reactions to it so far. Along the way I learned that not listening to people who actually know what they are doing is usually more a product of fear than confidence and that any day you can learn a way you messed up is a good day since it gives you the opportunity to improve your work.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

I had always made progress in school through working very hard. When I started trying to write and to act I always judged my work very harshly and was convinced that I couldn’t be any good unless I worked on any particular project for a very long time and understood it thoroughly. This was good in a way since it helped me develop my craft and taught me patience and perseverance, but it also made me nervous since I developed a belief that nothing I did could be any good unless I put a tremendous amount of work into it. My nerves often overcame me and I found I would rework a performance or something I’d written over and over again, not making it any better and, consequently, feeling miserable. I finally learned to relax and that sometimes good work can come easily. That has been a tremendous gift.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.erictbrandenburg.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/erictbrandenburg/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TalesfromtheMoonPodcast/
• Other: For the podcast, www.talesfromthemoon.com

Image Credits
All images belong to Eric Brandenburg