In this episode of Creative Guts, co-hosts Laura Harper Lake and Joe Acone sit down with Dr. Loretta Brady, professor at Saint Anselm College and founder of the Community Resilience and Social Equity Lab.
In this episode of Creative Guts, co-hosts Laura Harper Lake and Joe Acone sit down with Dr. Loretta Brady, professor at Saint Anselm College and founder of the Community Resilience and Social Equity Lab.
Loretta’s work sits at the intersection of research, community engagement, and game design, using interactive, research-backed projects to explore how communities respond to challenge and inequity. In our conversation, we dig into how her lab designs games as tools for understanding complex social systems, how students actively participate in that work, and how creativity can open new pathways into conversations around resilience and equity.
Learn more about Dr. Brady and the Community Resilience and Social Equity Lab at Saint Anselm College.
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Thank you to our friends at Art Up Front Street Studios and Gallery in Exeter, NH and the Rochester Museum of Fine Arts in Rochester, NH for their support of the show!
Any views or opinions expressed by our hosts or guests do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of Creative Guts.
[INTRODUCTION]
[0:00:00] LHL: I'm Laura Harper Lake.
[0:00:01] JA: And I’m Joe Acone.
[0:00:03] LHL AND JA: And you're listening to Creative Guts.
[EPISODE]
[0:00:17] LHL: Hey, friends. Thanks for tuning in to Creative Guts.
[0:00:20] JA: Today, we are sitting down with Dr. Loretta Brady, Professor at Saint Anselm College and Founder of the Community Resilience & Social Equity Lab.
[0:00:28] LHL: Let's jump right into this episode of Creative Guts with Dr. Loretta Brady.
[INTERVIEW]
[0:00:36] JA: All right. Welcome, everybody.
[0:00:38] LHL: Hello.
[0:00:39] LB: Hello, thank you for having me.
[0:00:41] LHL: It's awesome to have you on the show, Loretta.
[0:00:43] JA: For those who don't know, we have in studio with us today, Dr. Loretta Brady. She is a Professor at Saint Anselm College and runs a myriad of things. I'm going to do my best to try to summarize, but I will talk a little bit about the, primarily the Community Resilience & Social Equity Lab, amongst so many other things. Can you fill in a little bit?
[0:01:03] LB: I think that's it. I am the self-appointed director of the Community Resilience & Social Equity Lab, which is my research lab at the college. I'm a clinical psychologist, and I wanted to find a way to allow my undergraduate students to engage with work that had to do with mental health and various community needs. The lab was a space where that could happen. We have two sides to our work. We have a Technical Assistance Bureau, where we deliver organizational development and leadership support, strategic planning, those kinds of activities, and that work helps us subsidize the game and play-making work that we get to do with our students. That happens in what we call the Resilience Incubator, which is a space where game prototypes having to do with various mental health, or community needs are developed iteratively, usually over several academic years, usually with several teams of students before they're ready for publication.
In 2025, that culminated in four of our games being officially published. One with a community group called Queer Elective. We supported some of their game design, learning and play testing, and they released a game called We Are Your Neighbors, last May of 25. This fall, thanks in part to help from Joe, we were able to formally publish three card-based games that we created. Two of them were based on role-playing games a year in the life of different communities. One is Bad Call, which is year in life of first responders, and the other is Bad Call Sport, which is an academic year in the life of a student athlete. Both of those games allow you to take on the persona of a member of those communities. As you play, you're also being exposed to various resources that we curated to support the different mental health needs of those populations.
Then, another game called Faces, which is a card deck featuring figures from contemporary and historic medical backgrounds. As one of my students eloquently has put it, it shows the two faces of medicine, the faces that have helped and caused healing, and the faces that have sometimes caused harm. It's a way of exploring ethics in medicine and ways of exposing different groups, both professional people who are in medical care, as well as students who might be training to these various issues in medicine.
[0:03:35] JA: There's so much tucked into what you just said, and I would love to unpack it a little bit more, because I feel like it's a good insight into my experience working with you and learning from you in the past year, year and a half or so. I forget how long have we been working together now. It's like, a year and a half, right?
[0:03:49] LB: Yeah, I think so.
[0:03:50] JA: My role in some of the work is very small. It was just about some graphic design layout stuff. But while I was doing that work, I was really struck by the depth and the possibilities of the work that you and your students are doing. It drips with both creativity and really rich design, as well as being scientifically informed and research-based. Then, there's this whole other lens that you and I talked about too, about being an educator as well. You're creating this space for kids to learn and design and create. You're also thinking on that meta level of how do I make this an educational experience for my students designing educational games?
[0:04:31] LB: Yeah, which I'm not sure if I'm successful at any of it, but it's a lot of fun to be able to try.
[0:04:38] JA: Your students, every student I spoke to, they were deep in it. They were engaged, they were excited, they were playtesting, they had great questions. I think that a huge part of that is because of you. I was able to come to some of your showcases, where you showcase your department and your student work. Many times, they were asked by people in the audience. What's motivating you? What's going on here? How did you get involved? They was like, “Oh, Dr. Brady. Dr. Brady brought us here.” I feel like I need to give you your flowers right at the top.
[0:05:04] LB: I really appreciate it. No, I was filling out the background form to get ready to come today. There's a question about how are you creative, or something. I don't necessarily think of myself as a creative. I am a writer and I do both creative writing, creative nonfiction and fiction writing, children's literature. When it comes to the work that I do in the lab, I hadn't really considered that as part of my creative repertoire. I see myself more as a producer. I'm making projects possible. I'm pulling together people who have artistic skills and have clinical knowledge and expertise to try and make something that I hope will be an accessible resource for some need.
The degree to which that's part of my creativity, I don't necessarily claim that in the same way. I definitely will claim the space making part. I’m very intentional about pulling students in, finding ways for their interests to be met, finding ways for them to share the skills and talents they have. I just wish I had endless space, endless budget, endless time with the students, so that they could all realize the way in which they are creative and knowledgeable. That is as an educator, to hear that from you, that is very humbling. Thank you.
[0:06:24] JA: Of course.
[0:06:25] LB: Thank you for seeing that.
[0:06:26] LHL: The whole thing is just fascinating. It's really amazing. I would argue that you are creative and outside and in this, because it sounds like you're creating games for storytelling to have folks understand other people's point of view. That's storytelling and that's connecting folks and that's extremely creative.
[0:06:44] LB: That is the piece, the narrative design component is where I can see a contribution. There is actual formal language to describe that within the game industry setting itself. I think I just like talking to people and asking good questions. You do that enough and things come out of it.
[0:07:03] LHL: Yeah. How did game design become such a central part to the lab?
[0:07:08] LB: Definitely the storytelling component. Also, about a decade ago, I was working on a grant for the National Institute of Health. They have a mechanism to support pre-K through grade 12 science education in both formal and informal settings. I was really interested in that work. I attended a conference where some of that work was being shared, and I had a collaborator at the time at the college who, we were interested in that work, but we thought we were going to focus on preschool and the interaction that parents and very young children were having technology at that time, which was early smartphone adoption.
That project that we had written didn't get funded, but I attended the meeting, that annual meeting that year of that particular program called CIPA. I found my people in terms of, it was the first time in an academic context where I was seeing these really creative applications of translational medicine, programs that were looking at childhood obesity prevention, programs that were looking at sexual assault prevention. They were using a variety of community-based approaches. Some of them were mobile vans that were going to neighborhoods and delivering programming. Some of them were museum exhibits and various stickers and guidebooks and things associated with it.
Often, the teams were assembled. They were included librarians and STEM educators and health specialists and psychologists. I just thought, oh, this is a really neat academic and scholarly community to be a part of. I don't know if our project looking at smartphone adoption with preschoolers is going to get another rewrite, but what else is happening in this space? I came across a program run out of University of Chicago. Melissa Gilliam is now the President of Boston University, but at the time she was a faculty member at University of Chicago. She and a man named Patrick Jagoda had started a game lab. In their work, they worked with youth in the summer months. Her background was as an OBGYN, so she had a lot of focus on health and youth health.
I was learning about their project. They had a CIPA funded project, where they worked with students over four weeks. They would come to the University of Chicago campus. They would learn how to play all types of games, video games, board games, card games. Then they would learn some health topic. One summer it was tobacco, one summer it was sexually transmitted illnesses. By the end of the four-week period, the students would have created a game prototype. That was just a fascinating model to me. It was also fascinating, because Patrick Jagoda had written this article about basically, a larp through social media that the students had believed so thoroughly that they tracked down and solved this mystery that wasn't actually a mystery. It was all sorts of ethical implications of using games with youth.
I was really interested in that approach. In my own lab, I started to incorporate game design. I had some students working with me and I had a set of community organizations that wanted to understand how youth could more successfully close the gap between 10th grade to 12th grade. In the particular community that we were working, there was a finding that if students persisted through 10th grade, they were much more likely to persist through 12th and graduate than if they did not. I had a couple of students who were willing to learn game design and to then use the concept of game design with different groups of youth, to try to understand what do these youth know about surviving 10th grade, and what could those youth tell us that could help an 8th grader be prepared to persist through 10th grade.
It was a fascinating methodology, I found, to use this just as a device to say, I don't know if 15-year-olds are going to sit around a table and tell me what they know. I felt pretty confident they weren't. They told my research assistants, my students, what they knew by designing different games. We did it two different times. I had two students working with me. We did it in the context of two different youth organizations. Some of the youth that came for one day that we did it showed up at the next day at the other organization, because they really liked what we were doing.
My students were wonderful. They really facilitated a discussion with these young people in a way that I hadn't noticed them being able to do that before. I think their comfort with the idea of designing a game was something that made me much more confident in their ability to really listen closely. I was just in the space. I wasn't facilitating their facilitation, other than just being another person in the room. What the students designed was totally different from one setting to another, but the themes and what were the roadblocks that were getting in the way? What was the insight that this different group of youth had about their own education that they would want an 8th grader to understand? The findings were really robust. Even though it wasn't a grant funded research project that resulted in journal articles, which is the measure of academic success, if you will, I knew there was something really powerful there.
That happened around 2017. For the purpose of that project, we did what we did. My students got something from it. The organizations that we were serving, they got the information they needed. I held on to that as something that I wanted to see more of. Simultaneous to that, the work that I was doing off campus with my own consulting firm, I was being called on more and more to speak around issues of diversity and inclusion and to help leaders. I designed a program called Culturally Inclusive Leaders. I was being called on to deliver that in different settings more and more.
Then in 2019, we were able to secure a contract. We being the college, I was able to secure a contract. It was too large a project for me to be able to take that on as a solo consultant in my own firm. I was able to approach the college and bring that into the college. That was the birth of our Technical Assistance Bureau. That was around helping leadership management training. That helped fund the game and play-based work that we were doing, where I had a concept of what I wanted to see that turn into. But it wasn't a clear enough project that I could pursue grant funding at that point. I didn't have any prior work in that area, so it wasn't something that I could easily secure funding for.
The nature of that contract coming into the college allowed the proceeds of it to support early game designer work that we did. We've had three game designers in residence now who've worked with us to – I mean, initially just teach me play-testing. What is play-testing? To teach my students how to summarize the play-testing process. Then eventually, that role would also include game design itself, graphic design work, introducing us to different genres of games and a whole new vocabulary.
[0:14:48] LHL: Dang, there's so much there.
[0:14:51] JA: It's so rich and it's nice to know the background to how that came to be. I think, to speak for the listeners, as an artist, I feel like you just gave me the slightest little glimpse into the world of scientific research, college-level professorship. There's so much. You're talking about journals and all these things, and I'm just like, and writing grants and all the possibilities there. At its core, you're also creating educational spaces, where kids make games. Game design in of itself is this whole other complicated creative endeavor that I feel a lot of artists, maybe some of our listeners maybe don't engage with as much necessarily.
[0:15:33] LB: I'm sure they play games.
[0:15:34] JA: Sure, of course. Right.
[0:15:35] LB: I think most of our listeners were probably on the receiving end of games. They're consuming, enjoying, and to step back and think about the process of how it's made and what it's trying to say with what you're presented with is really the key.
[0:15:49] JA: The fact that a lot of the work is based on supporting communities in a myriad of ways. It feels like the possibilities are so immense that they can have a direct impact on people, if they engage with these games. That's that critical play stuff of what can games do outside of leisure, educational games that can be enjoyable, but also very impactful. You introduced me to a bunch of games that I was like, oh, these games are really powerful. They give you really powerful experience. I don't necessarily know that I want to play them multiple times.
[0:16:27] LB: Yeah. Fun with trauma.
[0:16:28] JA: Yeah, absolutely.
[0:16:30] LHL: Just a clarifying question. Are all these games physical, or are there digital video games?
[0:16:35] LB: We did have a project back in ’23. I mentioned that projects that we work on in the lab are often spanning many academic years and many teams of students. In 2020, I wrote three visual narratives and I have no visual art skills. Thanks to a mutual of hours of Joe and I, Joe Christian Gill. He referred –
[0:17:00] LHL: Who’s been on the podcast.
[0:17:02] LHL: Yes. As he should have been. He referred me to one of his former students, Danny Koka, who was a student of his when she was at Mass Arts, I think. Mass College of Arts. Danny lives in New Jersey and an amazing artist, and took the three stories that I had, I guess, described. I don't know if you could say I wrote them. I did write them, but I just visually described what I wanted to see, and realized them. One of them was realized into a full 17-page comic called Rounds. That is the story of a day in the life of an emergency room doctor, whose shift is interrupted by a mass casualty incident in the broader community. That comic, the art for that was, I think, finished in 21.
Between 21 and 23, I worked with a student, Gianna Cormier, who we did a lot, but ultimately, we turned Rounds from a comic into a visual novel video game. We partnered with students at SNHU Inkwell's Interactive Studio to do that work. Unfortunately, the link no longer works. It was a beta. We learned how we would want to rewrite that project, should we have funding to do that. If we were funded for that project, it would fit into a space that is both career exploration, as well as medical education in terms of charting and health informatics. It's a whole sub-specialty of healthcare. Of course, because all of our projects do way too many things.
The process of developing the visual novel game actually started by working with youth. We would bring them to campus. We'd show them the pages of the comic itself, and we'd ask them where would they want to jump into the story, if they could. That's how we chose some of the narrative points to turn it into a visual novel game. Yeah. We've done video, we've done card, we've done board game, and then we've done experiences, like larping, I guess. Created a ritual for our campus community to honor and share COVID related stories called The Plague Walk. We premiered that in 23, and that's actually going to be published this year in a Book of Uncommon Rituals, which is a journal that publishes rituals.
[0:19:24] JA: Oh, wow. That's news to me. That's brilliant. I love that. Can you unpack what you mean by ritual?
[0:19:29] LB: Well, in the case of The Plague Walk, it was really just a walk around alumni hall, but we had very specific points in our campus geography, where we would stop and the walk is facilitated by a plague doctor and plague nurse, or a plague doctor and a safety monitor, depending on how much people want to lean into it. It was really interesting, because our campus is full of iconography. It's just like a Catholic college that you would expect to see a lot of iconography. I've been on this campus for 30 years. As a student, I was there 30 years ago. As a faculty member, I've been there for more than 23 years. I had never noticed things before. But doing this process and combining it with some dramaturgy around plagues and what cultures have historically done to mark them, to deal with them, to deal with them to process them, it just brought our campus, physical campus to life in a completely different way.
Then it did what we wanted it to do. We wanted people to have conversations about COVID and not act like it was overdone and never to be discussed again, but to instead have these moments along the walk where their own narrative of how they encountered it could be shared. Then there were moments where they were in a group and discussing what they experienced, as well as moments where they were able to be by themselves and to be more reflective. The walk starts with the prompt of what's plaguing you, and it ends with what are you leaving behind.
[0:21:01] LHL: That's powerful. I feel like that's important too, because a lot of folks think, “Oh yeah. COVID's over and done with.” But there's so many people that live with the effects of that, the effects of losing someone through that. Not to mention, the fact that we're not immune to something like that ever happening again. Processing that is important in case it happens again.
[0:21:21] JA:
[0:21:21] LB: Interesting.
[0:21:22] JA: I find the structure really fascinating. My brain's buzzing. I’m thinking about like, how did you even invite people to this? What did that look like, when you come join this plague walk, where we're going to unpack really –
[0:21:33] LB: Well, Joe, you know now from working with me that nothing is simple and straightforward. It was also a pilot to test how metadata was collected through QR code.
[0:21:44] JA: Okay. Yeah, it is. Okay.
[0:21:47] LB: The whole ArcGIS map.
[0:21:48] JA: Yeah, sure. Okay.
[0:21:51] LB: The invitation actually came. We have an event on campus called Raven's Night that I started with colleagues. It happens around Halloween time and we read the Raven. In the past few years, Poe himself has shown up, because we have a faculty member on campus who has already had a Poe character that he's developed. He'll show up and do a reading with us.
[0:22:14] LHL: When you said that, my first thought was there's a Ouija board involved, and like, Poe has shown up.
[0:22:19] LB: Yes. Yeah, there are Ouija boards, but our Catholic students are somewhat –
[0:22:24] LHL: Understand.
[0:22:25] LB: At arm's length with Ouija board involvement, so we don't really lean into that part. But it's a mixture of literary. We have a poetry and open mic that we do. Then there's also games that we make available. More spooky themed games. This fit into that event. It was something that we constructed for one year that we did it, and something we could bring back. We have all the scripting and everything for it. But just depends on what the student team is willing to sign up for.
[0:22:54] LHL: Totally. Yeah.
[0:22:56] JA: Yeah. That experience of being in a space and unpacking your feelings around something that's possibly traumatic, right? That's an opt in if you like, that experience.
[0:23:05] LB: Yes, exactly. We had it, so there were specific times in the evening where you could convene and participate in that if you wanted to. If you didn't, there's plenty of other things to be doing.
[0:23:16] JA: This framework that you've built around this plague walk is a part – you're calling that a ritual. Then that's being published is one of a series of things. Do they all have different themes? Are they all related to the plagues? How does that work?
[0:23:30] LB: I didn't create The Plague Walk for publication. I did have a pilot use of ArcGIS, which is a mapping technology. I think that was actually my motivation. Like, oh, let's see how accurate the location is when you're on campus. We know where all these spaces are that we're stopping. Sometime in 24 or 25, I happened to come across a book of uncommon rituals and they had a call for publication. I submitted it as an example of a ritual and they accepted it.
[0:23:58] JA: Oh, that's great.
[0:23:59] LB: Yes.
[0:24:00] LHL: Congratulations.
[0:24:01] LB: Thank you.
[0:24:01] LHL: That's awesome.
[0:24:05] JA: We've talked about a lot. We've talked about rituals, these performance-based experiences that we talked about game design. I'm thinking about some of the residency experiences that you've put together. I had the good fortune to be a part of the one that you had this past summer. The theme of that was generational trauma.
[0:24:24] LB: Light things –
[0:24:24] JA: Nice and light.
[0:24:25] LB: - to discuss with your friends.
[0:24:26] LHL: Sign me up.
[0:24:28] JA: Right. Right. I would love to maybe talk a little bit about that structure, because, again, you as a creative creating spaces for people to build things. You're also curating who's coming to this event, right? Who has some expertise in various fields? I'm an artist, the art lens. That's the extent of mine. You brought people in who had a wide range of experiences. Could you unpack that a little bit?
[0:24:54] LB: Sure. Yeah. In July of 26, it'll be our fourth residency. I didn't get an NIH grant to fund youth for four weeks on campus learning health topics and creating games. But I've been able to bootstrap this six-day experience. It's looked a number of ways over the years. It really relies on trust. I mean, you just trusted me and said, “I'll show up as much as I can.” I was like, great. Keep doing that. You had people over to your house. It was so kind. The residency serves a few different purposes. One, it gives us a chance as a lab to iterate on something that's really tangible and usually pretty meaty. The reason that it's five or six days is it coincides with make it a longish weekend.
What we try to do is bring one to three artists to campus. It's at a time in the summer when my summer research student, who is often funded through an NIH mechanism called INBRE that our campus participates in. The undergraduate student would have spent six to eight weeks by that point, focusing on some medical area of literature. Then when the residency begins, the artists are combining knowledge with the research student. Then we are also connecting with some community health need.
I think our first official residency was in 23, we had a medical illustrator and a journalist who came. The community health need was actually urban redevelopment and looking at healthier neighborhood structures. They created a game that was based on that rounds comic. Instead of being inside the hospital walls and following the day in the life of the emergency room doctor, their game was a map of the neighborhood, outside the community hospital. You encountered the characters that were patients in the hospital in the community setting. That became a model that last year, when we worked with Queer Elective and they created the We Are Your Neighbors game, that became the model for that project. Their execution was amazing and not something that was done in six days. That was full color and beautiful.
That was something that showed the medical illustrator a little bit about something called graphic medicine, because in our work, especially in the summer residency, we're trying to bring comic arts and game design together and just showing what you can do when you have that intentionality. In the summer of 24, we had two artists from Arizona. The health topic that my student was looking at was climate related impacts of mental health and youth mental health. The artists came. One of the artists came with us to a day-long conference in Portsmouth about coastal climate resilience. Then the game that we created over that residency was a Oregon trail-like zine game, where you have to survive a flood event for four days. Yes, dysentery does come into the picture.
[0:28:00] JA: There you go. Test to show up once.
[0:28:02] LB: Yup. It was also a way of really exploring ideas of like, well, who gets shelter in these situations? They were coming from a community where if you didn't have a picture ID, you might not get shelter. If you weren't a citizen, you might not get shelter. It allowed us to have different conversations than what my students research alone would have been focusing on.
Last summer, my student and I were working on a project to understand the impact of something called ACERT, which is Adverse Childhood Experience Response Team. It's a community policing model that developed in Manchester and has since gotten federal support to spread to other communities, not just in New Hampshire, but across the country. It's about 10 years old now. My student and I were doing interviews with folks who had formed that community response and were listening closely in those interviews for how that work affected them. We had questions around occupational health and wellness that we were interested in exploring. But doing any kind of work, looking at social support systems in Manchester, in New Hampshire also leads you to look at the different juvenile justice mechanisms and systems of care.
For the summer residency, to try and connect with what my student was working on, we focused on juvenile incarceration and intergenerational healing from incarceration. We had comic artists, Lafleche Giasson, we had a writer and yoga guru, Karen Kenny. Joe came as our game designer expert and we had another game designer, Jenny Powell, who came from Los Angeles. Then we had men with different lived experience of incarceration, juvenile incarceration, adult incarceration, and men who worked in corrections. They joined us as well to generate a really fun card game called The Comeback Kid, that is ready to be iterated. Hopefully, will be over in the next couple of academic years. Yeah. I don't know. You can say more, because you were actually the creator in there.
[0:30:06] JA: Yeah, it was wild. It was front loaded with a tour of the youth detention center. A yoga experience where you unpack your trauma a little bit in that space, to talk about ways to deal with energetically deal with some of the things that you might have not dealt with in a while, which was very, very powerful. Then Lafleche Giasson is – their experience, they're a comic artist that unpacks generational trauma and they are in the midst of writing a memoir about being a fourth-generation cult survivor. Her family has founded this cult and it's been four generations now and she's writing a whole memoir about that. She led a whole workshop around informing us on some of the work that she's done in graphic medicine. This whole residency, the front end was just jam-packed with stuff to get you in the zone, in the way of thinking about generational trauma. Then it was like, all right, design a game.
[0:31:03] LB: Here's some snacks. Good luck.
[0:31:04] JA: Yeah. Here’s some snacks. Let's go. That was intense. That was a really cool experience, trying to mash all these ideas together. We should also shout out Tone Payton. He was the former guest of the podcast, too.
[0:31:16] LHL: Yeah, yeah. Anthony Tone Payton. Yeah.
[0:31:20] JA: Anthony Payton.
[0:31:21] LB: He and his podcast co-host, Marv Kinnel, were participating. They have Lock and Key. That's their podcast.
[0:31:26] LHL: Yes. Yup.
[0:31:27] LB: Corden James, who is a speaker and youth activist and leader, he participated. Yeah.
[0:31:35] JA: It was really cool to see all of these people who some folks had creative game design nerd experience, and some people absolutely did not, but they had life experience that they wanted to contribute. We were all jamming together to try to build this game. It was a lot of fun. We ended up with a prototype that I thought looked functional. Looked really simple.
[0:31:53] LB: It works. Yeah, it does work. I think there is room to iterate in terms of that intergenerational aspect. I know that was one of your ideas. In and of itself, it absolutely works. It gives you an opportunity to practice resilience and to have conversations about resilience, and just with cards and tiles.
[0:32:12] JA: Yeah. This is as a part of your lab, this prototype lives there and it can be re-engaged with at any point by students, or with as another residency, or however.
[0:32:24] LB: Exactly. Yeah. We're starting to plan for this summer's residency. The concept I'm thinking is that we'll be focused on sewing and women's health and maybe black women's economic empowerment. We'll see who we pull in or the final verdict on that.
[0:32:42] JA: What’s the name of that game? The embroidery.
[0:32:45] LB: A mending.
[0:32:45] JA: A mending.
[0:32:46] LB: Yeah.
[0:32:47] LHL: The name.
[0:32:47] LB: It's a really cool game.
[0:32:49] LHL: Oh, wow.
[0:32:49] LB: It's about mending a relationship. But you're sewing on a map and it's very interesting.
[0:32:53] LHL: Oh, wow.
[0:32:54] LB: Very interesting. Mentor text.
[0:32:56] JA: Yes. That's been such a pleasure to collaborate with you. You're just feeding me games. I have no idea what they are. Then I'm like, it's so smart. I hope people are able to use the game design space to engage with so many wonderful things. It's actually entertaining and engaging and heartbreaking and it's wild.
[0:33:18] LHL: Many of the topics that you focus on are very important, but very heavy, or hard. Do you personally have any –
[0:33:28] LB: Fun ever? I know. Never, actually.
[0:33:33] LHL: That and do you bring it home? Are you able to compartmentalize to protect your own mental health? Maybe this is too personal of a question, I guess. I'm really diving into your mind in the heart here. Just in the creative space, any creative is processing what it is to be human, the emotions that go with it and with the heavier stuff. Sometimes it's really hard to put up a wall to not let that affect you. How does that work for you?
[0:33:58] LB: How does that work? I don't know how well it works. I do think that the faculty hat gives me – it's not really an invisibility cloak, but there are compartments, right? I'm organizing a residency to pull together people, so that they walk away having an experience that they value. If we're creating something that will live beyond it and really be fully functionally iterated and published, that's great. I'm just trying to create an experience and provide, and to the point of the yoga session this particular summer, I didn't have that in prior residencies, because it wasn't as relevant, right? This summer, it felt like this is a really important piece that I wanted to invest in and I wanted to make sure we had, because whether or not you have experience of incarceration, everybody has intergenerational stuff. And to bring people together who, other than coming together with this intention over five or six days, would otherwise not be working together. I felt it was really important to have that for myself and for others.
Sometimes I'm also working on a project myself alongside of these themes. The yoga session and some of the work that came after the residency was as much for me as it was to support the residency, because I just knew if you're reading about trauma, revisiting trauma, it's going to be in your own body. How do you move with that in a way that doesn't paralyze you, or keep you from continuing work that you value? It probably does come home more than it should. I'm definitely obsessive over everything, so that part's probably not so healthy for my family. Because I'll just like, I’ll focus on that, you know. It's your summer, you're not even on contract. What are you doing? It's so cool to see what comes out of five or six days together. I did get to see the Barbie movie in 23 with the artists, so that was fun.
[0:36:03] LHL: Very good.
[0:36:05] LB: There is some fun that happens.
[0:36:05] LHL: That's a piece of art right there.
[0:36:07] LB: Yeah, exactly. There is some fun that comes alongside the work involved with the residency.
[0:36:15] LHL: I think it's time to wind down with rapid fire questions now.
[0:36:18] LHL: Oh, okay.
[0:36:19] LB: This is how we conclude the episode.
[0:36:21] LHL: Oh, okay. I really should have done my homework on this one.
[0:36:22] JA: No, it's okay.
[0:36:23] LHL: These should be easy questions. If not, don't worry, we edit it to make it shorter.
[0:36:28] LB: Perfect. Perfect.
[0:36:29] LHL: What is your favorite color?
[0:36:31] LB: Oh, gosh. Okay. Right out the gate. I love every color. I love red. Yeah.
[0:36:38] JA: Mm. Good choice.
[0:36:38] LB: Red. Yeah.
[0:36:38] LHL: Awesome.
[0:36:39] JA: What's your favorite scent?
[0:36:41] LB: I would say, florals. I like lavenders. I like Lily of the Valley. An old lady smells great to me, apparently.
[0:36:48] JA: There you go. Yeah.
[0:36:50] LB: Just like a cloying floral. Just give it to me.
[0:36:53] LHL: What's your favorite sound?
[0:36:55] LB: I love rain.
[0:36:56] LHL: Good one.
[0:36:57] JA: Texture or touch?
[0:36:58] LB: Soft and cozy.
[0:37:00] JA: Hmm.
[0:37:00] LB: Probably a bunch of microplastic fleece.
[0:37:02] JA: There you go.
[0:37:03] LB: Yeah.
[0:37:04] LHL: Nice. Most inspiring location you've traveled to.
[0:37:10] LB: Well, I've been very lucky to be able to spend time in really beautiful places. That's hard. I really love Prince Edward Island and Cyprus. Totally different landscapes. Totally different architectures. But give me some good red dirt roads. Give me some beautiful Grecian pots outside of homes with flowing wisteria vines. Yeah.
[0:37:36] JA: I love the picture. You just painted it. What other artists, designer, researcher has influenced you the most?
[0:37:43] LB: I do consider myself a collage artist, without any evidence of that. I just think the way that my brain works and the way that my occasional calling is. I’m just like, that’s what game design is to me. That's what writing is to me. It's collage. I love Bisa Butler. I love Faith Ringgold. I just think, give me more texture, fabric, sewing, all these skills that I don't possess myself, but I just admire.
[0:38:09] LHL: Love it. What is the last new thing you've learned?
[0:38:14] LB: It was probably something food-related, because I'll just Google things that I need to ingredients I have to turn into something. Yeah, that was probably – probably something food-related.
[0:38:24] JA: Okay.
[0:38:25] LHL: Nice.
[0:38:26] JA: Then, if you could go back in time, what advice would you give your younger self?
[0:38:31] LB: Oh, gosh. I mean, how much younger? I have young adults now. I definitely wouldn't have worked all those summers. But they know I love my work, so that is okay. I probably relax. I think that's probably just good advice. I had a crisis of faith when I was 20, that I wouldn't do all the things that I felt people needed to do by a certain age, and I did, and it was fine. Even if I hadn't, it still would have been fine.
[0:38:57] LHL: Yeah. Yeah.
[0:38:58] LB: Yeah. Relax.
[0:38:59] JA: Relax is great. Yes.
[0:39:01] LHL: I need to hear it daily. A lot of us do. Thank you so much, Loretta.
[0:39:06] LB: Thank you.
[0:39:07] JA: This is wonderful. Thank you.
[0:39:08] LHL: It's been an absolute pleasure. Yeah.
[0:39:10] LB: I hope you got something useful out of it.
[0:39:12] LHL: Oh, absolutely.
[0:39:12] JA: Of course.
[0:39:13] LHL: This is a whole realm we haven't really gone into at all on the podcast, so it's so wonderful to have.
[0:39:18] LB: Well, you should get real game designers here to talk about stuff.
[0:39:22] LHL: That'll be coming up next.
[0:39:23] LB: I recommend.
[0:39:23] LHL: Yeah.
[0:39:24] JA: Do you have any recommendations? We’ll have to –
[0:39:27] LB: Well, I might, but they can't come for me, so.
[0:39:30] LHL: Yeah. Thank you again, Loretta, for being on the show.
[0:39:33] LB: Thank you.
[0:39:35] LHL: With that –
[0:39:36] JA and LHL and LB: Show us your creative guts.
[END OF INTERVIEW]
[0:39:42] LHL: Another huge thank you to Loretta for joining us on Creative Guts. What a cool interview.
[0:39:48] JA: Yes. I was so excited that we were going to have her on the podcast today. She does so much that even with all that she informed us with that she's doing at St. A's and through her lab, she is just scratching the surface of everything. She went over some of the projects he's doing, but I just love talking about game design first and foremost. It's such a cool medium. It's cool to talk somebody who's literally doing it and creating space for people to do it and are doing it in a way that engages with really vital, important, community-based initiatives that's research-based. I was like, yeah, I was so excited to have her on.
[0:40:28] LHL: I know. We didn't even really get to talk about that as much as I'd like to, but just the amount of change that she's affecting and the way that people think and process and deal with things. It's just amazing. It's amazing that there are these pockets of education, or pockets of our community that we're not even aware of what's being built. I had no idea this was a thing.
[0:40:49] JA: Yeah, me either. I came in sideways to being a little bit involved with the work that she was doing and it's so incredible. The residencies that she's doing, where she invites people over, the stuff we talked about, I just feel like, what's going to come out of that is – what's wild is we might not even see much of it, much of the work, but I know that what she's doing with her students is just so profound. We're including links in the show notes and stuff in ways that support the work that she's doing and the Community Resilience and Social Equity Lab. Please, do engage with that stuff, listener. I feel like, if you want to learn more, too, definitely visit the website.
[0:41:27] LHL: Yeah. It's very important to support these types of things that are right in our backyard, right in our community.
[0:41:32] JA: Yeah, absolutely.
[0:41:33] LHL: Personally, I'm definitely getting – this a little bit of a side note, but I'm totally getting a time machine in my brain to when I interviewed you. You were a guest before you were a host.
[0:41:45] JA: Oh, yeah.
[0:41:45] LHL: I didn't know you quite as well. We were talking about gamified learning and teaching through that way. This is a little different, but it's not that different. It's like, the other side to it in a way. I just love that it's returned to the podcast.
[0:41:58] JA: That's so cool. It was a good callback. Yeah. I wasn’t even thinking about that, but yeah.
[0:42:01] LHL: Yeah. The way in which we approach education and the way we tell stories and try to impact change, you can do it in a creative way. Go to a lecture where you might be a little bored, or play a game where it can impact and influence. Maybe you could check your bias, or learn about someone else's perspective. There's so many ways to grow as a person in those ways. It's just so cool. I love seeing that creativity is tapped into all of that whole world.
[0:42:30] JA: Definitely. Drawing and painting is like, games are a language, especially kids. She's engaging with youth. Youth play games, man. They know, so they're way more interested in engaging with critical, important content when it's brought out in the game.
[0:42:46] LHL: Wicked. Oh, thank you again, Loretta. This was awesome. Check out the guest links in the episode description and on our website, creativegutspodcast.com.
[0:42:56] JA: You can also find us, Creative Guts Podcast on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn and Discord. If you're not on social media, but you want to stay in the know about what we're doing, join our newsletter list. We're on Substack and you can find the link to sign up in our website.
[0:43:10] LHL: This episode is sponsored by Kennebunk Savings Bank. Thank you so much, Kennebunk Savings, for being an official sponsor of the show. We'd also like to thank the Rochester Museum of Fine Arts and Art Up Front Street Studios & Gallery for both being friends of the show.
[0:43:27] JA: If you love listening and want to support Creative Guts, you can make a donation, leave us a review, interact with our content on social media, purchase a merch, whatever you're able to do, we appreciate you. Thank you for tuning in. We'll be back next Wednesday with another episode of Creative Guts.
[END]