Briana Corr Scott has lived with depression all her life. Despite a life filled with love –­ of family, nature, and art – she has been overcome with sadness many times. One such period unfolded soon after the pandemic. “My father-in-law passed away, my sister became a drug addict, and my mom was diagnosed with stage four cancer,” Scott recounts. “It all happened within five months, and it was really intense. I ended up spending a lot of time in bed, depressed.” A normal reaction to a tremendous amount of grief, but for Scott, a mom of three with a job, this wasn’t an option.

So, she asked her therapist a question: how do I get myself out of bed when I’m overcome with this sadness? Her therapist offered a question in return: what advice would you give your children?

The answer came in the form of a poem entitled I Lost a Day (Nimbus Publishing, out now). It was extraordinary for Scott because the author/illustrator always sees images for a book first, not the words. “This picture book is special because it’s from my own experience,” Scott says. “I wrote the poem first. That’s new for me.”

Dartmouth, Nova Scotia-based Scott fell in love with poetry in high school. Her poems normally undergo many drafts, but I Lost a Day arrived in flow state while she was lying in bed. “I think poetry is the same as painting. When you paint from life, there are a lot of limits: you have to start a certain way, the light does this, these are the rules of composition,” says Scott. “Poetry does the same with words, and I find the result the same. If I see a beautiful painting that’s masterful and gorgeous, it makes the top of my head explode. And if I read a good poem, it does the same thing.”

Scott’s artwork in I Lost a Day, which simmers with electricity, energy, and emotion, will surely elicit the same reaction from readers. Painted with acrylics and oils, chosen for their capacity to create a more three-dimensional effect, each piece was 30 by 40 inches, and took 40 hours to complete. Once the art was photographed, Scott added digital touches to the illustrations. The act of creating the artwork energized Scott, who had metabolized the emotions of the book in the writing process. “Once it becomes a poem, it’s out of my body. It’s really magical how that happens, because then I can make the artwork from an observer’s perspective,” she says. “I don’t have to be in it, and that’s helpful, because if I had been in this book all the time while I was making it, it would have been really hard. It’s a magical thing to be an observer of human activity and experience. I’m now in sharing mode, where I can re-form this clay into something else to give to other people.”

What Scott gives to readers are avenues to navigate emotions that can sometimes feel overwhelming such as rage and sadness. “When I wrote the stanzas, I noticed that some of the activities were more active than others,” recalls Scott. “I reorganized them so that I went from the least active to the most active.” Readers will see children evolve from being cocooned in bed, to reading a book, to playing make-believe and, eventually, running on the beach. Each activity is one that Scott loves and many are connected to, and take place in, nature where she also does much of her work.

For a previous title, The Book of Selkie, Scott travelled to Ireland, hiked the Wild Atlantic Way, and painted it. This approach stems from her childhood. She grew up near the beach, on an island in Massachusetts, and then her family moved to the woods in New Hampshire; when she creates, the natural world is often her muse. “Any time I needed to feel good, I had this great privilege of either stepping outside into the ocean or stepping outside into a forest, and I don’t know any other way of feeling better besides those things,” Scott says. “Now I live in a city, and I have to seek it out more, but I still feel the same. If I’m overwhelmed or upset, I step outside and it’s like a mental reset. That’s just so important.”

Equally important is keeping in mind that her books are for adults as much as they are intended for children. It’s the grown-ups who sit and read with the children, and who search for a book that will help a child understand the nature of depression. “I wrote I Lost a Day on my phone, in bed. I would write a stanza and then say, ‘Okay, now you can get up.’ This poem pulled me out of that time,” Scott recalls. “The answer to my therapist’s question is this poem. This is how you get out of bed when you’re sad, and this is what I would tell a child.”

Photo Credit: Nicole Lapierre.