Transcript: Season 2, Episode 6
Laura Zurowski
Terri Trespicio:
When Laura Zurowski graduated with a degree mass comm from Emerson, the world looked very different. There was TV and radio, and she even hosted a show WERS, but there was no Instagram or Facebook. There was no internet, period, but there were... hang me. Let me try that last part again. There were record stores, and one of Laura's very first jobs was making window displays for recording artists in Kenmore Square. She's gone on to have a very interesting career in writing, publishing, marketing, but what's changed her life profoundly is how she's made art and community a big part of it.
Laura's currently in the middle of a multiyear project to document every one of Pittsburgh's 739 staircases, traversed by generations of the city's industrial workers and residents using only her Polaroid Spectra. That project started as a personal creative endeavor, but soon requests and offers started pouring in. She's not only gotten a lot of for the MiS.Steps Project, she has a very nice side hustle giving walking tours of her beloved staircases, and that's something she never would have expected. What you're about to learn from Laura is that being an artist isn't just about the tools or the topic or the industry. It's about paying attention to what calls to you and believing that you can make a difference not just to you, but to a community. Even an entire city. Laura calls herself a full-time artist and a full-time employee, which she's been since the beginning. Did I mention she got her first full-time job as a sophomore? I think that's what I love most about her. She doesn't think you have to try to fit all the pieces of your life into one pie. Have two pies. With that, I give you Laura Zurowski, on making it as a full-time artist with a full-time job.
Terri Trespicio:
Laura, when I was first introduced to you, I was told you're a Pittsburgh based writer and photographer. Then when I went to look into you further, I was honestly blown away. I was like, wow. Talk about someone who's not easily categorized, and that is a compliment, because in an age where everyone is worried about nichifying and being really specific about the only one thing they do, your career is almost impossible to categorize. Was that on purpose?
Laura Zurowski:
Part of it is necessity. I'm a Gen X'er. I graduated from Emerson in 1990 so it really required a lot of flexibility and willingness to try new things and embrace change and be nimble. That was something as an undergraduate at Emerson was a really big part of the curriculum was just learning to be very creative and think on your feet and act quickly and kind of seize the moment. I kind of feel like, particularly in my early career, like throughout my 20s and early 30s, I did do a lot of different things. In part because I was striving to get a toe hold in the working world, and also try to figure out what I really wanted to do. I came to Emerson as a very creative artistic person, young person, to begin with, and a lot of that developed in my four years in Boston. When I left, once I graduated, I still had a lot of different things that I was learning and exploring, and I think that's very natural for someone who's 20, 21 years old.
Terri Trespicio:
Oh my God.
Laura Zurowski:
I don't have all the answers.
Terri Trespicio:
I don't know what planet people are living on that they think they're graduate at average age 21 and sort of have it figured out. Most college educations, they're not job training, because all training is on the job training, but just even a glance at where do we look now to see what people are about? We look on LinkedIn and it's like, if you look up Laura right now, you're going to see that she is a master of many things. She's a professional communicator, a photographer, a writer, a technical engineer. She's has technical engineering in her past. She also leads tours. You are a walking example of how fantastically diverse a person's life can be, and you just said it. Flexibility is the mark of a creative person.
Laura Zurowski:
Everything that I've done throughout the 30 years since I've graduated from college, it is all still rooted in what I was most interested in as a young person. Which was communicating, which was acting, which was art, which was writing. All of these different disciplines. I'm fortunate in that I've never necessarily had to stick with a job that wasn't the right fit. Maybe that doesn't sound so good.
Terri Trespicio:
That's great. What are you talking about? Who rewards staying in the wrong job?
Laura Zurowski:
That's not an issue of lack of persistence or dedication, because those qualities are very important, but I feel like in my career path I'm someone that I have taken on jobs and different kinds of roles because I have found them very interesting, because there has been a problem. I have often been hired to solve a particular problem.
Terri Trespicio:
I think we can agree that any job, the purpose is not only to teach you something that you'll know, but also to teach you what you don't like. Can you remember one of the earlier jobs How did you know one of those jobs wasn't fit? That'd be so helpful to know.
Laura Zurowski:
Sure. Some of it is personalities of the people that are there.
Terri Trespicio:
Yes, that's a big part.
Laura Zurowski:
Yeah. The thing is, I feel like these are the kinds of things it's different for every kind of person, like what their threshold is and what's acceptable, what's embraced, and what's a deal-breaker. For me, I did have a job mid-career where it was on a creative level, it was absolutely fantastic.
Laura Zurowski:
I was working at Brown University at the time in the computer science department as their director of their Industrial Partners program. It was doing a lot of technical writing, but writing for a non-technical audience.
Terri Trespicio:
There's your skill right there, the communication skill.
Laura Zurowski:
Yeah. That's something that I really enjoy. All of those aspects that I'm just describing right there, I thoroughly enjoyed, and I had lots of money at my disposal, I created beautiful publications.
Laura Zurowski:
Unfortunately, there were just some really big personality differences between myself and how I operate in the world and how a lot of PhD, computer science operate. They're brilliant people. They do wonderful things in the world, but I found that over my time in working there, I was just taking on a lot of behaviors that weren't naturally me. It made me really unhappy.
Terri Trespicio:
You changed your own behavior? You noticed things you did were different?
Laura Zurowski:
I was becoming more like the people that I worked with. I think that's something that a lot of people do in the workplace. You're some place and you kind of see oh, this is how it goes. I just felt, for me, in the long run, it really wasn't going to be the right fit and I wasn't happy with it. That was an instance where I was sad to leave because I felt on one had I was creating some really beautiful work that was really garnering attention not just within the university, but also on a much larger scale. All of those accomplishments were really fantastic, but the personalities of some the players that were involved were just not going to... it was just not going to work.
Terri Trespicio:
This is why I think it's crazy when we obsess about a specific job or job title or what I'll be doing, because unless you're in a hole talking to no one, which no job really functions like that, you're going to have to interact with people. What struck me, as you said, not just oh, I didn't like them, these couple jerks. It's there is a culture there that benefited very much from your skill set, but the culture would not allow you to do what your great at in the way you do it.
Terri Trespicio:
I'm assuming here, you tell me, you went in and said, this isn't working out, even though the job on paper was great. You dumped them. You broke up with them.
Laura Zurowski:
Yes, I did.
Terri Trespicio:
You did the right thing, though. You know what? A lot of people would tell themselves, but this is a good job and this is what I want to do, so I'm going to stay there. Guess what? Those people complain and kvetch and end up really miserable and end up being not happy, even though it seems as if they should have been. Back up a second, though. You were mass comm, right?
Laura Zurowski:
Yes, I was. Yeah.
Terri Trespicio:
I'm curious, when someone comes out with that degree, did you think you knew then what you should or wanted to do, or did you just not know?
Laura Zurowski:
Well, you know what's interesting is that my Emerson experience was maybe just a little bit different than the traditional person in the late 80s in that I moved off campus after freshman year and I started working full-time.
Terri Trespicio:
What?
Laura Zurowski:
I was very, very fortunate. Right off the bat freshman year, even first semester, I started to get very involved with WERS, and started my first semester freshman year just kind of being the intern, like just hanging out and getting records for people.
Terri Trespicio:
Records.
Laura Zurowski:
It was even before the CD player, so everything was vinyl, and hanging out in record library and meeting all of the other students that worked there. Fran Berger was our general manager back at the time. Because I was just always hanging around, the beginning of second semester of freshman year, there was a radio show slot that had opened. A student had left or had graduated and folk music of Ireland and the British Isles, which aired on Sunday morning. Here I am, in second semester freshman year, I know nothing about Irish music, but I thought to myself, whoa, this is a great opportunity and I really like the radio station. The folks here are a lot of fun. I learned how to use the turn tables and really spent a lot of time going over the Irish music section that was in the library to familiarize myself with things, and doing however one did research back in the 80s, because there was no internet. I started, but it was through that of kind of being this youngish new on-air person that I really solidified a bunch of other friendships with upperclassmen from Emerson who were already very involved with WERS because they were juniors and seniors and whatnot. It was through a friend of mine at the time, his name was Mark Allgehny He had been working at MCA Motown, the record label and he was moving on to something else, and he said, "There's a job opening there. It starts out part time, but if you like it, it might move up to full-time." The thing is is that my goal, at that time, at the end of my freshman year, my goal was well, jeez, when I come back for sophomore year, I'm getting an apartment with a couple of friends. We were going to get an apartment in Kenmore Square, and I'm going to try to get a job at Strawberries, which was the record store that used to be in Kenmore Square.
Terri Trespicio:
Oh, yeah.
Laura Zurowski:
When Mark had said to me, "Oh, hey. I'm leaving MCA Motown. Are you interested? I can put your name in and let them know." I said, jeez, that's way better than working at Strawberries. I started working at MCA Motown. I was an office assistant working part-time, just going stuff in the office, helping the sales office, packaging things up to be mailed.
Terri Trespicio:
But you're learning. You're learning what it is to be a working person.
Laura Zurowski:
I am learning. It was fun and it was an interesting job. Within the first couple of months, a full-time job came open as a merchandiser. Once again, I think this might be one of those jobs that it doesn't really exist in our current times anymore, but essentially what I did was I drove around to all these different record stores all over Massachusetts and Rhode Island and New Hampshire and made displays. I did inventory, so I had to count to make sure that do we have enough Bobby Brown 12-Inch singles.
Terri Trespicio:
Oh my God.
Laura Zurowski:
I made windows displays and put up posters. I did that job for the rest of my time at Emerson and one year after because I loved it. The thing that is really interesting is that most people look at a merchandising job, or at least back then, as well, this is really entry level. At the other record labels, the job was typically held by other folks like myself, either Emerson students or students from BU who are juniors or seniors getting ready to go on. It was a fantastic job to have while I was in college, but I also really loved it because it was also very creative because I'm making all of these window displays, and there was the whole process of trying to figure out oh, what do I want to create for this? Yeah, you could just hang up a couple of posters and fold some things around, but you had as much latitude as you wanted to put into it. For me, that was really just one of the most fantastic things.
Terri Trespicio:
Isn't that kind of fantastic, because you were going to go get a job at Strawberries, where you'd be restocking things and one of those temporary jobs. It wouldn't have meant anything, but instead you took an opportunity and someone else might have gone well, what do you want me to put in the window and waited for someone to tell them what to do because they wanted to do the right thing. Instead, you saw an opportunity there. You saw it as a chance to be creative.
Laura Zurowski:
Exactly.
Terri Trespicio:
Clearly, you're drawn not just to creativity, but to art and community, and those things go hand in hand, and a sense of place. In 2017, of course, you started MisSteps: Our missed connections with Pittsburgh's city steps. Talk to us a little bit about that project. Tell me about how that...
Laura Zurowski:
How that all came about.
Terri Trespicio:
Yeah. What the heck, yes. How.
Laura Zurowski:
What's that all about? About eight years ago I moved to Pittsburgh, and coming to Pittsburgh I often say is one of the best things I've ever done in my life.
Terri Trespicio:
Who up and moves to Pittsburgh and why?
Laura Zurowski:
I know.
Terri Trespicio:
You must be from there.
Laura Zurowski:
Terri, you'd be surprised. There are a lot of refugees from New York City and Brooklyn and Seattle and Silicon Valley.
Terri Trespicio:
I know it's a wonderful city, but usually people I know go back to Pittsburgh because they love it. I don't know people who just up and move there. What originated that big move?
Laura Zurowski:
I was working for a college in upstate New York and I had the opportunity to work remotely to become a virtual employee. At the time, I was very interested in wanting to buy a house That is what precipitated my coming here. What brought me to Mis.Steps was I had already been living here for a few years, there's a really robust arts and creative maker community here in Pittsburgh. Once I moved here, I was immediately hooked in and getting involved with different things here with that, but I realized after about two or three years, because I was a remote employee and I was working from home, I didn't really know my way around Pittsburgh. I wasn't fully comfortable in the city, and that really troubled me. I had been thinking okay, I have this personal issue that I need to resolve. I always do that through some sort of creative manifestation. As I was thinking about all of this, I happened to come upon this book in a local bookstore that is called Pittsburgh's Steps. The book was about 20 years old. It was written by a professor at the University of Pittsburgh that talked about the history of these 739 public stairways that exist in the city of Pittsburgh, and there are that many city steps because Pittsburgh is the hilliest city in the United States. A lot of people think it's San Francisco. It's close, but not quite. Having this book, I started looking at it and reading it and it was so fascinating because the book also contained the full list of where you could find all of these stairs. I thought to myself okay, this is going to be interesting because this is going to take me to neighborhoods that I don't know anything about, I've never been to, places I have never seen while I've been here.
Laura Zurowski:
At the time, I was also very interested in getting back into instant photography. I thought, all right. I'm going to get my camera, I'm going to get this film, I've got this book, and now I'm going to go out and I'm going to visit these stairs and I am going to write. I'm going to write my own stories, because up to this point, I had spent decades writing. Writing scientific and technical stories, working as a ghost writer and writing other people's books for them, doing content marketing and writing articles and website content and brochures. All of these types of things, but I had given very little attention to doing my own writing and saying, what is my voice and what do I want to say? I thought, these stairs will prompt me. I will go out, and as I visit a neighborhood and walk around and see the stairs and sit on the stairs and walk up and down the stairs. I'm going to spend time and I'm going to think about, what's coming into my mind? What am I think about while I'm here? What comes up? Sometimes it's personal memories and recollections. Sometimes it's about an interaction that I have with someone or with an animal while I'm out there. Other times thoughts just kind of come out from nowhere. When that happens, I just like to think of well, those are the city stairs and that's the story that they wanted to tell me. Then I write.
Laura Zurowski:
I started posting them on Instagram and I told a couple of friends. Originally, this wasn't a big project. Over the last three years, it's definitely become a big project. Within the first three months, Pittsburgh Magazine contacted me and said, "Hey, we hear you're writing about the city stairs and doing this project. We want to interview you. We want to do a story."
Terri Trespicio:
Oh, great how did they hear about it?
Laura Zurowski:
Because Pittsburghers love their city stairs.
Terri Trespicio:
The local angle.
Laura Zurowski:
Very quickly it went from a project which was just kind of like a little pet hobby type thing to oh boy, all of a sudden I have a lot of people that are emailing me and I need a better website. There were all of these things that happened, and it's been really a very fascinating last three years. The project itself is going to take five years. I have not quite two years left ahead of me to do it, but over the last three years, there have just been hundreds of people that have approached me to do different things. Whether it's leading neighborhood tours.
Terri Trespicio:
I saw that. I was like, she's giving tours now.
Laura Zurowski:
I lead people. City government has taken an interest in what I'm doing. There's just been so many different angles that have kind of come about just through doing this work and putting it out there.
Terri Trespicio:
I love that.
Laura Zurowski:
Just so much positive energy. As a result of that, when I say the project kind of keeps getting bigger and bigger, is that it's something that it's, like I said, it started out as a very personal creative endeavor, but then as I've continued on and as the three years so far have rolled by, it's really prompted me to dig into so much more than me. I'm so happy I found that book.
Terri Trespicio:
We never know what will prompt a creative project or something of personal interest.
Laura Zurowski:
It's all about keeping your eyes open.
Terri Trespicio:
To me, it sounds like the role of the artist here, is something you're bringing to attention here, is not just to find something you want to do something with or about that is oh, I'm going to do this because it interests me, but how does it, in turn, serve who? In this case, serve a community, serve a city, serve the history?
Laura Zurowski:
Yeah. Exactly. It's become something where I feel like part of it has become encouraging and motivating people. Sometimes I think people look at the work that I'm doing and think, oh wow. That's so cool. I wish I could do something like that. I always say, you know what? You can. Find what you're interested in. Find what peeks your interest and something that speaks to you, and then just go out and do it. I feel so much like we live in a world now where people, I think, often are afraid to try anything new because if it's not going to be perfect, if I'm not going to have a million Instagram followers.
Terri Trespicio:
Right. There's a new standard. That can't be the goal. It can't be the goal.
Laura Zurowski:
The goal is really just hey, I'm doing this for myself.
Terri Trespicio:
In this day and age we have different metrics for what we think success is. Is it follows? Is it views? Is it media? Whatever. The other thing is, look, everyone can be creative. Everyone is wired to be, but the artist mentality is that I'm going to make something, not just make fun of something. In our culture, it's real easy to hit the comment button. Oh, everyone loves to comment. People love to comment, they love to snark, they love to criticize, but if you really care about something, you make something. I think that is something you've taught us today.
Terri Trespicio:
One question I have is, does it also matter if the project is paying your rent or your mortgage, but I have to ask, you put a lot of time into this. Is it just kind of something you do because you're passionate about it and that's that, or is this kind of your job now?
Laura Zurowski:
Well, I do have a job. I am employed at the University of Pittsburgh.
Terri Trespicio:
You had a job? You have a day job?
Laura Zurowski:
I do have regular full-time employment. I have reached the point now with Mis.Steps where I believe it's getting very close to paying for itself.
Terri Trespicio:
How?
Laura Zurowski:
I get paid for my tours. The tours are very popular. You're a tour guide. People give you tips at the end. That has actually become very lucrative. When they say, when you find a job doing something that you love, it's like you're not really working. That's exactly how I feel with this. Oh, okay. I'm going out and I'm doing all of these different things and it's just fun. Oh, I happen to make money off of it as well.
Terri Trespicio:
Right, but not in the way you'd expect it.
Laura Zurowski:
Having a full-time job, I always say, I'm a full-time artist and also a full-time employee.
Terri Trespicio:
Yes. I think it's really important, because another thing we say is oh, we need to have followers, oh we need to be critically acclaimed. The other this is this; that we think we have to make money from it or that it has to offer profit in order to be worth it. The fact it, you just said it. You said, the project is close to paying for itself. There's a difference there between oh, I pocket money and I make extra side money from doing this. That's not why you started this, but the fact that the work is starting to pay for itself because of the kind of attention, you've brought people out of their homes.
Terri Trespicio:
You know what? Yes, you should be paid for it. I'm not saying you're like, I'm rolling in a million dollars cash. The idea is work, really valuable work to a group, to a community should be self-sustaining, and it is. It is an investment, though. You made a very big investment of your time and resources, but it makes me so happy that you're making money back, but you're making it not because someone bought a picture of a step or bought a story, but they're investing in your experience. You've created an experience for people.
Laura Zurowski:
Exactly. I've created an experience for myself. The majority of everything that I have to do for this project is really enjoyable. I look forward to doing it. That's part of the whole thing. I'm also enjoying the whole process and enjoying all of the learning.
Terri Trespicio:
Yes. It's feeding you. Let me ask you this, What does it mean to you, Laura, to make it in a career? How do you know? Do you think of yourself as having made it and how will you know when you have?
Laura Zurowski:
Yes. I've been very fortunate. I have made it, because throughout my time since I graduated from college, I've always been able to work in places and with people that I thoroughly enjoy.
Terri Trespicio:
We know you didn't like all of them. This is not just luck, Laura. Laura, the reason I'm asking is because you're acting like oh, I was just real lucky. You've worked really hard to make this happen. I think you're being a little bit self deprecating here.
Laura Zurowski:
The thing I do have to say though about that computer science job was there there were a lot of things I really did like about it. I loved...
Terri Trespicio:
She an irrepressible optimist. That's why I love Laura.
Laura Zurowski:
I loved the things that I was able to create there. Didn't really like the people I had to create them for, or some people.
Terri Trespicio:
How do you define what it means to make it, because you're already knocked down, in a great way, a lot of the old ideas of what it means, so how would you define it?
Laura Zurowski:
I would say it's taking on opportunities that are interesting to you, that speak to you in some way working with them, giving them 100%, and if the time comes when they no longer speak to you that way or your work is done, then it's time to pick up and try something else. There's always something else out there to try. There are always other opportunities. There are other things that you can learn. I've gone back to school, I've taken classes; always learned new skills, new things since graduating from Emerson. Always being a lifelong learner, that's a part of the process. By learning, that opens up new ideas, new opportunities. There's this Pablo Picasso quote. I think it says something like, "If you know exactly what you're going to do, what's the point of doing it?"
Laura Zurowski:
That's something that I'm like okay, I want to have a little bit of a plan, but I don't want to know exactly what's going to come down the pike. That's part of the excitement and the experience is knowing well, what's around the corner? What can happen? What might happen to me? I have all sorts of hopes and dreams of things that I might like to see happen in the future, but some of the greatest things that have come my way are things that I did not even imagine. I had my eyes open, I had my heart open and boom; they were in front of me and I seized the day and life went off in a brand new direction.
Terri Trespicio:
You are really an inspiration, just in the way that you're continually reinventing yourself and your career and what you do and how you create meaning through art and experiencing community and how you continue to keep doing it. Laura, thank you so much for being on with us.
Laura Zurowski:
Thanks, Terri.