Trading Pictures for Words: Vera Brosgol Presents Her Middle Grade Debut, Return to Sender

Okay. Fun Vera Brosgol story time.

About six or seven years ago I was at an Annual American Library Association Conference. It was a pretty normal affair and, as is my wont, I attended a fair share of cocktail parties. My Friday night consisted mostly of leaping from publisher party to publisher party. There were two problems with that. 1- I had a slightly runny nose and 2 – I was talking at a very loud volume for hours at a time in heavily air conditioned spaces. By the time my Saturday dinner rolled around I was thrilled to find that I was going to be seated next to the one and only Vera Brosgol. Vera’s Leave Me Alone had already won a Caldecott and I believe that at that point I was also a fan of her magnificent graphic novel Be Prepared. I was also a bit mortified when I realized that, yes indeed, my voice was almost entirely gone. I managed to croak out some halting banter early on, but as the dinner progressed I was reduced to scribbling notes on a napkin in a desperate attempt at conversation. I was, to put it plainly, poor company, but Vera was nothing but nice about the whole thing. She gamely kept up what was, in the end, a rather slow discussion.

Fast forward to 2025 and here we are with Vera’s very first full-on middle grade novel! Return to Sender (out May 6th) has everything you want. New York apartments. Mysterious letters. Suspicious old dames. Or, as the publisher describes it:

“Be careful what you wish for…

After everything they’ve been through, Oliver and his mom finally have a place to call home. But Oliver’s fresh start feels more like a dead-end at his fancy new private school, where kids fly in on helicopters, wear the latest and most expensive sneakers, and go on luxury vacations. Oliver is only there because his mom’s the school custodian.

Oliver wishes his life could be easier. And then one day, after slipping a wish into a mysterious mail slot, it suddenly comes true. Pizza for dinner? Yes! The rarest sneakers in the world? Yes! Everything he could ever want, without spending a cent? Yes, yes, yes!

Oliver’s dreams are finally within his grasp… but what happens when he discovers that his wishes don’t come for free?”

And now, at long last, I am capable of MAINTAINING a conversation with Vera Brosgol!

Betsy Bird: Vera! Such a delight to get to discuss RETURN TO SENDER with you today. Let’s just start with the basics. Where did this book come from in the first place? What was the impetus behind it? What, in other words, is its origin story?

Vera Brosgol: Once upon a time I was a maladjusted teenager who had graduated high school at 16 and wasn’t quite ready for college. So I took a gap year and spent most of it drawing and goofing around on the internet. One of the things I did was make a webcomic called “Return to Sender”, about a young man who moved into an apartment that had a mysterious mail slot on the wall. Letters would come out giving him a small task that set off a larger chain reaction, changing reality. His friend Colette came over to help.

That’s about where the similarities end. It was much darker – I was reading a lot of Jhonen Vasquez comics back then. There were monsters and death and if the guy didn’t do what the letter said he got an endless nosebleed. The ending I came up with didn’t really work, and after a hundred pages or so I was ready for college after all. So it was abandoned, unfinished, to the dusty corners of the internet. A few people still remember it, which is nice!

I always liked the fun conceit of the mail slot to nowhere, and returned to it a few times over the years trying to figure out what this story was. It spent a little time as a screenplay, then a graphic novel, but eventually landed on what I think is its ultimate form – an illustrated middle grade novel! Finally I have it out of my system!

BB: And onto our shelves! No you’re no stranger to more realistic fiction in your graphic novels (BE PREPARED is always topmost in my mind in this regard). But this is the first time I’ve seen you write a novel that touches on that genre. What made you feel that RETURN TO SENDER was better suited as prose than comics?

Vera: The thing about comics, the obvious thing, is that you have to draw everything in them. And not everyone is good at, or enjoys, drawing everything. I love characters, nature, and organic stuff. I do NOT love fire escapes or cars. And guess what Manhattan is full of???

That is my flippant reason, but another reason is that the story is just a beast. The scope is bigger than anything I’ve done before, from the high tech private school to the complicated chain reactions to the other dimension, and cramming it into a single graphic novel would be a gargantuan task. Comics shine with simple, emotional stories, at least the ones I like to do. For something this complicated, prose felt like a better fit. And of course it still has oodles of drawings because I am who I am.

BB: Darn right. How was the switch to novel writing for you personally? Was there anything that was unexpected about the process? And would you care to try your hand at more novels in the future?

Vera: The switch was life-changing. It was a revelation to realize I could just write whatever I wanted down, and the images would magically appear inside the readers’ heads! I can just tell you what the character is feeling and you believe me?! Does everybody know about this!?

 It took me a surprising amount of time to learn to take advantage of that. My editor kept pointing out that she didn’t know what Oliver was feeling in a given scene, and I realized I was expecting at some point to draw it into his facial expression. When I make my comics I lean heavily on the art to convey feelings, and I just didn’t have that tool in my toolbox anymore, so I had to use words instead. It feels a little like cheating, but they also have to be the exact right words, so it’s not really cheating. It’s a super fun, interesting challenge with so much room to grow and improve. I am absolutely hooked and would love to do more prose in the future.

BB: Huh. And I suppose the opposite of this might be true if a novelist tried to write a comic (not describing the emotions on a face but showing it). On another note, as a former New Yorker I particularly enjoyed the first sentence of your book: “The floors were getting dirtier with each flight of stairs he climbed.” Yeah, man. NYC!! Have you ever lived in New York yourself? What are your own personal New York experiences that influenced the book?

Vera: Even though I was born in Russia and have lived in Portland for nearly 20 years, New York is where I say I’m “from”. I went to high school in Brooklyn, and moved back briefly after college.

My experiences were of cramped living quarters, giant cockroaches, hot trains, incredible art museums, and bagels that have ruined me for life. I think it’s such an interesting place – how can it not be with so many different folks all packed in like little sardines? There’s so much unobscured class structure, people living these incredibly disparate lives within inches of each other. I wanted to explore that in this story, as Oliver’s eyes open to the inequality and the craving for more-more-more that drives the city, and so much of our lives.

BB: Plus our hero, Oliver, is a bit of a cook. Do you share his cooking tendencies? Where did his recipes come from for this story?

Vera: I very much do share those tendencies! Georgian food is SO good, unique and special and delicious. There’s lots of awesome Georgian restaurants in NYC, but only one near me, so I made do with one million library books and YouTube videos. I had a very fun time making khinkali dumplings, which are kind of like giant, sturdy soup dumplings you eat with your hands and a cracking of black pepper. I heartily recommend a khinkali party.

BB: Finally, what’s next for you? What else do you have going on these days?

Vera: I wish I could say what is next! I have an idea for another novel that I hope I’ll get to do, a middle grade horror story that is probably the weirdest thing I’ve come up with so far. That’s saying something. Besides that I’m repainting my bathroom and fantasizing about summer backpacking trips. Ah, the glamorous author’s life!

That repairing the bathroom wish was a little too real for me.

Thanks so much to Vera Brosgol for answering all my questions today! In her bio you can learn that Vera was born in Moscow, Russia, in 1984 and moved to the United States when she was five. Her three graphic novels, Anya’s Ghost, Be Prepared, and Plain Jane and the Mermaid, were published by First Second. She wrote and illustrated several picture books including The Little Guys and Memory Jars, and her debut Leave Me Alone! was a 2017 Caldecott Honor Book. She’s also worked on storyboards for several animated films, including Coraline, Kubo and the Two Strings, and Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio. She lives in Portland, Oregon, with her dog Omar.

And a big thank you as well to Morgan Kane and the team at Macmillan Children’s Publishing Group for helping me put this all together. Return to Sender is out May 6th so be sure to look for it then!

Filed under: Interviews