Life was cold in the little Maine village Samara was born in. School was often cancelled, not because of snow, but because it was just too cold to go outside. She sought solace in the pages of National Geographic magazines. They let her explore the world and experience cultures so distant from hers. From these pages sparked an idea. She would grow up to be a world traveling writer and photographer!
Time passed and Samara grew up. Family drama brought her to a new state. Loss and heartache matured her faster than she wanted. Soon, she was heading to college to pursue her childhood dream. She studied hard, worked four jobs at a time, took course after course on photography and media ethics, and wrote more essays and articles than she ever thought possible. She made it all the way through to senior year before she realized a horrible truth: journalism sucks.
Don’t get it wrong, journalism is important, but it’s also not very affective. Her senior thesis forced her to research how people actually consume news and what she found left her devastated. Turns out, most people don’t consume news. At all. They read the headline and maybe the first few sentences at best, but they almost NEVER make it to the bottom. How much important information are they missing? How do people know what’s going on in the world? In their own communities? HOW DO PEOPLE KNOW WHO TO VOTE FOR?
Explains a lot, right?
Anyway, it was not something she wanted to realize after four years of accumulating debt in the amount of a modest countryside condo. So, now what? She graduated, moved in with her adorable college boyfriend, became a freelance writer for local print newspapers, and paid the bills with bartending, waitressing, and nanny jobs. She wasn’t fulfilled. She knew why, but she didn’t know how to make it right.
Searching her mind for the answer, she went back to those days of bundling up by the fireplace with a National Geographic. That memory only made her sad so she went further back to a time before the magazines, before the notion of journalism or any specific kind of writing. Do you know what she found?
Stories.
She found notebooks filled with cheesy characters going on crazy adventures with fluffy animals that could talk, finding buried treasure on tropical islands, and saving all the starving children in the world with one snap of a magical finger. She wrote STORIES. Stories with crazy little illustrations to match. She drew and wrote, drew and wrote and she loved it.
She loved it.
So, she started doing it again. She tossed all her technical journalism writing out the window and she wrote the dumbest story ever written by an educated twenty-something and made even dumber paintings to match and no, you may not read them or see them. But, something cool started to happen. The stories got better and so did the drawings. She started to learn things about herself she had never realized before and she started to care less and less what people thought of her or her work. She was happy and other opinions didn’t have a place in her world anymore.
Every decision she made from that point on was designed to help bring her deeper and deeper into this new reality. The result? She packed up her boyfriend, two cats, and all her work, and moved to Los Angeles. The creative city has helped her writing grow stronger and her art grow weirder (that’s a good thing).
Now, she’s ready to show off her work and maybe even convince you to buy some because LA isn’t cheap…seriously. Buy something. Please.
🙂
P.S. she married the boyfriend because of said adorableness.