We recently connected with Alina Cerminara and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Alina, thanks for sharing your insights with our community today. Part of your success, no doubt, is due to your work ethic and so we’d love if you could open up about where you got your work ethic from?
My mother. She was go-go-go all the time and never let anything stop her. She filled her day from morning to night with her five kids, partner-in-life, career, education (earning her phd), and so many extracurricular activities like traveling, skiing, and glassblowing. She was passionate about her work, and even spent her last days doing what she loved—marking papers. You’d always find my mom and I typing away on our laptops together. I miss her.
Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?
I’ve never known what I wanted to do, always just randomly going from one thing to the next. Various jobs, degrees, and locations inevitably brought me to the present: working in publishing, running my own popular lifestyle magazine, with an arts festival planning career behind me, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in theatre and creative writing and a masters in publishing under my belt, living on the beautiful islands of West Coast Canada. I couldn’t be happier.
And that’s because FOLKLIFE actually means something to me and to those who find it. It’s about slowing the folk down. We pride ourselves on taking our time with it, making sure every moment of the mag resonates, from the feel of the earthy paper, the top-quality photos and words, and the romantic content.
I started FOLKLIFE for two reasons: to inspire folks to a more intentional, more creative, more earthy way of living, and to connect people through the dark and light things we all face, because knowing we’re all going through beautifully hard things helps us to bring us out of our shame, and bring us together.
We’re in our 4th year, soon to be launching Volume 09, and it’s always a big event, that our readers spend half a year waiting for. We recommend pre-ordering now. A beautiful window into the salty wild, for only $20.99.
If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
Unfortunately, I’d say it’s the soft skills, which can be hard to learn, I’ve realized. I always felt I was ‘faking it till I made it’, but I had trust in that because I had the following qualities. I don’t know how you gain these though.
1.) Taking initiative/being a doer/being motivated/holding yourself accountable.
2.) Being a problem solver. This includes being resourceful, asking questions, finding out the answer, thinking outside of the box/creatively.
3.) Being brave/ambitious/naive. Take the leap—you probably won’t die. And even if you do, life was grand, wasn’t it?
Is there a particular challenge you are currently facing?
Human resources. I have decided that I don’t want to be a one-woman show, and that means learning how to lead/manage/hire the right people. I can easily do this on the creative side of FOLKLIFE because it’s easy to give a task and have it done, and that’s it. If it worked, keep hiring them for upcoming tasks. Therefore, leading a creative team has been easy for me and we have an awesome one. But the business end of things is the hard side. It’s the side where you can always get more/do more, or where you don’t have hardly any ROI from the work at all. Finding the right people with the right skills and the right qualities at the right point in their careers and with the right passion is key. Ahem, but how?! And then how to manage? Well, that’s what Im learning right now. And it ain’t cheap or easy, which means I keep doing a sub-par job myself.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.folklifemag.ca
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/folklifemedia/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/folklifemag
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alinacerminara/
Image Credits
Shannon Kay Deserai Brierley Saman Rezapour
