We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Gail Shalan. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Gail below.
Gail, thank you so much for taking the time to share your lessons learned with us and we’re sure your wisdom will help many. So, one question that comes up often and that we’re hoping you can shed some light on is keeping creativity alive over long stretches – how do you keep your creativity alive?
I like to think of my creativity as the most essential of sparks that must be protected and nurtured at all costs. It’s a living, breathing thing that can rage and roar into a glowing fire on a clear day with plenty of oxygen to fuel it, but even on the stormiest of days, it’s my duty to shield it from the elements and make sure it never goes out.
Without my creativity, I am a shell. I think of it as my spirit, my soul.
I like the ancient definition of “genius” as a “a guiding spirit that attended [a person] throughout their lives. Because this spirit was born with the person it was called a ‘genius’ (from the Latin verb gignere meaning ‘to give birth or bring forth’ – which also happens to be the root of our word ‘generate’). A person’s ‘genius’ dictated their unique personality and disposition. So if a person had an outstanding talent or ability, it was believed that this was due to their ‘genius’. From here it was a natural step for the word ‘genius’ to be used not only of the spirit that inspired a talent but also of the talent itself.” (Collins Dictionary Language Lovers Blog).
To me our unique creativity is our genius. Engaging with my creativity is when I feel most alive, most human, and most connected.
Being creative is a basic human right, and yet we live in a world that has made it difficult to nurture. I feel very lucky to have inherited a quintessentially creative view of the world from my parents and my ancestors, as well as to have been raised and educated in incredibly creative environments all my life. At some point, or maybe from the get-go, I learned that creativity was sacred to my existence and so have always pursued creative opportunities, outlets, spaces, and ideology. It took me longer to realize how privileged I was to default to a creative lifestyle and point of view, and how precious that outlook is.
Nurturing creativity is a balancing act. It requires play and rest. It requires observation and manifestation. It is also a dialogue and recently I’ve learned to be a much better listener to my creative instincts, impulses, and needs. To respect what my creativity is requesting.
Creativity is also a habit, a muscle. The more you use it, the more dexterous and available it will be. There is an opportunity to approach every moment of life creatively, to find creative inspirations and meditations everywhere we look, listen, taste, smell, and feel. When I feel disconnected from my creativity, the best thing for me to do is to slow down, make space and be consciously, deliberately available to the stimuli of the world around me and the world within me.
Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?
Most often, these days, I am telling stories behind the mic, as a narrator and voice actor across many genres.
Although relatively new to audiobook narration as a professional pursuit, I’m proud to share that my solo narration has garnered praise from several notable publications and awards over the past few years. I’ve had the privilege of narrating a wide variety of incredible titles by authors such as Joyce Carol Oates, Stephen Graham Jones, Lisa Taddeo, Laura Taylor Namey, Nina Garcia, and Elle McNicoll — to name a few.
I am also proud to be creating and devising as an actor & puppeteer on both stage & screen with several fantastic artists here in New York, and as a writer for both the screen and audio with my creative collaborator, Kaiya Jones.
I’ve always had a strong love for, and found purpose in, storytelling. I knew I wanted to be an actor at a very young age. I was raised in culturally-rich Berkshire County, Massachusetts where I was lucky to be able to work with many great theatre companies (such as Shakespeare and Company, Williamstown Theatre Festival, Berkshire Theatre Festival) and even experience my first professional role on film– in the Lisa Kors’ Award-Winning Indie Feature “Dinner and a Movie” — when I was 10.
I grew up the child of two very creative people. My mom, a professional ceramic artist and art teacher, always had plenty of art supplies around for us kids and taught us to paint, draw, make, craft, and be imaginative in everything we do. My dad, although more private about his creativity, is a talented poet, musician, and woodworker who always made time to play music with us around his busy work days. They both taught us to engage and invest in all sorts of creative endeavors.
And I’ve always been a deep lover of books. I spent more time than not reading books as a kid, listening to books-on-tape, and creating stories of my own. I’ve had a love for literature and language all my life.
My passion for storytelling propelled me to Boston, New York, Rome, London, Edinburgh, and Bristol, earning my MFA in Acting at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, and performing at renowned venues such as The Bristol Old Vic, Edinburgh Fringe, Cherry Lane, and St. Ann’s Warehouse as an actor, puppeteer, and voice actor.
In 2019, I’d recently moved back to New York and set up a home recording studio in our closet. When the pandemic hit, I was fresh out of grad school with a few major voice over credits under my belt and the VO set up ready to go. I started working full time in voice over in 2020.
When not performing, I’m out and about exploring with my partner and our very sweet and sassy puppy, Edith, listening to, dancing to, or making music, basking in the worlds of visual art, art history, poetry, myths, folklore, or simply breathing and being and cultivating space for healing and discovery.
If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
Curiosity, flexibility, and self-worth would be the three qualities I’ve found most impactful on my journey so far.
For me, accepting that we don’t know everything, we don’t control everything (or much of anything), that life changes radically all the time and so do we — but also that no matter where I am, who I am, what I’ve “achieved”, what I bring to the table, my needs are worth prioritizing in my own life– has all been essential in mitigating my fears, resistance, anxieties, trepidations, and in taking the leaps of faith necessary to cultivate the types of opportunities and relationships that I’ve sought out.
It took me longer than I’d like to honor those truths, but I think I new them long before I accepted them.
I think curiosity is really the key to unlocking the other two qualities. If you can stay curious, open, interested, engaged, in-dialogue then you can discover and re-discover the world outside you and within you.
Oh, and therapy. Therapy is great. It helps so much with all of these things.
I’m getting better at saying “no.” It’s very hard for me. Especially as someone raised female, especially as an artist– we are conditioned to say “yes” to every opportunity, every ask– to be helpful, easy, compliant, available. But I’m learning that saying “no” is not, in fact, “being difficult”. It is being clear about the resources I have available. It is being respectful to others, to myself, and to my creative genius.
Saying “no” is allowing my creative genius the space to breathe, to listen, to flow, to observe and, yes, my creative self is curious about a great many things but for as enthusiastic and genuinely engaged as it may be, also needs and deserves rest, also gets burnt out if saying “yes” to too many things.
And I don’t mean that just in regards to the creative projects I’m working on, I also mean that in regards to all stimuli– social, atmospheric, intellectual, philosophical. “No” is not just for making space to “say yes to something else” — which is a useful reminder– it is also a powerful tool for balance and calibration.
As someone who, for years, said “no” to myself before others could say “no” to me– for fear of rejection or letting others down, not being enough, and feeling unworthy– I am learning how different the kind of “no” is that I am practicing now. It’s a “no” from a place of strength, confidence, and inner-knowing. A “no” from a place of grace and honesty, rather than fear and inadequacy.
When I put it that way, I realize that my former “yes”es and “no”s were both coming from the same place. So, I guess I’m also practicing this new kind of “no” to get better at saying a new kind of “yes”.
I’m really stumbly right now, but I’ve learned that I’m worth the challenging growth, and that staying flexible and curious will help with the practice of it all, and most everything improves and gets easier with practice.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.
gailshalan.com/ - Instagram: https://www.
instagram.com/grshalan/ - Linkedin: https://www.
linkedin.com/in/gail-shalan- 89398a52/ - Twitter: https://twitter.com/
grshalan - SoundCloud: https://
soundcloud.com/user-887223752
- Other: Check out the books I’ve narrated on Libro.FM (a platform that donates to your bookstore of choice with every purchase) and get a FREE audiobook with the code CHOOSEINDIE through this link: https://bit.ly/3tUmXwA
Image Credits
Maria Kazikhanov
