We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Dana Shavin. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Dana below.

Alright, Dana thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to hear about when you first realized that you wanted to pursue a creative path professionally.

I had always “played around” with art because my mother was very creative–an interior designer and an amateur art teacher. Likewise, I began keeping a journal at age twelve, thanks to my older sister, who encouraged me to write everything down. I graduated from high school (Atlanta) just a few months after my 17th birthday, and I was eager to get away from home. I hadn’t gotten any guidance from my high school counselors or my parents when it came to selecting a college or a major, although I had excelled at English and writing and expressed an interest in pursuing writing. I chose a college randomly out of the Big Book of Colleges–it turned out to be Bard College–and was accepted for early admission. At the time, they didn’t have a creative writing major, so I majored in psychology, which I loved. I continued to dabble in writing throughout college, and all through graduate school (MS in Psychology). When I landed my first post-grad job in the tiny north Georgia town of Lafayette, I was profoundly affected by the mountainous landscape and the rural countryside, which was completely unfamiliar to me. I started writing about the road I traveled between the two mental health centers I worked at, called Highway 27, which I always believed I would turn into a book. What I didn’t see coming was that I would get so burned out on my job as a therapist in the community mental health system that I would leave my job–and my entire career–about ten years later. I was already writing (for free) for small local arts and entertainment newspapers, but a chance meeting with an artist who was making his living on the art fair circuit brought me around full circle to how much I’d loved art as a child. I was elated to see, through him, a way forward, out of work I no longer loved (counseling), and into work I had always loved (art) but had never thought could be viable. I immediately threw myself into pottery making and painting, joined the art fair circuit, and by some fabulous twist of fate-luck, got hired by my local newspaper as a monthly columnist. I have been a columnist ever since–22 years now!

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I am a bifurcated creative: I split my time between art and writing, with a little more weight in the writing camp. I got into art by chance. My husband (Daryl Thetford) and I were both severely burned out in our mental health careers, and I had begun to have panic attacks at work–in the middle of therapy and testing sessions with clients! I knew my heart and mind were sending me clear signals that I needed to change course, but I didn’t have a clue how I might make enough money were I to only write full time. One day we met an artist who had been making a living on the art festival circuit, and he and his wife sat us down and ran the numbers with us. I was interested in pottery and they explained everything that was involved in doing shows including how to jury in, how much inventory I needed to have, what kind of tent I needed, etc. From pottery I leapt into making floorcloths, and then painting, eventually making enough at shows to support myself and my husband while he made the transition from mental health work to art.

Meanwhile, I was also writing. Immediately after quitting my mental health job I snagged a gig as a monthly columnist for my local newspaper, which I have been doing now for 22 years, and which I count among my most cherished accomplishments (my father was also a columnist, among other things). I have received several awards for my columns, which, it turns out are humor columns, something I did not set out to make them! I recently published a collection of those columns, called Finding the World: Thoughts on Life, Love, Home and Dogs.

I have always written nonfiction–mainly memoirist essays–and I started submitting these to literary journals at the same time I started to do pottery. I had a modest amount of publication success but there were SO MANY rejections along the way. A few of my proudest moments as a writer: when after two or more years of submitting I got an essay accepted to The Sun; when, after 5 years of submitting, I got an essay accepted to Oxford American magazine, and when I got a writing grant. I am very proud of my essay about my diabetic dog, Theo, that appeared in Garden and Gun two years ago, my article in Psychology Today about envy between creative partners, and my blended research/essay pieces for the PBS outlet Next Avenue. I am most proud however of my first book, The Body Tourist, which grew out of my writing about Highway 27 and my first job out of graduate school. It’s the story of my difficult and protracted recovery from anorexia nervosa during the time I was studying to be a therapist. Central to the book/story are five houses I lived in during this time, all of which were in various states of disrepair, which I only realized, in the writing of the book, were a metaphor for my body, which was also in a state of disrepair.

While I don’t paint very much these days, I have been building table-top sized houses out of salvaged wood. The inspiration for these is the houses I wrote about in my book, because although I wrote extensively about them, digging deep into their metaphorical significance to my body and my recovery, I don’t feel I’m “finished” exploring them. It has been an interesting project because I know nothing about working with power tools or wood! I’ve gotten a few pointers so I don’t saw an arm off, but I feel like the inherent flaws in the finished pieces speak to the state of my body and mind at the time I lived in those houses. I also feel the use of salvaged wood speaks to the period of time in which I was attempting to salvage what was left of my body.

I have always felt that being split creatively between art and writing is my greatest strength as well as my Achilles heel! It has allowed me to pursue so many creative avenues, each of which, I feel enriches the others, but I have also wondered along the way what I might have accomplished had I kept my creative focus to ONE medium.

To sum up what I do now: I build small houses out of wood, and am currently researching exhibit opportunities. And I am a freelance writer, writing blended research/personal essay articles for a variety of outlets. I also from time to time teach a publishing class I designed, and continue to submit my more literary (ie non-research) essays to literary journals.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

I’m not sure this illustrates my resilience or just the need for resilience, but the writing of a book is a long, hard, journey no matter who you are or what your circumstances, and the number of rejections along the way is staggering. I wrote The Body Tourist over the course of about 10-12 years, which included countless revisions and rewrites. I worked with two mentors, and fed the entire book to my writers group page by page, painstakingly going through all their thoughts and suggestions for revision. The process of then seeking an agent or publisher is gutting, as each one has a different format they want you to use, and all formats require a huge amount of writing and summarizing of your project, and most of the time the answer is No, because the number of writers agents sign is minuscule, and determined by factors often writers can’t possibly know about or foresee. And you, the writer, then have to NOT crawl into a deep hole and die, or want to die, or feel like you have died, which is perhaps the hardest part of writing a book: the selling (or as the case may be, NOT selling) of it.

I came to the process of seeking publication for my book after years of submitting to literary journals and commercial magazines, so I was no stranger to rejection. Everything you read tells you not to take rejection personally, but the problem is that, as a writer (or any kind of creative, really) sometimes the problem really is YOU, not you as a human being of course, but you as a sellable commodity. You have to be able to distinguish between being rejected because the agent or magazine simply can’t use what you wrote right now, and being rejected because your submission is flawed in some way. In the first scenario, say, the magazine decides to publish a whole issue dedicated to the theme of horses, and you, who couldn’t possibly have known this, sent something about cats. In the second scenario, they made known the horses theme, and you did indeed send in an essay about horses, but it just didn’t hit the mark because you didn’t nail the ending.

In summary, being a writer means you either learn to deal with rejection or you die a small death every time you get a No. One year I decided to tempt rejection fate by submitting 100 pitches in a year. I distinctly remember I was on the verge of not meeting my quota for the week, so I cavalierly sent my essay, “This Strange Ballet,” to Garden and Gun, knowing it would be rejected but needing to send to one more place for the week. Three months later, it was accepted. The lesson in this story is, however you build resilience, and there are lots of ways to do it, build it, because as a creative, it’s required in order to survive emotionally.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

If I have a particular goal or mission driving my journey, it’s simply to be true to my own artistic urges and creative energy. I mentioned earlier that I am a split creative, that I divide my energy and time between art and writing, and that I sometimes feel this is like robbing Peter to pay Paul. But when I think about stopping one completely to focus on the other, my heart shuts down. It feels like I would be killing off one healthy, thriving part of myself in favor of only growing the other, and I just can’t do it.

When I left my mental health job/career in 1993-ish (I was about 32) to pursue art and writing full time, it was because it was important to me to honor the path my heart and mind pined for. My father had died young, at 61 (I was 26 when he died), and it impressed upon me that we never know how long we have. I developed a kind of “if not now, when?” mentality because of his death, because he was in the middle of living, pursuing his own creative projects, and so I saw firsthand the importance of not waiting to do what you believe you are called to do, or what you believe you will love, and that will feed you emotionally, spiritually, mindfully.

Contact Info:

• Website: http://www.danashavin.com and http://www.danashavinartist.com
• Instagram: @danashavin
• Facebook: Dana Shavin Writes
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dana-lise-shavin-1b7b3a18

Image Credits
Daryl Thetford