We were lucky to catch up with Alison Stolpa recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Alison, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to hear about when you first realized that you wanted to pursue a creative path professionally.

When I was an undergraduate, I worked at my college radio station, which was the most exciting, fulfilling, and fun thing imaginable to me. I decided I was going to work in the arts, rather than being an artist myself. Once the opportunity to move to LA came up, though, I started to feel like maybe this was a sign I should revisit my old dream of being an actor.

Of course, once you first move to LA, you end up working like three jobs plus following your creative pursuits and you’re basically always tired and broke. I remember leaving the holiday party for my record store job early, super bummed that I wouldn’t be able to keep having fun with all these friends and people who really “got” me, because I had to get up early the next morning for my main job. So the next morning I got up at like 5 am to drive to Beverly Hills and let a TV crew into the home of an author who was repped by my other job. On one hand, I felt like this was a decently cool thing to sacrifice sleep for…on the other, I started thinking, “Why am I spending my life promoting other people’s dreams when I could just be pursuing my own?” This thought kept floating into my head until eventually I had to take it seriously.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

By day, I am a content manager and copywriter. My strengths are creating specific tones of voice and memorable catchphrases. I completely fell into this line of work…mostly from reading a ton of books and writing obsessively. What I’m most proud of here is my ability to create cohesive tones throughout my work, while easily moving between personalities. I write professional, reliable, friendly. I write cheeky, cool, witty.

Creatively, I’m an actor, writer, and musician. Right now I’m in a band called Phantom Sister that has a desert post-punk vibe: it’s the sort of thing a David Lynch character would pause the dial on while flipping through radio channels on a lonesome midnight road to nowhere, having just had the most intense identity crisis/supernatural occurrence imaginable. At least, I like to think of it that way. Our influences as a band are post-punk, spaghetti western, and classic goth.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

The biggest lesson I’ve had to learn in the past few years is to ask for help. As a teen and young adult, I was very self-sufficient and independent, very “I’ll do it myself.” What I thought was strength, however, was really insecurity.

I’d felt like I could only rely on myself, that asking for help revealed weakness that could be used against me, for so long. What I had to learn is that friendship and community are integral to the human experience. People want to help just because they care, and barring them from opportunities to show up for you does them a disservice and keeps our worlds small and miserly.

This all flashed into my mind when I was super depressed during the isolation of the pandemic lockdowns but I was still too “I can do it myself!!!” (said in the tiniest, faintest, disappearing voice) to carry through, even though my mental health was deeply, deeply not great. It started to dawn on me gradually as I started rebuilding life post-pandemic and finally ingrained itself into my being after I experienced a lot of loss at the beginning of this year and then was overcome with awe, love, and appreciation for all the people around me who reached out. I had always assumed grief was something you went through on your own but now I know that’s not true and I’m so deeply grateful for the people who have been there for me.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

I always felt like art saved my life — a movie that made you feel like there was a life out there to be lived, a song that made you feel like someone else knew just what you were going through, a book that made you recognize yourself. This is the biggest theme underlying all my creative work: I want people to know they are not alone.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: instagram.com/phantom_sister
• Other: I will have a Bandcamp link to our forthcoming EP sometime next month (April)

Image Credits
Photos of just me: Paula Crichton Photos of band: Christopher Pedraza