We recently connected with Jenni Prange Boran and have shared our conversation below.

Jenni Prange, appreciate you joining us today. If you could go back in time do you wish you had started your creative career sooner or later?

I’ve wanted to be a writer since I could hold a pencil, and I am a writer today. Getting from point A to point B, however, was not a straight path. I was admittedly unfocused, trying out other forms of art here and there, muddying the writer career track waters. So, yes, I have had moments of wishing I’d been more focused earlier on, but that’s my ego doing its dirty work.

The devil on my shoulder whispers that I should be a best-selling author by now, an Academy Award-winning screenwriter, but who knows what I might have missed out on because it didn’t fit into the mold of ‘writer.’ The thing about writing is that experience is the true fuel of the craft. My first set decoration role was on Universal’s THE GRINCH, during which we built the entire town of Whoville on a sound stage. Can you imagine saying no to that opportunity? My experience in set decoration gave me the tools to build characters visually. As a commissioned painter I have the skills to see a story abstractly. My time spent singing in front of an audience gave me thick skin. You better have thick skin as a writer. All of these experiences informed my ability to excel in branding and marketing too. Like it or not, we are all consumers, and we all want to hear stories. Like any other art form, a successful brand or marketing campaign draws the audience into the story and allows them to see themselves as part of it. We all want to see ourselves as part of something. A cocktail of creativity and life experience builds that bridge.

I was good at all the things I was paid to do, good enough that I lost track of myself. My work satisfied the creative part of me long enough that, when the work went away due to being laid off, I felt lost. The upside? My mental bandwidth expanded in the absence of work and I was compelled to start my own creative track. I reconnected with myself having no clue I had lost myself in the first place.

Reconnect with your authenticity, your weirdness, your pain, your joy. Do something just because. No matter what work you’re doing to support your 3D life, find something to love about it while still nurturing your creative drive and evaluating your message. Painting, singing, writing, dancing, knitting, cooking, building, yoga, gardening…as humans we are so lucky to have so many outlets. However you express it, we all have a story to tell.

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?

Over the past three decades, I’ve been a professional screenwriter, an artist-in-residence for a theatre group in Silverton, Colorado, a commissioned painter, a set decorator, an on-location chef for a pilot shot in Italy, a back-up singer in a bluegrass band, a marketing professional and brand specialist and I run writers’ retreats twice a year.
Every step of my creative path has been a happy accident, rich with experience yet reactive. When I think ‘career’ I think of something, a track, a creative movement, that is totally mine. My creative career has only recently begun, as I’ve started thinking about what message I deeply and personally want to put out into the world. What can I offer that comes deeply from within me?

In 2007, my stepfather who was diagnosed with an extremely aggressive cancer at just 50 years of age, imparted his message to me: “If only I had known how funny life really is.” He was a very serious man, hard on himself and dissatisfied with his own creative journey. The message hit me hard. I held it close. I believed it was just for me. I kept it to myself for seventeen years. And I didn’t heed it very well, finding myself swept up in the everyday autopilot of raising a kid, working a job, obsessing over my credit score, grocery shopping, laundry and taxes.
In March of 2024 I was comfortably and successfully plugging away at a well-paying job in Creative Marketing and Brand Strategy when I was laid off very suddenly, no severance, no prospects in sight. I was now, on paper, at rock bottom emotionally and financially.

In between applying for role after role, I walked to the beach every day in an attempt at maintaining sanity. I’d never faced so much rejection. I was qualified for all of these roles. I was over-qualified for some. How could this be happening? I suspected the Universe was trying to tell me something.

It was August 2nd when it felt like I was hit over the head. I was pouring my coffee, preparing to dive back into the unholy soul suck that is LinkedIn when, for no obvious reason, I started laughing. You know, in the cartoons, when a light bulb appears over someone’s head? That.

Wait a minute, you like writing. Wasn’t that what you wanted to do? Like, your OWN writing. You’ve got all these stories, things that have actually happened to you. Things that you never thought about putting to paper because there didn’t seem to be a reason to. No one was asking you to. No one was paying you to.
Well, I thought, no one’s asking me or paying me to do anything presently.
Suddenly there didn’t seem to be a reason not to write them. As I wrote, a common theme arose in the storytelling: Life is really funny. Even while things are terrifying. Just as my stepdad had told me so many years ago. The message had gotten lost in the back of the junk drawer of 3D life.

Today, I’m polishing a collection of essays placed in an interactive journal designed to get people noticing with a new slant at the world around them. I want to shake people awake and let them know it’s never too late to rub the sleep out of their eyes and really look around. I see a lot of people operating in a state of reaction the way I have been. It’s a survival mode, and while it works, there’s often a missed opportunity for magic. My mission is to steer those lost in day-to-day living to a parallel path. You don’t have to give up the things we have to do to support ourselves to also support our creative sides, to feed our souls. The brand I’m building is intended to help folks find moments of joy in what might seem like drudgery. I’m at the very beginning of this creative career and I’m so excited to be focusing on something I myself am bringing to life, a place where the magic and playfulness of living is sacred, even in the bleakest moments.

What am I most proud of? My best friend, who knows me better and has known me longer than anyone, described me as resilient in response to my telling her I had joined the army of the laid-off. That was not a word I would have thought of for myself, and it immediately shifted my self-imposed perception that I had to WAIT for someone to ask me to be productive. I would say that moment was the beginning of my true creative career and I will never forget the way it made me feel. Like tables had turned.

What sets me apart is my authentic, undying and unwavering belief in the total magic and beauty of life. Even after the personal trials and global tribulations of last year, even in the face of a series of family emergencies and financial stress. It’s there. There is an entire chapter in my book dedicated to a pile of trash I saw in an alleyway in Los Angeles at sunset in the late nineties and how I almost cried (okay, I probably cried), the light was hitting it just right. The secret is to find one tiny awestruck moment like this, every day, even in garbage. Looking for it becomes habit. Finding it becomes fuel for something between joy and peace and love.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

I want each person on this planet to know what it feels like to be amazed simply by their own existence. AND THEN, I want each person to express in whatever way works best for them what that existence encompasses. That way we get this big swirling salad of creative energy fueling the earth. As I create this tool, this journal of encouragement, I’m operating under the unwavering belief that writing just a few sentences a day can get that sense of the awe of living jumpstarted. Just taking a moment each day to look up, rub your eyes and marvel at the fact that there’s air to breathe and that the Sun is physical and that trees just grow and don’t judge themselves — that kind of thing, just a simple thing, that’s a start.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

The most rewarding aspect of living in true creativity is the permission it gives one to be vulnerable, and in that vulnerability giving the person experiencing your art to be vulnerable too. Whether it be an audience of one or a stadium filled with people all singing along to the same song, sharing laughter at a joke or tears in the face of a tragedy. It’s that unspoken connection through shared vulnerability that is art itself.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.clippings.me/jenniprangeboran
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jenniprangeboranartpage/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenniprange/

Image Credits

Photos by me