We were lucky to catch up with Katie Mack recently and have shared our conversation below.

Katie, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Are you happier as a creative? Do you sometimes think about what it would be like to just have a regular job? Can you talk to us about how you think through these emotions?

I love this question. All of my life I kept thinking “well if this whole artist thing doesn’t work out, I’ll get a regular job and then it will be easy”. Come to find out, all of this whole life stuff and identity stuff and making a living stuff, it’s all hard. I decided to choose my hard. Was my hard juggling projects all at once, or sitting in a windowless office all day? Was my hard going to be writing and rewriting or revising budgets? I chose my hard, and in the choosing, I chose my happiness. Suddenly, seventeen years later after chipping away THIS IS my regular job. This is my regular way of working. I wished I had a “regular” job and now, it looks like I have it. I’m so lucky.

These days my regular job is pulling together a lifetime of creative theories. I am an actor and writer by trade and now working on a solo performance show called #UglyCry: grief hits different, produced by off the WALL productions. This show asks the audience to use their phones to give them an immersive and interactive live theatrical experience unlike anything else. Think “Year of Magical Thinking, a play” by Joan Didion meets Netflix’s “Inside” by Bo Burnham.

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?

They keep saying that if you don’t see the work in the world that you wish to see, you have to give it a shot. My resistance to making my own work came out of the assumption that I just hadn’t found that work yet. That I needed to keep searching. I’ve been searching for ten years and while I’ve been a part of many beautiful and exciting things, it’s true, I hadn’t found the work that quite fits exactly what I wanted to work on. I desperately wanted to be chosen, but my impatience won and my curiosity led me to lean into creating my own things with my own people.

After about five years of making small projects and plays, I finally wrote & produced “f*cking sober: the first 90 days”,, a serialized narrative podcast about the first 90 days of getting sober, which now has two seasons out. I was lucky enough to gain recognition with a 2021 Webby Award for Best Writing for a podcast when the show had less than 40k listens. The most exciting aspect of this was that it was my first big push into creating the work I wanted to see in the world. This work continues to beget work and now in the throngs of working on #uglycry: grief hits different now, set for a Pittsburgh and Off Broadway run, I am finally bringing together my philosophical theories that technology has helped shape our identity, specifically through the lens of grief and grieving. I keep hoping that someone will intersect live theater and our phone with emphasis on storytelling but I’m impatient, so I guess I will give it a shot.

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

Lessons I had to unlearn:

1) Only certain people have stories to tell
(Everyone, literally every single person, has a story to tell right now. Even you.)

2) Everyone know what they are doing except me because of xyz
(No, no one knows what they are doing. They simply don’t.)

3) Failing means I should move on
(Failing is part of becoming a creative. You have to fail. Big ways and small but you will not be immune to failing no matter what you do. The important thing is how you recover from it.)

4) There is a cookie cuter way to make things
(Every single project is different.)

5) Beating myself up and struggling will make the best creative work.
(No, joy is the best way to make work. That doesn’t mean it won’t be hard. If you are being mean to yourself you are not being your higher self, and you need your higher self to do your best work in all endeavors.)

Are there any resources you wish you knew about earlier in your creative journey?

You are your best and biggest resource. Find out what you are good at and find out what you are not so good at and then lean in. You have compiled a life of meeting people who care about you, so lean into the resources you know you have. We are in a time where we are able to stay connected to ideas and people in a way we have never been before. Lean in! People want to hear from you, people want to help you, and people want your creative project in the world. The more I can learn and know myself, the better shot I have at staying on whatever weirdo path has been forged for me.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.mackstage.com
• Instagram: @mackersnyc

Image Credits
Matthew Scott Photography – NYC Siri Darmendra Photography – Sint Maarten