We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Nicholas D. Monteilh a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Nicholas D., thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love to hear about the things you feel your parents did right and how those things have impacted your career and life.

While a mother’s unconditional love is not a unique experience to just me, my mom was uniquely gifted in providing it and doing so in abundance. From the moment I came into existence within her, my mother treated me like a fully-grown person with a gamut of emotions who deserved respect and dignity; from the very first heartbeat, she was only ever concerned with making sure I knew that I could do anything in the world and that she would be proud of me for doing it. She set only one expectation and that was to live my life to the fullest, however I defined that, and then taught me how by doing it for herself. She was a veteran and a single mother raising a little boy 1,000 miles away from any support system, working for decades as an advocate defending abused women in the fight against domestic violence at the chagrin of her family for the small paycheck it brought, and impacting every single life she graced with her genius and perspective along the way. She thought that a real gift means giving someone a piece of yourself, and that giving to others is a gift you also give to yourself. And she loved what she loved, openly and unabashedly, trapping anyone who would listen and talking their ears off – or “until the cows come home,” as she would have put it.
She also taught me how to drink: she and I could polish off a bottle of scotch within an hour, easy, and you’d be none-the-wiser…but that’s a different story.
All of this (and so so so much more) has made me the artist and person that I am. Her example is one I strive to emulate every single day – with every piece of art I create, with every single step I take, with every breath I draw. Sadly, my mom passed away in May of this year, and I while miss her terribly and always will, I am even more grateful that I got to share in so much of her life. We were a team, partners, just a woman and her boy facing the world together, hand in hand and laughing all the while. She was my first and greatest best friend, my #1 fan, my mentor. She moved through the world with brazen bravery, a sharp wit, the wisdom of ages, and a gentle grace. She gave me her creativity, her talent, her intelligence, her humor. She didn’t just teach me “a lot”; she taught me EVERYTHING.

Nicholas D., before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I’ve been an actor and artist practically my entire life, starting when I became the lead in my kindergarten play about Christopher Columbus. I started studying the craft at an arts high school in Denver, continued doing so in Los Angeles at USC, and I have been writing, producing, editing, and directing films, plays, shorts, audiobooks, and web series throughout and ever since.

My most recent project is CookEatLive (@cookeatliveshow, www.cookeatliveshow.com), a comedic cooking show about how making really good food is simple no matter what level you’re at and how it will enrich your life and all the lives whom you serve it to. From my lesson episodes teaching the basics and fundamentals of cooking onto my recipe videos where I don’t just make a dish (like popcorn or grilled cheese sandwiches) but also an ingredient used in that dish (like chili powder or mustard), to my ICANCOOK Series that expands culinary horizons by showing exactly how much wildly-varied food can be made in the common kitchen with common tools, there is something to motivate everyone to get in the kitchen and start cooking!

Do you think there is something that non-creatives might struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can shed some light?

1. That creativity is both an unquenchable, ever-lasting, blazing fire within, and a muscle that atrophies if you don’t use it, and; 2. While an artist must be paid for their work, money has no say in the artist’s or their work’s validity. Creativity is not something that can simply be turned off – if you think creatively, there’s always something inside of you seeing the world another way it could be, whether you do anything about it or not – and at the same time, it must be used every day if it is to enrich your life and the lives of others. The fire within must be stoked lest it burns out because once it does, the journey can seem impossible. And a lot of people have a hard time with the concept that an artist deserves to be paid for their work even if the work itself never aims to make money. Modern society not only values art as just a commodity/product, but it almost always treats the artists (living, breathing human beings) like commodities, too. This leads to the POV that, if it ain’t making bank (or raking in views), it ain’t worth the time of day. “Bulls$%t,” as my mom would have said, and I agree.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

When your art takes on a life of its own, and when that life reaches out and touches someone else in ways you never expected. A work becomes its own when the artist no longer feels like they are generating the ideas but discovering them instead, as if it’s the artwork that has all the answers and we’re just there to ask the questions. But it’s when the audience develops an emotional connection to my work beyond my original intentions that I suddenly feel like a proud papa who can only take credit in the raising, but not the effects – as if my piece of art has gone off to college, graduated, and started volunteering in their community until they got voted onto city council. There is nothing better.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.ndmonteilh.com
• Instagram: @ndmonteilh; @cookeatliveshow
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CookEatLiveShow/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/cookeatlive
• Other: https://linktr.ee/ndmonteilh

Image Credits
Jayne Marin