Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Shelly Snow Pordea. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Alright, Shelly thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Can you talk to us about a project that’s meant a lot to you?

The most meaningful project I’ve worked on is actually my current work. I have a few projects in progress, but they all have the same theme. I was raised in a religious cult and it took me many years to pull at the strings that unravelled the theme of my own story.

My first publishing experience was writing my time-travel novels. I love escaping into fantasy and fiction, and I’ve always known there’s deep, resonant meaning in any creative writing. But when you can paint word pictures in metaphors that dance with the rawness of real life, that’s extremely exciting to me. So instead of focusing on my imaginary friends and worlds, I’m currently weaving a tapestry of fictionalized stories based on real-life events.

One story is for my next novel, and another is in collaboration with my brother, who’s an actor/writer/producer himself, That one will be a fictionalized drama series based on our experiences being raised in a cult, as well as the stories of so many we grew up with. I feel like there’s such deep meaning behind telling these stories, and I’m so honored to be part of sharing them with the world.

Shelly, 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 think I’ve always written stories and poems since the time I was young, but I really started writing seriously when my dad suddenly passed away and I was living overseas. I needed an emotional outlet, and writing fiction seemed like a good place to emote, and at the same time hide from reality. It served its purpose at the time…I probably got four to six chapters written, but life got busier, and I let it sit in my computer files for a few years. It wasn’t until I moved back to the States and was at a job where I would come home crying at least twice a week, that I picked up the story and started writing again.

I worked probably 50-60 hours a week half the time, but I’d steal away moments, and spend all my weekend time with classical music in my earbuds, telling my family to just let me write. I think I finished the rough draft in less than three months, and I bought an online course to help me. I was forty-one at the time, and I think I started to realize just how fast time was starting to slip through my fingers.

So, I invested all the money I could afford to at the time, and basically learned how to be an author. I continued to work full time for a little more than a year even after I self-published my first novel, but by that time, I had gotten a taste for it, and I knew creating compelling stories is what I want to do forever.

I now have a full trilogy, a children’s book with three additional bilingual versions, and a published journal with a companion course that prompts people to expand their creative mindset. In total, you can find eight books authored by yours truly, and I feel like I’m just getting started!

But people don’t just make a full-time living right away by selling their self-published novels. So, I also coach other authors with the self-publishing process, trying to share the information I’ve acquired over the past six years at a fraction of the cost I’ve paid. I have ghostwritten on many projects, and written technical articles for websites, all to stay within a field I really love.

I hold writing workshops and have a few other things in the works that I’m super excited to launch in 2023!

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?

This is something I think about often. I think creative and non-creative labels are just a fallacy. In fact, when I realized I needed to register a business a year or so after becoming a writer full-time, I called my company The Creativ U, (the creative you, spelled out as a website was super expensive, so I got kitschy) because as a new entrepreneur I was often treated as if I was not the “type” to make my business work, being in the creative arts. And I wanted my clients to understand my writing or coaching services were not about me, but about them and the creative gift they bring to the world.

I feel like we’re all creative, we just apply it in different areas. In fact. Brene Brown has entire books dedicated to helping society understand that we cannot relegate creativity to the past of our childhood or to the artistic type. We need it for innovation, ingenuity, and invention. I am as naturally organized, and routine-loving, as I am creative, so for me it may have been easier than for an artist who finds it hard to keep on schedule, but I would posit that even that is a product of black-and-white thinking. Something society has taught us.

Perhaps if I wasn’t raised in a very strict cult where all I did was comply for the first thirty years of my life, I’d have been the kid in the back of the room who wasn’t expected to stay on task. The one they told stories of failure and demise of the typical starving artist. I can’t know for sure. But I think whether you thing you’re in a creative field or not facing your life, your tasks, and even your relationships with creative curiosity is a refreshingly healthy way to live.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

Because I have become public and vocal about my journey after being raised in what I consider a religious cult, some people accuse me of having a vindictive agenda. And I think that’s the hardest thing about the work I’m currently doing. I know so many good people who are in the churches I grew up in. They promote ideologies I find harmful, but I’m not gunning for them.

My mission is to spread awareness about a clear and present threat to human liberation. To help people find their own real freedom from coercive control. It’s not about one person or even a group of people. It’s about protecting the young children who internalize messaging in a way we can’t really fathom as adults if we don’t do a lot of self-examination and listening.

So, my goal is to paint a clear picture that there is choice. Beautiful, colorful, messy choices out in the big, wide world. And it’s time to stop creating environments where the message to children is that their only choice is obedience and submission. It’s not an atypical story, unfortunately, but ours was not the only cult where child sexual abuse ran rampant, And the perpetrators were covered.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.thecreativu.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/shellysnowpordea/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/shellysnowpordea
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shelly-snow-pordea-427b22158/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjRhXT2SIcQHI3E6w7yfaBQ