We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Stacey Elise Haught a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Stacey Elise, appreciate you joining us today. Can you open up about a risk you’ve taken – what it was like taking that risk, why you took the risk and how it turned out?

For fourteen years I was dedicated to one career. I spent my entire life pouring everything I was into this career, and I loved it with everything I had. My career as an Acting Instructor and Coach was my identity, and regardless of what life threw at me, I knew that I had a home in my theatre, and that studio was protection. A safeguard. It was a place I grew up, where I learned what it meant to tell stories and how to be. Well. Me. I wouldn’t know exactly how important that would be. Those lessons I learned while teaching students the crafts of the stage and silver screen until my husband fell twelve feet from an extension ladder shattering his heel, the same week of his surgery his boss informed him of the need to find a new job. I was a wife, mother, and career-woman who now had to be a nurse, mother, wife, and the glue that held the family together while we moved across the state for my husband’s new job, which resulted in me retiring from my fourteen-year career. For three years I tossed around my choices of what would be next. But it wasn’t until when the entire world was closed up inside their homes that I decided to take the biggest risk of my life. When I started facing my trauma, and pain and telling my story through fiction stories. I penned my first novel in the spring of twenty-twenty and by the winter I had my first written offer to purchase my third manuscript. You see I had to lose it all, and ultimately face rejection time and time again, then risk more in order to finally tell the stories I was born 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?

Hi! My name is Stacey Elise Haught, or known most recently as Stacey E. Haught. I am a fiction author, who just in the last year released my debut novel “Good Hope.” I spoke a little bit earlier about how I got to writing from the entertainment industry. But my storytelling craft didn’t begin in the theatre. I was born into a family of storytellers. Born into a family rich in storytellers, my Grandfather became one of the first National Geographic Film-vloggers to film tour guides for Germany and Norway, and my father raised me at the feet of some of the circus’s most famous performers, traveling America while experiencing a unique childhood has genuinely impacted how I got to be an Author. Primarily my upbringing taught me two valuable lessons the first is that you’re nothing without community, and second good things, are worth the hard work. I credit that mindset to how I got into publishing my first novel “Good Hope” in the first year of writing, working through rejection was worth it when you’ve been rejected countless times in auditions in theatre, and film! But it was that you can’t do any of this without people. It’s because of people. People who read my writing, believe in my talent, and want to read more that I’ve just recently signed with eGlobal Publishing to become a signed serial romance author under the pen name “Anastasia O’Hare” Where I just released my first eRomance novel “Blind Date With an Underboss” That can be found on most eReader platforms, and the amazing team from eGlobal is working with me to publish all of my currently completed manuscripts. The first of which “Power” will be released under my fiction pen name Stacey E. Haught soon!

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

I set out to start writing as a way to process the trauma I was experiencing during the COVID-19 lockdown, facing so much anxiety with no outlet I had an opportunity to sort through the pain, and unresolved issues. They just happened to present themselves as fictional stories. Now I continue to write to provide people with an escape. Because I too need to escape through reading. That few hours or minutes a day we can hide away and nose dive into a book is important, and I want to help people find themselves in these stories. I want them to see representation that they don’t normally see. My main goal is to write authentic characters that feel pliable, that you feel connected to, that you feel like you can touch them, you want to have coffee with them. I want you to feel like they are you, and that you feel fulfilled when you’re done reading. That’s why I continue to write.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

When someone sees what I write. Not in the physical form. But the little bits I add to the story. When they connect to it, and they write me or they see me in person and they tell me why they hate the antagonist, or why the protagonist made them cry. It means more to me than any contract or completing any word count for the day. It’s that connection that they get it, and they see me.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://authorstaceyehaught.weebly.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/stacey.e.haught/
• Other: Pen Name: IG @ https://www.instagram.com/anastasia.o.hare/ Pen Name Website https://philipandstaceyhau.wixsite.com/my-site-3