The official third-person bio: A writer and editor for over a decade, Ariel Meadow Stallings has been published in magazines and newspapers including Modern Bride, ReadyMade Magazine, and Seattle Weekly. Her work has been featured by the New York Times, Today Show, and The Guardian. Offbeat Bride: Taffeta-Free Alternatives For Independent Brides is Ariel's first book. She lives in Seattle with her husband and a small dog.
Me rambling about my whole life story:
I am Ariel Meadow Stallings, and yes: I was born with that name. I'm mostly just a writer, but I'm also a comedy event organizer, media commentator, social media marketer, professional blogger, author, web community mobilizer, profanity spitter, wife, dog owner, only child, and 30-something middle-class white woman.
Oh so you want to know even more? Ok, ok. I was born on Bainbridge Island in Washington State. I grew up in a log cabin my hippie parents built in the forest of Bainbridge Island. My mother was a midwife, then worked at the Seattle Midwifery School. Now she runs a little eco-retreat center. My father used to be a college professor, but left the ivory tower to work for the Seattle Metro and read books out loud to his "little grr." He's also a poet.
I was a content and relatively well-adjusted child, although a bit of a prude, constantly chiding my parents for swearing. In high school I acted in lots of regional theater and was a really good kid. My teenage years are testament to the power of the swinging pendulum theory of parenting. Nothing like liberal parents to keep a teenager from smoking, drinking, or being a fun-loving slut. No: I waited until college to do all those things.
After one semester as a musical theater major at Emerson College in Boston, I ended up at the University of Washington in Seattle, studying Sociology and Communications. In 1996, I started going to raves, and decided to take a year off between my junior and senior years to move to San Francisco and commune with my destiny as a serious scenester.
I worked at a law firm during the day and enjoyed ridiculous — although I still believe very important — hedonism and bad fashion most nights. My writing career began in the haze of my most serious raver days, first with funny articles for a San Francisco feminists' zine, then as a features writer for Lotus Magazine, a Los Angeles-based music magazine.
I moved back up to Seattle in 1997 to finish my final year of college and met the love of my life on a dance floor in a dirty warehouse.
After getting my BA in 1998, I was promoted to Editor in Chief of Lotus Magazine. I obsessively documented the West Coast's rave community for about four years. You can laugh all you want, but the magazine was a total success in its niche.
After my resignation from Lotus in early 2001, I spent a summer in New York City attending the Columbia Publishing Course. Then I bounced around a bit, first back to Seattle for a year of copywriting for The Seattle Times and writing for The Seattle Weekly. Then there was the brief encounter with Los Angeles in 2002, when Dre and I moved to Venice Beach and I worked for a dotcom and ran a hula hooping website.
Andreas and I returned to Seattle in fall of 2003, and since then lots of grown-uppy stuff has happened like getting married, buying a home, the publication of my first book and trying to navigate the transition from young naive weirdo to older wiser weirdo.
These days I seem to have moved into my bobo phase, finding a balance between my 30something professional ambitions and my hippie/raver creative lifestyle. I spend three days a week as a social media-focused Marketing Manager at Microsoft. (Yes, really: Microsoft. You can call me a sell-out all you want. I don't think starving = artist.) The other four days a week I work on my projects like Offbeat Bride and the Salon of Shame.
When I'm not writing or sleeping, I'm usually visiting with friends & family, dancing, taking pictures, walking my dog, attending the very occasional hippy-raver-freakfest, or staring at the wall quietly trying to get my shit together.
