My first introduction to today’s Creative Mix guest was when she played the role of the ambitious, neurotic-but-endearing Taylor Townsend on The OC. I loved that show, and Autumn Reeser‘s Taylor always cracked me up. Maybe if I would stop watching old episodes of Felicity I could finally finish Entourage, where Autumn’s Lizzie Grant went up against Ari Gold. Good stuff, I’m sure!
Fast forward to last year, when I “met” Autumn through the interwebs. She was going to Girl Crush Portland and I had been to Girl Crush Seattle and we chatted a bit about that, as well as MoveLifeStyle, Autumn’s awesome lifestyle website that she runs with two of her girlfriends, Ashley Fauset and Jenn Wong.
Let’s get to know more about her Creative Mix!
What is your Creative Mix? Tell us about all the creative things you do.
I’ve been in the theater since age 7, and have made my living as an actor for over a decade so that’s the foundation on which I’ve built my life, but I’ve always had multiple creative ways to express myself. My parents always encouraged my sister and me to express ourselves creatively (thanks, Mom + Dad!) and to follow our bliss, and I cannot remember a time where I wasn’t creating something visual. I grew up painting and even had an art scholarship but my instinct was that I would never be very successful at it, so I chose to focus my attention on pursuing an acting career instead, another art I loved.
Over my life, I’ve studied drawing, painting, photography and I used to be an obsessive scrapbooker. I’ve always photographed my life intensively, but cataloging/printing/making pretty layouts was extremely time consuming, so now I have a strong edit with my photos and I make one Blurb book a year (instead of an enormous scrapbook). I also grew up learning how to edit videos from my father, who ran a community television station in my hometown, so I love to cut together little movies of my family and share them at the holidays (also very time consuming, but very rewarding).
As I get older I feel a strong pull to create handmade visual art again, but I’m a very messy artist and do best in a studio where I can create with abandon. Earlier this year I took stock of my life and found such a deep desire to paint again, so happily, I’m planning ahead to make that into a reality within the next five years. In the meantime, I’ve also co-founded a lifestyle website for working women, MoveLifeStyle, where I can use all my visual talent for creating digital layouts, which doesn’t get my hands messy at all. :)
One of the things I want to talk about in this series is the dark side of “glamorous” jobs. Tell us what it’s really like to be an actress — the awesome and the awful.
I’d say one of the most difficult things is the inability to create a ‘traditional’ life when everything around us runs on a traditional schedule. People in most jobs can plan ahead for a vacation with their family, but I can’t tell you how many trips/weddings/birthdays I’ve missed out on because of last minute jobs. In the acting world, career is king and people drop everything when an opportunity arises. Unfortunately, as you grow, you realize what a flaky friend that makes you, even if you have the best of intentions and are not by nature ‘flaky’, the reality of being friends with someone in this industry is you can never never count on them. It’s something I’m starting to dislike very much now that I’m a mother and I want to be able to make promises to my son and keep them.
Also, my job consists primarily of waiting. If I’m on set, I’m waiting for everything to be set up before I can do my part of the work; if I’ve just finished one job, I’m waiting for an audition or offer for another one. There is very little consistency and it becomes especially difficult as you try to build a life and support a family because you never have any idea how much income you’ll have from year to year or even where you’ll be living. There’s no planning course that prepares you for it and most of the financial advice out there is based on people who make a steady amount monthly. I may make all my money for the year over the space of 2 months and then see nothing for the next 10 months. In a way it keeps you sort of perpetually adolescent because you’re rarely truly dealing with the life rhythms that most adults can count on.
You’re the Editor-in-Chief of the online magazine MoveLifeStyle. How long have you been writing, how did this project start and what are your goals for it?
I love the online community of women that has formed, and am so inspired by the number of women putting their voices out there, without needing to wait for someone’s permission to tell them their stories were valuable, as had been the case with traditional media in the past. I have so many inspiring friends who are bloggers, so I knew a bit of how much work it takes to truly be able to turn a blog into a success. Because of their examples, I was able to sense almost immediately that with a demanding acting career and a small son at home, I wouldn’t be able to dedicate the time it would take to create a blog by myself with the kind of reach I hoped to have. Instead, I partnered with two girlfriends and took the blog in a lifestyle-meets-working girl direction instead.
Growing up I always knew I wanted to move to Los Angeles and pursue a career in the arts but I found it hard to find editorial examples of what that really looked like, and so that’s the gap we’re filling — what life is really like for a ‘Girl on the Go’. There are a lot of websites and magazines out there that cover women-in-business, so we’re focusing on the lifestyle side of working women (style, design, products, entertaining), and interviewing women who inspire us in our Girl Friday column. We’ve partnered with some amazing photographers (Woodnote Photography, The Hendershotts, Janis Nicolay) to shoot behind the scenes portraits of working women and their work-life “Creative Mix”! I would love to see Move LifeStyle grow into a larger editorial voice, possibly even a magazine in print.
Our focus is work-life balance, so I’m committed to honoring that value behind the scenes at our company, too, and that means we follow the idea of ‘slow growth promotes deep roots.’ We’re not staying up until 2am, abandoning our family, sleep and sanity to make everything happen NOW. I want it to be fun, I want it to grow organically, and I want our voice to develop authentically. We were just featured in Forbes, so I’m pretty happy with our rate of growth, but we could definitely use a few more hands to help us expand – I’d love to bring on some interns this year!
You have a lot of things going on in your life. How do you stay focused and make sure you’re working on things that are really important to you?
For most of my life acting has been priority number one because its how I make my living and support everything else in my life. That meant I had to always be willing to drop everything in order to fly off to Vancouver or Toronto or New Orleans to work, and I absolutely loved this jet-setting life style – until I started a family two years ago.
Last summer I relocated to Hawaii to shoot a show for ABC called Last Resort and it was far more challenging than I ever thought it would be to pick up roots and start living a new life six hours away from my home. The logistics were difficult, the emotions were even more difficult and I came away from the experience realizing that things are different now that I’m a mom, and career is no longer the Head Honcho in my life. My family has to come first and what that means for me right now is I won’t relocate for a series for more than 3 months. It really takes a toll when your family and community is split up, and I want my son to be able to have some consistency in his life. I want to be able to sign him up for preschool. I want him to take music classes. That doesn’t mean that we can’t travel for work in small doses (we actually just spent a week working in Atlanta), but relocating is out of the question for now. Feeling more in control of my creative life is also hugely important to me currently, so I’m saying ‘no’ to social events and auditions more often, in order to be able to focus on writing and growing my website.
How has blogging and social media impacted your career?
What I love about social media is it cuts out the middle man. For most of my career I had to rely on PR people and whatever magazines chose to print in order to get my image and voice out there and it was very frustrating when reporters took a viewpoint that wasn’t necessarily in line with what I felt was my truth. With Twitter, Facebook, Who Say and Instagram, I am able to put my voice out there authentically, the way I want it to be heard.
Connecting with my fans has been hugely rewarding and if people are interested they can follow along and if not, they are free to not follow and I love that freedom of choice. Personally, I love that I never have to hear or see anybody from Real Housewives or Teen Mom, but I can hear regularly from Sheryl Sandberg and Refinery29 and Patton Oswalt. We get to curate and customize the fabric of media in our lives and I love that social media makes that possible!
Autumn, thank you so much for taking the time to share your thoughts and experiences with us! I’ve loved watching MoveLifeStyle evolve and am excited to see what’s next. xo
If you’ve missed any of these awesome interviews, you can read more of the Creative Mix series here. If you want to brush up on your own blogging skills check out Blog with Purpose!