Tag: UT Austin

Inspiring Stories Across Industries: Bold Journey Interview

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Bold Journey interview photos

Bold Journey: Nicolette, thank you so much for making time for us today. We can’t wait to dive into your story and the lessons you’ve learned along the way, but maybe we can start with something foundational to your success. How have you gone about developing your ability to communicate effectively?

There isn’t one simple answer to that because I learned a lot about communications from social cues, body language, reading, traveling, failing to communicate, as well as listening to others. Ultimately, I learned how to communicate most effectively through writing. Since I was little, I’ve always kept diaries, and in hindsight, I think it was a subconscious space to speak my truth. Plus, I always loved reading at the library, so writing in my diary was also like my own little world in a secret book with a lock and key. Stories that belonged to me. Over time, as an adult, my passion for writing led to a career. 

Back to your question: in private, I’ve always written a lot of personal letters to myself. Even today, although I wouldn’t call it a journal or a diary, yet I suppose that’s what it is. Writing things down helps me organize my thoughts and decide what is relevant to my message and what is hindering my delivery. We can fine-tune our words, thoughts, and emotions just like we edit our papers.

Releasing my feelings through the written word helped me navigate life complexities that would have been too daunting to decipher alone if I hadn’t poured them out from my head. Because whether you’re interpreting your diary or a dream from the night before, we can learn a lot about ourselves by what we’re saying or thinking on the regular. We can also learn how to communicate more effectively, as well as pinpoint exactly where we are flailing, by reading our own words. People write down speeches before they rehearse and deliver them to the audience. Imagine being the reader or the listener to your own thoughts… the more you write things down, like exercising a muscle, the more your speaking voice is going to improve as well.

BJ: Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?

Born and raised in Texas and NYC—I’m an artist: published writer, dancer, vocalist, thespian, and amateur photographer. I’ve done a little modeling, too, and was accepted by Barbizon but declined their contract offer. For years, I’ve covered numerous press events as a (dyslexic) writer. My portfolio reflects a vast array of creative content, and I’ve obtained 110+ publications in the US and Europe so far. My career transcends multiple industries like AI content engineering, jewelry, publishing, sales, customer service, fashion, A&E, fine dining, and tech. No matter the job I work(ed) in order to make a living—my focus always finds its way back home to creative arts!

Over time, I’ve interviewed an extensive list of diverse talent that inspired me, including talent like Oscar nominee Greta Gerwig and Oscar winner Jimmy Chin. I’ve collaborated with companies and publicity teams from Texas Monthly, National Geographic, Prevention Magazine, HBO Films, The Hollywood Reporter, SXSW, The David Lynch Foundation, The University of Texas at Austin, and more. Presently, my portfolio entails 12 national awards or scholarships, including both individual and group projects. 

Looking back, SCAD and Texas Monthly were the launchpads of my professional journey as a writer. But my artistic journey began back in pre-K through music, dance, sports, and theater arts. Since childhood, I always believed in my heart and soul that I was an artist! College forced me to choose between the arts or athletics, and I am grateful I chose to follow my artistic dreams rather than a sports scholarship. To each their own.

BJ: There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

Oh, wow. I often struggle with these questions and wish I had come up with a more refined answer later on. Today, I’m going to go with my gut instincts: 

1. My willingness to put myself out there, even if it means embarrassment or facing rejection. For instance, my grammar is a humbling work in progress due to struggling with dyslexia on my own until college. A story I’ve discussed at length before. Basically, I never know whether to be transparent or to withhold my dyslexia, because some people see it as a disability and others see it as a superpower! Regardless, the amount of rejection letters I’ve received from editors and the scrutiny, or judgment, from teachers and society because of grammatical errors is profound. At first, it was scathing to hear, and back then, I allowed others to make me feel inferior or uneducated.

Some people might have found the feedback too discouraging, disheartening, and given up from the external harshness. For me, it fueled my fire to prove them wrong! We must develop thick skin, like a python, and keep going if we want to succeed. Bravery takes courage; you can still be afraid of failure and intimidated by rejection. People can hurt your feelings. We might even make a fool of ourselves, which might bruise our ego or self-esteem. No matter what happens, we must find a way to keep shooting our shot, particularly when we’re apprehensive! And if you’re struggling with courage, that’s simple: face your fear, swallow your pride, step out of your comfort zone, and ask for help (from those you admire or anyone stronger than you). There is no shame in admitting we need help sometimes.

2. Balance is a lucrative life skill! Finding that balance of work versus playfulness, discipline versus rigidity, and pleasure versus inordinate indulgence is a lifelong challenge for many, myself included. I’ve always contained vibrant energy, a strong work ethic, and lots of passion. That’s simply part of my innate, vigorous nature, whether it was sports, the arts, school, relationships, or my career. However, constantly enduring that high level of energy is a lifelong practice that requires extra self-care. 

My own intensity can wear out my nervous system. Meaning, in order to balance out my passionate life, I have to pour extra love and care into myself. Otherwise, I hit a burnout. We are not machines, and even machines require a reboot. Adulting is challenging, and your personal life will affect your work life, and vice versa. Your daily lifestyle choices, habits, friends, thoughts, and sleep cycles—all of those elements impact your performance, and more importantly, your peace of mind. 

3: Ignoring the haters and the naysayers is vital. I’ve always been a misfit, and it used to sear my emotions when people didn’t see me, underestimated me, or made snap judgments based on my appearance, or whatever. But we have zero control over what society thinks of us or how other people behave. We can’t control how others see us. People are viewing life through their own personal lens. How we treat others is a reflection of how we feel about ourselves, so don’t take it to heart if people don’t always like you. What matters is that YOU like and respect yourself.

Focus on what you can control, like regulating our emotions and our responses to said emotions. Focus on evolving into a mature, grounded, confident person that knows their self-worth and identity. We need constructive criticism, but don’t allow dysfunctional, immature vipers to steal your light or poison your spirit with negative, inaccurate judgments, projections, and jealousy. Concentrate on your character and how you treat others, not your reputation or the gossip. Do not let other people define you. Make it a priority to like and love yourself, without the approval of others. We all want to be loved, and we all want to feel seen, but it’s O.K. to be alone and misunderstood sometimes. 

Word of caution: Be careful of the company you keep. Sometimes it’s your own tribe, the people closest to you, that want to derail you. Hanging out with rotten fruit will contaminate you, too.

BJ: Okay, so before we go we always love to ask if you are looking for folks to partner or collaborate with?

Yes, I am looking for collaborators and people that I can also learn from. Presently I am open to trustworthy connections that lead to radio, sports entertainment, and video editing. I applied to a radio job long before podcasts ever went viral and was told that my demo was fantastic, but I needed experience. Sports entertainment mixes my passions for theater arts, athletics, and entertainment all into one role.

As for video and film, I want to share my dancing online rather than commit to a dance troupe like I did for years. Alas, I’ve hidden myself away when it comes to my singing voice and my dancing. Solely in fear that my dancing, my music, or my sensuality in general might be considered too scandalous or too provocative for corporate and might cost me a job. Or cause people to not take my career seriously, like a wild card. But I want to safely showcase all my talents; I am so much more than my writing career! Although I am proud of my hard editorial work thus far. 

https://boldjourney.com/meet-nicolette-mallow-2

El Amor en Tiempos de Coronavirus

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Fotografía de Nicolette Mallow. Pasaporte de Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 1969-1976.

As the COVID-19 quarantine began all over the globe, I knew the world news would be flooding, a swarm with coronavirus headlines, stories, and coronavirus-inspired artwork. I also thought of Gabriel García Márquez and his beloved book “Love in the Time of Cholera.” There is only one Márquez, just like there can only be one Detective Poirot, and I didn’t feel qualified to write about Love in the Time of Coronavirus. For weeks, during this time of social distancing, I waited for someone else to publish a play on Márquez’s words. I just knew someone else would and the story would go viral. So I waited. And I was delighted to read a story in The New York Times by Rodrigo Garcia, Marquez’s son. Rodrigo Garcia titled the piece “A Letter to My Father, Gabriel García Márquez.” How perfect that his son wrote a letter to Márquez about love in the time of coronavirus!

Márquez is one of my favorite writers, and this book “El Amor en Tiempos de Cólera” (Love in the Time of Cholera) holds one of my most beloved quotes ever written. Because of Márquez, I started to adore the genre magical realism, a genre Marquez created by accident. Simply because the words flowed from his imagination onto paper. How could I, and millions of other Márquez lovers, not think of the word—Love in the time of Coronavirus—during this strange, obscure and melancholy time of life?

Headline from Rodrigo Garcia’s story in The New York Times.

The letter written by Garcia to Gabo (his father) was fascinating, like listening to a private conversation between father and son, artist to artist. Garcia’s voice and the imagery as he spoke to his father beyond the grave were endearing, and you can see Márquez’s influence in his writing. Yet, Garcia holds his own voice, too, so it’s interesting to see the two styles. It’s a beautiful, evocative tribute to his father since Rodrigo Garcia knew Márquez at heart and not just through the pages like I did. True, Márquez spoke to all our hearts, the readers, the lovers of magical realism. But Rodrigo Garcia spent decades growing up with him and knowing details that we didn’t. For instance, in his letter, Garcia mentions his father’s greatest fear, something that Marquez dreaded when he was alive: loneliness. You must read it all, but I believe my favorite quote is this.

“I think that if you were here now, you would, as always, be enthralled by man. The term “man” is not much in use that way anymore, but I’ll make an exception not as a nod to the patriarchy, which you detested, but because it will echo in the ears of the young man and aspiring writer you once were, with more sensibility and ideas in your head than you knew what to do with, and with a strong sense that destinies are written, even for a creature in God’s image and cursed with free will. You would pity our frailty; you would marvel at our interconnectedness, be saddened by the suffering, enraged by the callousness of some of the leaders and moved by the heroism of people on the front lines. And you would be eager to hear how lovers were braving every obstacle, including the risk of death, to be together. Most of all, you would be as endeared to humans as you ever were.” – Rodrigo Garcia

My favorite line of that paragraph is when Garcia mentions lovers braving death in coronavirus: Márquez was a die-hard romantic! He had a love for life and an even deeper appreciation for love… A few years ago, I wrote a publication for Examiner.com about an art exhibition at The University of Texas at Austin regarding Marquez.

Born the year of 1927 in Colombia, Gabriel Garcia Marquez died of pneumonia in Mexico City circa 2014. A great artist was lost that day. The New York Times ran an article soon after the writer passed that read, “Mr. García Márquez, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982, wrote fiction rooted in a mythical Latin American landscape of his own creation, but his appeal was universal. His books were translated into dozens of languages. He was among a select roster of canonical writers — Dickens, Tolstoy and Hemingway among them — who were embraced both by critics and by a mass audience. Mr. García Márquez was a master of the literary genre known as magical realism, in which the miraculous and the real converge. In his novels and stories, storms rage for years, flowers drift from the skies, tyrants survive for centuries, priests levitate and corpses fail to decompose. And, more plausibly, lovers rekindle their passion after a half-century apart.”

Gabriel Garcia Marquez was a magical realism writer that created words of mysticism, beauty, love and tragedy. Marquez, also known as Gabo, had an eternal voice that was so unique it created its own writing genre. Marquez takes readers to another dimension within reality, like magic, and he can evoke heartfelt emotions that linger like the smell of fine perfume in the air, or a tender kiss on the skin.

nicolette mallow
Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s typewriter: Smith-Corona 250.

And now for one of my favorite quotes of all-time from his novel “El Amor en Tiempos de Cólera” (Love in the Time of Cholera).

“Así termino pensando en él como nunca se hubiera imaginado que se podía pensar en alguien, presintiéndolo donde no estaba, deseándolo donde no podía estar, despertando de pronto con la sensación física de que él la contemplaba en la oscuridad mientras dormía, de modo que la tarde en que sintió sus pasos resueltos sobre el reguero de hojas amarillas en el parquecito, le costó trabajo creer que no fuera burla de su fantasía.”

English Translation: “And so she thought about him as she never could have imagined thinking about anyone, having premonitions that he would be where he was not, wanting him to be where he could not be, awakening with a start, with the physical sensation that he was looking at her in the darkness while she slept, so that on the afternoon when she heard his resolute steps on the yellow leaves in the little park it was difficult for her not to think this was yet another trick of her imagination.”

– Gabriel García Márquez

Screenshot from the original publication on Examiner.com.

‘Natalie Frank: The Brothers Grimm’ exhibition on display at The Blanton Museum of Art

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“Six Swans III” – Drawing by Natalie Frank. (Photography by Nicolette Mallow.)

Natalie Frank: The Brothers Grimm is a current exhibition hosted by The Blanton Museum of Art at The University of Texas at Austin. Located within five different rooms that are all interconnected, the gallery is adorned with dozens of gouache and pastel drawings showcasing Frank’s hypnotizing and graphic fairy tale art. Make no mistake; the Brothers Grimm fairy tales are not reflective of the typical happily-ever-after stories that modern authors portray to our children today. Originally, these fairy tales were written for adults, not adolescents. Therefore, stand warned that Frank’s exquisite drawings are not necessarily child-friendly. Viewers with kids are advised to take a stroll before taking their children through the gallery.

“Looky, look, look at the shoe that she took. There’s blood all over, and the shoe’s too small. She’s not the bride you met at the ball,” (Grimm’s Fairy Tales).

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This fairy tale exhibition is a collection of otherworldly, unforgettable stories written hundreds of years ago. Magical, dark, haunting, and spellbinding. The colorful illustrations tell the Brothers Grimm stories of love, lust, death, tragedy, and (historical) folklore. During an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Frank explains how she “delved deeper into the early, unsanitized editions, she saw why so many of the brothers’ story plots contained brutal violence and elements of shape-shifting magic: Their folk tales were actually being told and retold by women who had to navigate a 19th-century social and political world wherein they held almost no power over their fates. Marriages were typically arranged; death during childbirth was common. Suddenly, the princesses, hags and witches in the Grimm’s’ fairy tales felt grounded and complex to Ms. Frank, and she started making drawings that could reflect these characters’ vulnerabilities and strengths.”

Blood, castles, animals, metamorphosis, nudity, genitalia, nature, and the supernatural can all be found in the artwork. The use of imagination within Natalie Frank: The Brothers Grimm is striking, unique and disturbing. The imagery is very intense, such as Frank’s drawing “Brier Rose,” which depicts a woman who almost seems to be drugged or half-conscious, missing clothing and unable to resist any advances. Her story entails a one-hundred-year-sleep caused by an evil witch, masked and blindfolded in a blood-red veil as a half-man and half-beast creature weighs down upon her as if to approach her in a sexual manner.

These are not images one can easily forget.

Entranced by the images in the artwork, walking through the gallery lures viewers to step out of modern times for a while. To think these stories were told centuries ago is fascinating and a bit creepy. Frank’s storybook illustrations are booming with bold and powerful colors that lighten the heaviness of the stories. The colors are so playful and bright like a children’s room, and yet the symbolism is so dark and grim. The gallery includes almost 20 stories, including the following: Snow White, Brier Rose, The Frog King, Rapunzel, The Juniper Tree, Endpaper, The Devil with The Three Golden Hairs, and Six Swans.

According to The Blanton Museum of Art, “Natalie Frank: The Brothers Grimm, is an exhibition of more than 30 gouache and pastel drawings by artist Natalie Frank, a New York-based Austin native. Organized by The Drawing Center in New York, this presentation explores the nineteenth-century fairy tales of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. Drawing upon the history of illustrated books, figuration, and personal and political narrative, Frank’s drawings represent the largest collection of Grimm’s fairy tales ever illustrated by a fine artist.”

“Mirror, mirror on the wall, who in this realm is the fairest of them all? … You, my queen, may have a beauty quite rare, but Snow White is a thousand times more fair,” (Grimm’s Fairy Tales).

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“Brier Rose III” – Drawing by Natalie Frank. (Photography by Nicolette Mallow.)

The exhibition will be featured at The Blanton Museum of Art at The University of Texas at Austin until November 15, 2015. The Blanton Museum of Art is a lovely university museum full of natural light, tall ceilings, blue tiling, installation pieces, statues and grand stairwells that facilitate the galleries. Over 17,000 works of art have become part of their permanent collection. However, due to the fact this particular gallery in the museum has no windows and flash photography is prohibited: It is strongly advised to visit the exhibition (and Natalie Frank’s website) in order to see her drawings in all their splendor and vivacity. Be sure to also check out storyteller Tom Lee on October 15, 2015 at 6:30 PM at The Blanton Museum of Art to perform selected stories from Frank’s illustrations. For more information regarding the exhibition, the museum or the artist, please visit www.natalie-frank.com or www.blantonmuseum.org.

Note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com in August 2015.