September 2012

Hey, I’m Ariel Meadow Stallings. At this point, I’m mostly a publisher, but I do a lot of stuff. I’m a writer, comedy event organizer, media commentator, marketing bellwether, professional blogger, author, web community mobilizer, profanity spitter, wife, mother, dog owner, only child, and 30-something middle-class white woman.

I’m a 2001 graduate of Columbia University’s Publishing Course, but I’ve been a writer since I took a year off from college in 1997. I’ve edited rave magazines, written about movie stars, and been paid to review ear and nose hair trimmers. I’m a lazy journalist when I have the opportunity, an inadvertent marketer, and a blogger almost always.

I’m also an author. My first book, Offbeat Bride, published in 2007, with a second edition released in 2010. These days, I spend most of my time publishing other people’s writing on my network of online publications. My digital media start-up is called the Offbeat Empire.

Me rambling about my whole life story:

I am Ariel Meadow Stallings, and yes: I was born with that name. I was born on Bainbridge Island in Washington State. I grew up in a log cabin my 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 now 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 humor columns 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 at a New Years warehouse party. 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 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 the next decade has been all about the grown-uppy stuff like getting married, buying a home, and dealing with infertility. 2007 saw the publication of my first book, and 2009 saw both the birth of my son (finally!) and the launch of my small business. A second edition of my book was published 2010, and now my business has grown to four sites and 700,000 monthly readers. At this point, I’m mostly trying to navigate the transition from young naive weirdo to older wiser weirdo.

When I’m not working on the internet or sleeping, I’m usually doing one of the following:

• hanging out with my family
• taking pictures
• walking my dog
• singing misguided karaoke
• sweating my ass off in NIA dance classes, barre studios, or on the dancefloors
• staring at the wall quietly trying to get my shit together