Electrolicious

About

Here’s the official third-person bio: A writer and editor for a decade, Ariel Meadow Stallings has been published in print and web publications including ReadyMade Magazine, Seattle Weekly, and Movies.com. Her first book, Offbeat Bride, published in 2007. She lives in Seattle.

Here’s me rambling about myself:

I am Ariel Meadow Stallings, and yes: I was born with that name. I’m mostly just a writer, but I’m also a media commentator, social media marketer, professional blogger, author, web community mobilizer, online obsessive, comedy event organizer, profanity spitter, wife, dog owner, only child, and 30-something weirdo.

Here’s the backstory: 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.

(This, by the way, is right about when I started blogging, so everything from here on down you can read blow-by-blow in the archives.)

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, back to Seattle for a year of copywriting for The Seattle Times and writing for The Seattle Weekly, then a year in Venice Beach working for a dotcom and running a hula hooping website. We returned to Seattle in fall of 2003, and since then lots of grown-uppy stuff has happened like getting married, buying a house, publishing my first book and trying to navigate the transition from young naive weirdo to older wiser weirdo.

These days, I spend three days a week as a social media-focused Marketing Manager at Microsoft. (Yes, really: Microsoft.) 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.

Top photo by Rannie Turingan, bottom photo by Naomi Sheikin