I tell wonder-filled stories about hope and healing
Author: Christa Avampato
The short of it:
Writer. Health, education, and art advocate. Theater and film producer. Visual artist. Product geek. Proud alumnae of the University of Pennsylvania (BA) and the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia (MBA). Inspired by ancient wisdom & modern tech. Proliferator of goodness. Opener of doors. Friend to animals. Fan of creative work in all its wondrous forms. I use my business skills to create passion projects that build a better world. I’ve been called the happiest New Yorker, and I try hard to live up to that title every day.
The long of it:
My career has stretched across Capitol Hill, Broadway theatre, education, nonprofit fundraising, health and wellness, and Fortune 500 companies in retail, media, entertainment, technology, and financial services. I’ve been a product developer and product manager, theater manager, strategic consultant, marketer, voice over artist, , teacher, and fundraiser. I use my business and storytelling to support and sustain passion projects that build a better world. In every experience, I’ve used my sense of and respect for elegant design to develop meaningful products, services, programs, and events.
While building a business career, I also built a strong portfolio as a journalist, novelist, freelance writer, interviewer, presenter, and public speaker. My writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, PBS.org, Boston.com, Royal Media Partners publications, and The Motley Fool on a wide range of topics including business, technology, science, health, education, culture, and lifestyle. I have also been an invited speaker at SXSW, Teach for America, Avon headquarters, Games for Change, NYU, Columbia University, Hunter College, and the Alzheimer’s Foundation of America. The first book in my young adult book series, Emerson Page and Where the Light Enters, was acquired by a publisher and launched in November 2017. I’m currently working on the second book in the series.
A recovering multi-tasker, I’m equally at home in front of my Mac, on my yoga mat, walking my rescue dog, Phineas, traveling with a purpose, or practicing the high-art of people watching. I also cut up small bits of paper and put them back together as a collage artist.
My company:
I’m bringing together all of my business and creative career paths as the Founder of Double or Nothing Media:
• I craft products, programs, and projects that make a difference;
• I build the business plans that make what I craft financially sustainable;
• I tell the stories that matter about the people, places, and products that inspire me.
Follow my adventures on Twitter at https://twitter.com/christanyc and Instagram at https://instagram.com/christarosenyc.
I’m trying a new writing practice. I read a bit of The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver before going to bed (which is an incredible book!), and then I set my iPad next to my bed with an email to myself already set up. I’ve found that this book’s language is doing radical things to my writing, in my dreams. I have the iPad at the ready to capture words I’ve dreamed. Here’s last night’s bit:
“She mixed the ingredients together, like a sorceress, like a doting grandmother makes meatballs or matzo, with such care and tradition and love. It was best to not disturb the magic.”
I don’t know where this is going or what it’s for, but I do know The Poisonwood Bible is good for me.
I think there are very few problems in this world that can’t be worked out when people prepare food and eat together. There’s something about the act of nurturing ourselves while nurturing others that makes us feel whole. Food heals wounds and helps us better understand ourselves and others. We cannot fear or hate on a full belly.
There are times lately when I wish it were possible to get fighting factions—the police and protestors, Democrats and Republicans, Russia and just about everyone—together in the kitchen for one night and see what might come of baking and breaking bread together. I wonder if that might work. Can we find a way to make food, not war?
Yesterday I went to a class called “Gardening for Native Pollinators and Honey Bees” at Leu Gardens in Orlando. Now that I have the physical and mental space to actively participate in environmental conservation, I decided to take my first tiny step with this class.
I don’t have a green thumb, but I am fascinated by honey bees and their role in our world. Without them, we would have a difficult time surviving. No chocolate, coffee, or just about every fruit and vegetable you can think of. They all rely on bees for pollination. Their survival, and ours, is endangered by the rampant use of toxic pesticides and fertilizers. So with our future on the line, I figured I better learn about them and see what I can do to help.
During this class, some ideas started brewing based on the information I learned:
As a society we need honey bees to make sure our food production meets the needs of our growing populations
As a largely agricultural state, Florida needs more beekeepers to raise and nurture placid bees to convert the wild, aggressive hives (believe it or not, this isn’t difficult to do!)
Florida needs more job opportunities, especially for disenfranchised youth and those in lower socioeconomic levels
So why couldn’t there be a company in Florida with a many-fold mission centered around honey bees, honey production, and the many healthy derivatives of honey that meets all of these needs? The wheels in my head are turning…
Eventually we all face this question: walk away or try harder? I face this kind of choice every day, multiple times a day, especially at that dark 3:00am hour. It happens so often that I’ve had to devise a method to calm myself down and thinking clearly. The beauty of this simple system is that it lets me respond to my fear and doubt without being consumed by them. I ask myself four questions:
1. Do I find joy in doing X?
2. Am I helping someone by doing X?
3. If I stop doing X now, will I regret it?
4. Is what I’m giving up to do X worth the tradeoff?
Sometimes these questions showed me that I did need to walk away. That walking away wasn’t easy or pain-free, but I knew it was the right thing to do. Compass Yoga, the nonprofit I founded and recently dissolved, is an example of that. Other pursuits, like my writing, proved to be things that I decided to double down on. These questions aren’t one and done. I re-evaluate regularly, sometimes hourly, and these questions help me get through the process so I can get on with my life. I hope they work for you, too.
A brighter and better future is before us because we have no other choice but to evolve and change. Our population is growing and the world is in need of innovative solutions to meet that growing need now more than ever. Our future is literally in our hands.
1. The need to desalinate our increasingly salty water around the globe.
2. E-textbooks that dynamically adapt content for different skill levels, languages and
other user-specific needs.
3. Truly smart smartphones that are cheap, need almost zero power, and do anything a computer can do. And truly smart homes that are cheap, built in urban environments, sturdy in the face of natural disasters and storms, and require very little power to be comfortable and functional.
4. New long-lasting chemical mosquito repellents delivered in novel ways. (As someone who is violently allergic to mosquitoes, I want these little buggers out of all of our lives!)
5. Solar-powered everything from medical devices to appliances to irrigation pumps to mini energy grids.
We start creating the future today. Let’s do it sustainably.
“With life as short as a half-taken breath, don’t plant anything but love.” ~Rumi
Love is magic. It heals what’s broken and nurtures what’s already strong. It breaks down barriers, builds bridges across chasms, casts light where there is darkness. It’s not always easy to love someone. It’s not always easy to love ourselves. But I believe now, and will always believe, that love is always possible and the one force that will always make things better. Always. So let’s love.
Where the Light Enters is my first novel. I wrote the first draft in November and now I’m in the midst of the first edit. I’ve read lots of advice on the process of editing and the structure of the task. I decided that the best structure for me is one scene per day. And I really work that scene from overall book structure right down to the word choice. It’s like being a scientist—I put the scene on a slide and mess with it through a microscope to see if I can get something to happen.
I ask myself a lot of questions as I peer through the microscope. Why does this scene really matter to the overall structure of the book? What information and ideas need to be conveyed that are critical to the story, and how can I convey them through action? What are the characters’ relationships and motivations, and why are they important? I like this intense dive into a 2-inch picture frame of the book. The idea is that when I edit that last scene the book will have been through five drafts one scene at a time.
The value of intensity, focus, and merciless reworking? (Hopefully) priceless.
With a groan, I stepped outside into the dark and chilly morning to let my dog, Phineas, do his business. It was 5:30am and I went to bed too late to be up this early. I was cranky.
The school bus came down the street and stopped in front of the neighbor’s house across the street. One of their sons has cerebral palsy, and his bus arrives before the sun comes up to take him to school. He’s always at the door waiting, fully dressed and ready to go, to get on the bus as soon as it arrives. He walks with great difficulty, on his own and always with a smile.
I’m out here groaning about being tired and here’s this kid who’s raring to go despite his challenges. I went inside and took a long, hard look in the mirror. I realized I’d just been given my hundred-foot journey in complete silence and under the cover of darkness, the lesson right across the street that taught me everything I needed to know to do everything I want to do. “Stop whining and just do it. You’re one of the lucky ones,” I thought to myself.
Now the school bus is my alarm clock. When I hear its come to a stop at the neighbor’s house, I swing my legs around and let my feet hit the floor. It’s time to get started.
This weekend I finally saw the movie The Hundred-Foot Journey, the story of a restaurant-owning family in Mumbai who loses everything and finds a new life in France. Though that trip was full of experiences, the journey that really transformed their lives was the hundred-foot walk from their new home and restaurant in France across the street to a rival restaurant.
It’s a beautiful story about challenge, love, loss, dreams, redemption, courage, and risk-taking. Go see it. It prompted me to realize that while travels around the world have so much to teach us, the travels that make us who we are often happen just around the corner from home. What’s your hundred-foot journey, the great life lesson you learned close to home? Tomorrow, I’ll tell you mine.
When I lived in New York City, I loved the vibrant food scene there. Growing up in a rural area of farm country and later working for an environmental nonprofit, I’ve always felt really connected to the dirt despite living in cities for more than half my life. I didn’t know if I’d find anything like that food scene when I moved to Florida but yesterday (ironically) The New York Times shined a light on what is growing here as it picked Orlando as one of its top travel destinations for 2015. Why? Because of the local food scene driven by places like East End Market and Cask & Larder.
While nowhere near the size of New York’s food scene, Orlando-based farmers and food artisans are building a locavore community with passion. I’m hoping to get more involved with that world now that I have the time and space to do that. I’ll let you know what I find. In the meantime, check out this article that highlights several food entrepreneurs that are making a delicious life here in the central part of the Sunshine State. (Scroll to number 15 on this list.)
