_Nicole Seiffert – Public Portrait – @nicoleseiffert

Web site:  http://wakeupfamous.com
Twitter: @nicoleseiffert

I’ve been making stuff up and writing stuff down my whole life. My parents first encouraged me to share my creative works when I drew a mouse the size of my three-year-old self on our back door, where it stayed for years.

My first published poem appeared in my hometown newspaper when I was ten, the same paper that later paid me to write features for special publications. It was also when I was ten years old that I decided Billy Joel had the coolest job in the world, because he didn’t just sing songs, he wrote them. However, except for the occasional songs I ad-libbed into a tape recorder during make-believe radio broadcasts, it would be almost two decades until I began songwriting in earnest.

I recorded my first real songwriter demos in 1993. Three years later, I started The Lyrical Café, a songwriting chat group on IRC, and bought a nice guitar and took lessons. And then I let life distract me and stopped. I write of it here, because I have always promised myself I would start again; I’m making it publicly known to keep myself honest.

I have a California teaching credential, a Master’s in Crosscultural Teaching, and recently made good on another promise to myself: stop teaching and start doing the kind of creative work that feeds my spirit, full time.

So, now there’s me, the writer, and me, the vocalist, and we both have business cards. And my only child, a daughter who is a 20-year-old U.S. Marine, says she is as proud of me as I am of her.

And that’s something.

Photo taken by Suzin Porter and digitally manipulated by me.

Colophon

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