Author and playwright Wren Valentino on building an internationally renowned creative powerhouse career
This episode of Streets of Your Town is a tribute to 30 years of friendship, and the power of the creative process in whatever form it takes.
Wren Valentino is an internationally renowned author, actor, film producer, entrepreneur, teacher, playwright and poet based in Sacramento California.
He’s the CEO and owner of Blue Dasher Productions, helping to bring more than 80 independent movies to the screen and championing the transformative power of the arts. Eight of his original screenplays and seven of his stage plays have been adapted for the screen.
And by an incredible stroke of kismet, this little Aussie Wandering journo met Wren almost exactly 30 years ago in a youth hostel in New York, where we bonded our friendship by sharing our artistic dreams over a banging 80’s soundtrack during one of the city’s most savage snowstorms.
And we celebrate all of that on today’s Streets of Your Town.
“It was the beginning of a beautiful lifelong friendship. We had a hairdryer and a blizzard. We got snowed in together in New York City,” Wren says.
“It was a fun place to get snowed in, let’s be honest.
“I remember we met John Stamos and we went to the Carnie Wilson Show. We went to stage door and met him, hung out with him. That was a lot of fun. That was a fun, fun, just experience on so many levels.”
Both Wren and I were at the beginning of our budding careers when we met.
Wren says he was lucky enough to figure out his purpose in life when he was quite young, and since then his passion for story-telling has not waned but rather adapted to a range of formats.
“I was 13 and had a very favourite author, Norma Fox Mazer, who’s sadly not with us anymore. She wrote a lot of young adult books, a lot of coming of age books,” Wren says.
“I devoured every book that this woman wrote. And she came to my junior high school, seventh and eighth grade, and I was in eighth grade. And she came as a guest author and they picked 10 students to have lunch with her in the library. And I campaigned and championed that ‘cause I was determined, I didn’t care if I was number 10, but I was going to be one of those students.
“I don’t come from a particularly creative family. So it was the first time meeting an adult that was creative for a living and was a storyteller, a professional storyteller.
“I took a little handwritten eighth grade notebook and said, I really want to be a writer. And I was starstruck and I was shaking and all the things. And she looked at my story and she said, ‘You already are a writer! You already are. You don’t just want it’.
“It was that moment of validation for me that somebody else was able to articulate, ‘Hey, you can do this. You can do this as a thing’. And that was my jumping up point.”
He published his first short story in an anthology two years after that meeting and has not looked back since.
He encourages others who have the creative muse whispering in their ear to honour that call, no matter what stage their life is at.
“Hang on to that spark that is lighting you up. If it lights you up, it’s something that you should be doing, and that’s coming from a place of joy,” Wren says.
“If that’s all you can think about doing, that’s what you’re supposed to be doing.
“One thing I always tell writers that are just starting out is to remember, you have many, many stories that live inside of you. You’re not just a one story writer.
“And those are the stories that you can tell or should tell, because those are the stories that only you can tell.
“Sometimes you get some folks around you that don’t really understand what it means to have a creative life, and you’ve got to turn those voices off just like that inner critic, and just listen to your own voice and let that guide you through your wonderful artistic journey.”
Now an actor, entrepreneur, film producer, movie critic, workshop instructor and writer, Wren is the bestselling author of 21 novels, writing in multiple genres but mainly romance, thriller, young adult and horror.
And he encouraged all the creatives out there not to become too despondent about the rise of AI.
“All of those things, books, novel stories, movies, plays, all begins with a story. It all begins with a writer’s imagination,” he says.
“That muse or muses we were talking about tapping some writer on the shoulder somewhere and saying, ‘Hey, why don’t you try this? This is the story you need to tell’. And I’ve learned just to listen and just be, I feel like a conduit really.
“Technology alone has revolutionised all of those art forms in a great way, I think in many ways. I think we have lost some of the preciousness, if you will, of the art forms that have kind of given way to things have certainly been made easier to produce and to film and to put on a stage. It’s changing.
“The audience has changed, but I feel like at the end of the day, even though all those changes happen around us, it really still goes back to that really great story. And that’s the reason why people have favourite books and favourite movies and favourite songs. There’s something that resonates in that story, connects with them.
“AI cannot do that. AI cannot change lives. It can throw some words on a screen and spit stuff out that other people have already written, by the way, but nothing’s original about it.”
And he said to not let the doubters stop you from pursuing your dreams.
“Having that thick skin, you got to have it because for every 100 rejections I get in some form or another, there’s that one yes,” he says.
“But you got to cry and sweat and live and keep going through those other rejections to keep going.
“I think it makes you appreciate the success and the accolades even more when they come. Through all of it, the rejections and all the hard work and that grind kind of thing, that part of it, I appreciate it because it makes me work harder. It makes me really take stock of my storytelling abilities. I feel like a lifelong learner.”
Thank you my ever supportive Streets of Your Towners for keeping me and Mildred the Cantankerous Kombi on the road and getting these stories that will now be kept in the Queensland library collection for generations to come. As one of the librarians so kindly told me when I asked her why they bought the rights, she said that I had captured stories of Queenslanders that in a hundred years no-one would remember—what it was like to be a refugee, to be a struggling actor, or to trek into the Woodford Folk Festival. You can see how to access the State Library collection in this previous newsletter!
So thank you all for making this possible!
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Love yas!
Nance