writer, artist
"Write as long as you can live and there is pencil and paper or ink or any machine to do it with, or anything you care to write about, and you feel the fool, and you are a fool, to do it any other way."
-Ernest Hemingway
About Me
Personal Background
Hi, my name is Sophia. I'm a 25 year old creative living in Calgary, Alberta. In 2021, I graduated from the University of Calgary with degrees in Business (with a marketing concentration) and in Spanish Language and Literature. By day I am a marketing and design professional at a tech startup (you can view my marketing and design portfolio here). By night I work on more personal artistic projects.
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Like many artists, I enjoy creating in different mediums. Growing up I was involved in a handful of sports but I always had a special place in my heart for the arts: while writing, drawing, singing, dancing, and acting, I quickly developed a love for the way stories can be told through various art forms.​ I owe so much of my passion for the arts to my mom. She kept every single thing I made and encouraged me to never stop creating.
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From grades 7 and beyond, writing became a defined passion in my life. I am grateful for the teachers I had at Basis Oro Valley. In our literature class we read so many memorable stories that both inspired and shaped my writing. I remember The Great Gatsby, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Othello, 1984, "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings", Wuthering Heights, "The Most Dangerous Game" and others. I began writing whenever I had a spare moment.
My family moved from Arizona to Alberta when I was 14 years old, and I began reading poetry online and writing more of my own. After high school, finding my style and voice within poetry became a passion project. In 2018, during my first year of university, I began sharing my writing online via an anonymous Instagram account, that eventually grew to over 1,000 followers. That account is no longer anonymous and I now share my personal life alongside my writing and art.
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Lately, I have been interested in reading Hemingway novels (just now finishing up with The Sun Also Rises, and The Old Man and the Sea), exploring new subgenres of poetry, writing lyrics, gradually (!) working on my novel, and starting to learn about screenwriting and film direction.
Recent Work
Raw Artists Canada
On January 14, 2023, I had the opportunity to display and sell my art and writing at Contemporary Calgary as part of an art show with RAW Artists Canada.
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Collaboration with Oranje Band
I have had the pleasure of working with Oranje Band on their logo design, website design, merch design, and a spoken word piece for a song called "Memo".
The lyrics were created to evoke a memo from someone who unexpectedly winds up in a strange, new world. The speaker eventually reveals that they are in fact writing a memo, when they directly address the receiver in the last line: "Dear addressee:".
I now regularly perform this song with the band at venues around Calgary. The studio recording is now out on Spotify.
Artistic Inspiration
Below is a collection of artistic works that have greatly inspired me over the years, in no particular order:
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Literature
-Susanna Clarke's Piranesi
-Savannah Brown's "The Universe May Stop Expanding in Five Billion Years"
-Gabriel Garcia Marquez' "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings"
-F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby
-Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises
-Amal El-Mohtar's "Turning the Leaves"
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Film
-Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry)
-Isle of Dogs, Fantastic Mr. Fox (Wes Anderson)
-Coraline (Henry Selick)
-La Casa Lobo (Cristobal León & Joaquín Cociña)
-Stop motion work by Edie Lawrence