Happy to your most original thinking. Organize your ideas and create the opportunities to launch a creative work. Unlocking your world of creativity, with best-selling author and brand-innovator, Mark Stinson.

Welcome back to our podcast, everyone. What does it mean to be a multi-passionate creative entrepreneur? Our guest today is an author, an executive, an actor, a singer, a composer, and a mom, and just an all-around fun person. Alison Hernandez is my guest today. Alison, welcome to the program.

Thank you, Mark. So excited to be here.

Well, it's exciting to be in Alison's Creative Space. It's an audio podcast, but if you're looking at the background, describe it a little bit for us, Alison. You called it your Unicorn Creative Space. You've got a lot of creative inspiration surrounding you right now.

I do. Well, about a week into COVID. So now that was like two years ago, I went to the hardware store with my family and bought the brightest turquoise green paint that I could find to paint half of my office. So I have accent walls in a deep turquoise.

And then I also have a painting of a unicorn that a dear friend and my old assistant from my last corporate job painted for me.

I have playbills of multiple Broadway shows behind me because Broadway and musicals are my passion. And what else?

Some colorful things behind me, my book, my new book, a ballad dream.

And so, and that's really what we want to talk about Alison. So I'm glad you got us back to the topic.

We want to talk about Alison's new book. It's called Ballad of Dreams. And it's been described as a love letter to New York City, Broadway theater in general, and specifically your grandmother and maybe great aunt, I think.

Tell us about Ballad of Dreams. Yeah, Ballad of Dreams is really a love letter for sure. It's my love letter to all of those things and to all of those people.

It's inspired by my grandmother, my grandmother Marie, who passed away almost four years ago now at 96 years of age. And she was a matriarch of my enormous Irish Catholic family.

She had 13 children. So you can imagine just from that fact alone, there's a lot of drama that I could write about.

And the other character that it's inspired about is my great aunt Laura. And she lived in New York City where my grandmother grew up in in the burbs of Jersey as as have I.

And never had children. And she was married to a talent scout who had a very big fancy life. And they lived in this gorgeous apartment on Central Park West overlooking the park. And they lived very, very different lives, my grandmother and my great aunt.

And I was really inspired to write a story about to strong women in my family and their drastic different trajectories of their life and their life choices, their friendship, right, all of the ups and downs of the choices that they had to make.

The bulk of the story is in the 1940s. I should have started with that. So really looking at how much has changed for women and how everything is still exactly the same. The same choices that my grandmother and my great aunt were facing in the 40s. I'm facing now as a 40 plus year old woman, mother, wife, creative.

And so that's really at the heart of why I started writing and and I just kept going. It started as a musical actually.

Well, this is what was so interesting. You know, I've read that, okay, it was going to be a musical. And now I mean ballot of dreams. I can't wait to see it on one of those play bills.

Yes, me too.

Tell me about that transition, but also maybe speaking of a dream still alive. Are we still hoping that it could be a musical?

Oh, yes, for sure. For sure. So yeah, it started. It started as a full musical. I wrote over wrote meaning wrote the book like the book of the musical. And I also composed over 30 songs.

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