Ahead of our third annual (Un)Common Threads Creativity and Innovation Summit on Thursday, November 5, we asked keynote speaker Mary Walsh a few rapid-fire questions about curiosity and what keeps her inspired.
What's something you're curious about?
Well, what am I not curious about? I'm just nosey by nature! I see people talking and I want to really - it's so rude, I know - just walk up and say "what are you talking about?" And I have done that on occasion, and sometimes people react really well to it, and sometimes they look askance, as they should. But I am just curious about everything, I am nosey by nature. I want to know what's going on, I want to know what people are saying, I don't want to be apart from, I want to be a part of.
What's the best piece of advice you've ever received?
It was advice given to me, and all of us in CODCO in the very, very early days when we were afraid to go on stage, by Greg Malone who said "do it with a bold face." And really, that has stood me in good stead all these many years later.
When you feel stuck creatively, what gets you moving?
What gets me moving is deadlines, really. Just deadlines. I was so stuck creatively in this screenplay that I'm writing, stuck for years, really, and then I got some movement on the producing side, I got a deadline and suddenly I've got it done - well, not completely done - but written: act one, act two, and act three. It's like Samuel Johnson said: "Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully."
What's something you've changed your mind about over the course of your career?
I don't know if it's exactly changed my mind, but I was so insecure in the beginning of my career, that I found that people not agreeing with me, or if even people questioned me, it undermined me to such an extent that I would probably try to stop it, or just, you know, I can't tell you how sad I'd be if the people I was working with didn't agree with me on everything. I mean, it was just basic insecurity, really, and no sense of who I might be, or what I could do. And as I've gotten older and have been longer in the business, then I welcome questions of course, and I welcome that other people have different opinions. Live and let live like they say! And I'm not as scared of them anymore, or undermined by then anymore, and so I don't have to make sure that I'm right in every way so that this terribly fragile house of cards that I was building for myself early in my career isn't in danger of falling down completely.
What keeps you coming back to the work?
The work itself is what keeps me coming back to the work. Because I'm blessed in that my vocation and my avocation are one in the same. I love my work. It keeps me going, it gives me life, it fulfills me pretty well in every way. Subsistence, living subsistence which is, I guess, where most artists in this country are forced to live, means that you have to learn to work together. You have to hang together, or surely you will hang alone, and also that you have to learn to do every job. It's like people who live on an island have to learn to make all the tools that they need - we had to learn to be the producer, and the director, and the writer, and the actor, and how to sell it, and so, so many people here on the island know how to do all the jobs. I like that, I like that yesterday I was writing a screenplay, not that long ago I got to be in the #1 show on 82 countries on Netflix, "Below" - oh my god, I never had so much fun - I wrote my book and it was published, and I've been doing readings across the country, I led a protest the other day against the Government's callous closing of supportive housing in this province. You know, every day, there's a new challenge to meet and a new way to live and enjoy the life that you're living.
