Today we’d like to introduce you to Avalon Grey.
Hi Avalon , please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
Creativity has been a thread through my life for as long as I can remember, although for many years I didn’t understand where that thread was leading me.
I started writing when I was very young. It became a way for me to process life and to put words around feelings and experiences I didn’t always know how to express otherwise. In high school, one of my teachers would enter my writing into contests without telling me until afterward. I remember thinking how incredible that was, but I don’t think it occurred to me then that writing could actually become a career and life path.
Writing wasn’t my only creative outlet. I studied opera from the age of 13 and later performed as the lead singer of a local rock band. Over the years, I also explored theater and modeling, and today I’m represented by Stars Talent Studio here in Utah. Creativity has always found its way back into my life, even during the years when I was busy building something entirely different.
After marrying and having children, and later going through a divorce, I returned to college as a single mother. I was fortunate to receive a scholarship through the Women’s Success Center at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah, that allowed me to complete my education and earn my degree in marketing.
From there, my life moved through several different worlds. I became an entrepreneur, owned a brick-and-mortar business, worked in corporate leadership across multiple states, built brands and businesses, and eventually spent several years working in technology and AI.
For a long time, I saw those chapters as having taken me away from the artist I had been when I was younger. I have since changed my perspective on this. Looking back, I realized that I was gathering material that I needed to learn and experience to make me who I am today.
There is something that happens when you live enough life. You experience love and loss, success and disappointment, beginnings and endings. You become different versions of yourself. You lose some of them through transformation and find others again but now carrying the wisdom needed to help you step forward into the next chapter in your life. And somewhere in all of that, you begin to understand that so much of what feels deeply personal to us is also profoundly human. That realization brought me back to writing and became part of why I created Peony Magazine.
Peony is centered around the human experience, the inner worlds we carry, love, relationships, identity, loss, longing, beauty, healing, transformation, and the complicated spaces between who we have been and who we are becoming. I’m especially interested in the things we experience deeply but don’t always know how to say out loud. Our journey in life can be beautiful, but it can also be incredibly lonely.
Sometimes we convince ourselves that no one else can understand what we’re feeling, what we’ve survived, or what we carry deep inside of us. Then someone writes a sentence, tells a story, creates a photograph or a piece of art, and another person encounters it and thinks, “I thought I was the only one.” I think there is something soul-moving in that moment where the essence of those two people connect on a level that is no longer superficial.
I created Peony as a place where writers, artists, and other creatives can express something true to their own experience or imagination and allow it to travel beyond them. Their work may reach someone they will never meet and touch a part of that person’s life they will never know existed. To me, that is one of the most beautiful things about creativity. We create from our own little corner of the world, but what we create doesn’t have to remain there.
I believe that is why platforms that make room for people’s stories matter so much. There are remarkable people everywhere, not necessarily people whose names everyone knows, but people creating, rebuilding, taking risks, changing direction, surviving difficult chapters, and trying to leave something meaningful behind. When we give those people room to tell their stories, we begin to recognize ourselves in one another. That is the kind of creative community I want to continue helping to support and build through Peony.
At the same time, I’m finally giving my own writing the place in my life that I never gave it before. My writing explores our inner worlds, relationships that change us, identity, transformation, and the light and darkness that can exist within the same human life.
I’m currently working on a book that I plan to release in 2027, and I’m looking forward to continuing to build opportunities not only for my own work, but for other creatives to expand their voices and reach the people who may need to hear what they have to say. I don’t think we are meant to live in a world believing we are alone in it.
Our stories may look completely different on the surface, but underneath, we share many of the same things, such as wanting to be loved, wanting to belong, losing people we love, and at times losing pieces of ourselves along the way. Sometimes another person’s words simply remind us of that and become a catalyst for us to change.
When I reflect on my past, I don’t feel as though I was abandoning one career to begin another. Everything somehow found its way here. Business taught me how to build. Marketing taught me how to communicate. Technology taught me to keep looking forward. And life gave me something worth writing about. So, this chapter doesn’t feel like starting over. It feels more like a novel that continues to tell me a story about life and its many secrets to happiness, through the many ups and downs it may bring.
My life experiences have given me the chance to come home to the little girl in me that I couldn’t protect when I was younger, the one who didn’t have a voice, no champion in her corner, but would go through life one knee scrape and stumble at a time, learning to become the wiser and stronger version of herself she was meant to be and in turn, help others in their journey to know they are not alone.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
It has definitely not been a smooth road, but I’m not sure I would want to rewrite all of the difficult parts either. Some of the experiences I once wished I could erase are the same ones that eventually taught me the most about myself.
There have been many seasons of rebuilding in my life. I’ve experienced divorce and spent many years raising my children as a single mother while finishing my education and trying to build a career. I’ve started businesses without knowing exactly where they would lead, experienced both successes and failures, worked my way through corporate environments, and learned the realities of entrepreneurship and the responsibility that comes with building something others may depend on.
There were also times when I became so focused on surviving, providing, achieving, and moving forward that I lost pieces of myself along the way. I think that may have been one of my greatest challenges. We often talk about resilience as the ability to keep going, but I’ve learned that resilience is also knowing when the version of you that survived one chapter cannot be the version of you that lives the next one.
Sometimes growth has required me to let go of identities I worked very hard to create. That can be frightening. We become attached to titles, businesses, relationships, accomplishments, and even our struggles because they give us some definition of who we are. Starting again means stepping into a space where you may not know exactly who you are becoming yet. I have spent time in that space more than once.
There have been moments of disappointment, loss, self-doubt, and circumstances that forced me to question what I believed about myself and the direction I thought my life was taking. But those experiences also taught me something I carry with me now, that is the belief that very little in our lives is wasted. Even the chapters that hurt can teach us something. Sometimes they teach us boundaries, courage, and compassion. And other times they simply teach us what we no longer want. At times we don’t understand what a particular chapter gave us until years later, when we suddenly find ourselves using the wisdom we gained from it.
I think one of the hardest lessons for me personally has been learning that strength doesn’t always mean pushing harder. Sometimes strength means allowing yourself to change direction and forgive your younger self for the mistakes you made and to see life as something building and shaping you, not trying to destroy you. I truly think that a change of perspective in how one sees their circumstances is the determiner of their fate. These lessons have been especially important as I’ve returned to writing and building Peony Magazine.
I’ve had to give myself permission to take the creative part of myself seriously again, not as something I do after the “real work” is finished, but as meaningful work in its own right. And perhaps that is what all these challenges have ultimately taught me, and that is that we are allowed to become more than one person during a lifetime. A difficult chapter does not have to become the definition of our entire story. Sometimes it is simply the page we had to turn before we could discover what came next.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
Much of my work today has grown from my interest in understanding the shadow parts of ourselves, the pain we carry, and how we can transmute painful experiences into wisdom that helps us move toward our dreams and desires. I believe there is a certain freedom that comes from learning to navigate both sides of our inner world without labeling one as good and the other as bad, but instead giving ourselves the compassion to understand, accept, and heal what we find there.
In my writing, I’m drawn to what we often conceal behind our outward-facing selves, the pain, shame, longing, and parts of our stories that never had a voice. I like taking readers into those darker spaces, not simply to remain there, but to explore what can happen when we finally confront them with honesty and care. There is something powerful in writing about what we have been taught to hide and discovering that those parts of us that have been tucked away have something to say and have been waiting for us to notice. These are some of the topics I will be writing about in my upcoming book. I hope to bring others some peace and clarity in their lives through the words in my work.
The other side of my creative work is Peony Magazine, where I serve as Founder and Editor-in-Chief. We feature talented and passionate creators working across personal essays, fiction, poetry, interviews, and other forms of storytelling and creative expression. I’m especially interested in discovering people who have something genuine to say and helping their work find the people who may connect with it.
One of the things I’m most proud of is creating a space where the person behind the work matters as much as the work itself. Without the different perspectives offered by other people’s experiences, how would we ever learn to see the world through the eyes of another?
I don’t believe meaningful creativity requires a perfectly polished life. Sometimes our most powerful work comes from the darkest parts of our lives. Our individual experiences make our voices unique, while our shared humanity allows those voices to reach across the distance between us. If there is something that defines my approach, it is probably that I don’t see creativity simply as content. I see it as a form of human connection.
Imagine a story finding its way into the life of someone the writer will never meet. A photograph can awaken a memory. A poem can put language around grief and soothe a soul. A novel can allow us to inhabit another person’s world for a while. Sometimes a single sentence can make someone feel understood. This is the most rewarding and exhilarating for me, to help someone see that they are understood, heard, and valued.
So, as I continue building this chapter, I want my work to exist on both sides of that exchange, in creating work of my own that reaches people while also helping create opportunities for other creatives to reach them. I want to create work that makes people feel the emotion of life, and I want to help other creatives do the same.
When driving past a cemetery I see rows of people who were living and breathing. People who once were part of a life story who carried dreams, desires, suffering, and tears. And now they are gone. But the question that enters my mind is, what did they leave behind? Are there remnants of their lived experiences, their wisdom from their time here, or even stories of theirs that would inspire the next generation onward?
Wealth is not the only valued inheritance we can receive in this world. We can also be the beneficiaries of the wisdom, lessons, and teachings of the past generations, whose words and actions can help us create a better world.
This is the kind of legacy I hope to leave during my lifetime.
Alright so before we go can you talk to us a bit about how people can work with you, collaborate with you or support you?
There are several ways people can connect and work with me depending on what brings them to my work.
For Peony Magazine, we welcome submissions from writers, including essays, fiction, poetry, and other original work for editorial consideration. We are also continually looking for interesting people and projects to feature, so I welcome introductions to authors, artists, filmmakers, founders, and other individuals whose work or story may be a good fit for the magazine.
I’m also open to collaborations with other publications, media organizations, creative professionals, and brands when there is an authentic fit. That might take the form of an editorial collaboration, interview, special feature, event, creative project, or simply finding an unexpected way to bring two audiences or ideas together.
Personally, I’m interested in opportunities surrounding my work as Avalon Reina Grey, including writing, publishing, interviews, speaking engagements, and creative projects that allow me to explore ideas in a new medium or with people whose perspectives challenge or inspire my own.
For anyone who simply wants to support what we’re building, read us. Share an article that stays with you. Follow a writer you discover through Peony. Tell someone about a story or artist you think deserves attention. And if you create something yourself, reach out.
Some of the most interesting opportunities in my life have started with a conversation I never expected to have. I hope to leave the door open for many more of those.
You can find my writing and upcoming work at www.avalongrey.com and explore Peony Magazine, our contributors, features, and submission opportunities at www.peonymagazine.com. You can also connect with both of us through our social platforms.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://peonymagazine.com/ and https://avalongrey.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/peonymag/ and https://www.instagram.com/avalonreinagrey/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/peonymagazine/ and https://www.facebook.com/AvalonReina/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/avalon-grey-58882221/
