who i am
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Maybe you know me as a middle-grade and YA author. Maybe you know me as a singer/songwriter. Maybe you know me as that girl who gives advice to teenagers on her website. On all of those counts, you would be correct, but there's more to me than that.
I'm a Christian. My relationship with Jesus is of great importance to me. I'm also a very family-oriented person. I love spending time with my parents and two younger brothers, as well as my grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. I'm an animal lover who enjoys being outside and visiting cool places. I'm an introvert, but I always have fun with friends, whether we're going on adventures, having board game nights, or just talking. I was born in Indiana, lived most of my life in New Hampshire, and currently reside in Ohio, where I work as an intervention specialist at a Christian school. My goal in life is to inspire, encourage, and change people's lives for the better. I firmly believe that everyone has the power to make the world a better place, and that even when things seem hopeless, there is always hope. |
my life as an author
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As a child, I loved to read, particularly series such as The Babysitters Club and The Boxcar Children. I also had quite the imagination, and was always writing stories of my own inside my head. I used to tell some of these stories to my brother, and even now we remember bits and pieces of the ludicrous plots I came up with. My brother and I also invented a whole school full of imaginary friends, some of whom later went on to become characters in my books.
I wrote my first "book" when I was four. It was a non-fiction work called Saturn Has Rings, and each page gave information about a different planet. I dictated it to my mom, who typed it and printed it out to make it look like a book, and then I drew the pictures. Over the next several years, I crafted several fiction works, sometimes actually writing down the words and sometimes just drawing the pictures as I made up the stories in my head. My first fully-written books were created when I was nine, in the form of a mystery series about a girl named Doylie Dot. As my writing matured over the years, I switched from folded-over pieces of printer paper to spiral-bound notebooks, and from 6-page stories about nine-year-olds catching burglars to longer, more detailed novels about various aspects of life. My published works include the Allisen's Notebooks series, the New Life series, Out of My League (short story), stand-alone middle grade novels Stuck on a Crazy Cul-De-Sac, I Didn't Plan This and That's the Way the Racquetball Bounces, contemporary YA novel Waves Crashing Just Like Me, and juvenile fiction duology Tiger & Lily. |
Pictured above: me at a book talk in 2019
I still enjoy reading, when I have the time. My favorite authors include Karen Kingsbury, Marissa Meyer, and Margaret Peterson Haddix!
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my life as a singer/songwriter
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I grew up listening to music every night when I went to bed. As a toddler, my favorite cassette tapes were Wee Sing Nursery Rhymes and Lullabies and Peter, Paul, and Mary. During my childhood years I mostly listened to CDs of seventies music, enjoying artists such as Billy Joel, Elton John, the Eagles, James Taylor, Barry Manilow, and Chicago. Sometimes we threw in a little Kids Songs 4 Worship or Hap Palmer's We're on Our Way album. My dad played guitar and had recorded a few songs of his own before I was born, so the idea of people making songs was just kind of normal to me.
One of my first memories of me as a singer/songwriter is sitting on my bedroom floor at age six, filling up an entire cassette with songs I was making up on the spot. I haven't listened to that tape in a very long time, but I bet it would be quite entertaining. I started keeping a notebook of songs when I was around ten. This is around the same time my brother Cam Gallant, three years younger, started coming up with lyrics of his own. Since then, we have been traveling through the songwriting journey together. |
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I see 2009 as our pivotal year. Although we wrote countless songs and pieces of songs before that, 2009 was the year we started writing lyrics and melodies that were less childish and followed more standard structures (rather than having five verses that were all different tunes and repeating the chorus seven times, as tended to be a common practice with our older songs). This was the year we started listening to popular music, and discovering songs and artists we liked outside of what our parents listened to.
My three biggest influences when it came to songwriting were Taylor Swift, Bethany Dillon, and Britt Nicole. These three women were my favorite artists when I was about 16-18, and it is during those years that my songwriting really took off. Some of the songs from that era are still some of my favorite songs I've ever written, and I'm excited about producing them and sharing them with the world. |
We always used to put on "concerts" for our parents and grandparents, showcasing our best songs. This is a picture from a concert primarily performed by 12-year-old Cameron (holding the mic), with 15-year-old me and 7-year-old Cody as background singers.
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Cam Gallant and me in the studio spring 2020, right after we'd finished producing our song "Gold."
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Cam got into producing in 2015, and we had fun producing an album of parodies for our younger brother, Cody, as well as a few songs of our own. Neither one of us played any instruments beyond very basic piano, so instrumentation was always a struggle. I always had the dream of putting my songs out there for people to hear, but at that point the goal seemed impossibly difficult.
In March of 2020, I decided I really wanted people to hear my songs. And I finally believed that people could hear my songs. A switch flipped in my brain and I realized that producing songs didn't have to be as hard as I'd always made it out to be. I knew basic guitar and piano chords, and I knew how to use our music production software. Making songs was doable. The timing couldn't have been better-- around the same time I decided to start producing songs, Cam's college closed down due to Covid-19, and he came home for several months. We spent the summer of 2020 collaborating on music! |
my cats (because who doesn't like cute cat pictures?)
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Striped cat with white paws: Christmas.
Striped cat with spots (you can't see the spots too well in the picture, but he actually looks like a leopard!): Magi Large orange/tan cat: Nucci Tiny grayishcat: Bits |
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“People are like houses--it’s easy to see what the outside’s like, but you can’t know exactly what the inside is like until you take the time to go in and find out for yourself. Sometimes, the inside matches the outside, and is precisely what you expected. But other times…you might be pretty surprised at what you find.”
- Kelsey Gallant
