Q&A with Noa Gavin

Noa Gavin is a writer/blogger, businesswoman and all-around hilarious lady. She moved to Dallas five years ago from Amarillo to help her husband expand his martial arts school. Not long after the move, she began dabbling in the blogosphere with her website, ohnoa.com. From there, everything snowballed. She began taking improv classes at Dallas Comedy House, where she met her business partner, photographer Alicia Sherrod. She also writes for Nickelodeon.

Tell me about HS Productions [the photography business]. That’s what pays the bills, right?

I do all the managerial side. So I do all the accounting, all the scheduling, everything like that. My friend [Alicia Sherrod] is the photographer, and she’s fantastic. We kind of just put our skills together. We were like, ‘Oh hey, you’re a great photographer, and I can run a business, so let’s just do that together and start making some money.’ And we’ve done pretty well in a year and a half. We’ve built it up quite a bit.

What do you write for Nickelodeon?

I write for NickMom, for their moms’ humor website. It’s kind of like Buzzfeed but for moms. So I do a lot of freelance writing for them, and that is a lot of fun because I get to come up with some really weird ideas for them and they’re just like, ‘Sure. We’ll take a shot at it.’ So it’s nice because it’s outside of what I normally write, so it’s a little bit of a stretch for me. And they pay me, so that’s nice, too.

Is ohnoa.com your passion? How’d you get into that?

I started the blog, I think four and a half years ago. I started it because I really needed a creative outlet. I was still kind of stuck in that phase where I was like, ‘Oh, I love to write, but I’ll never really be paid for writing, so I need to focus on other things and just kind of forget about that ever happening for me.’

So I was working in the martial arts school. Working with my husband was really hard, because we’re both Type A and both really bullheaded. I needed an outlet. I’d been reading a couple of blogs

Hyperbole and a Half is hilarious — and I thought, I can write some funny stuff. OK, I’ll give it a shot.

When I first started it, it was strictly a comedy blog. So I did that for a while, but I kind of shot myself in the foot because I didn’t give myself a target. It was just, ‘I’ll write funny things that happen to me,’ which is not an infinite well. It got harder and harder, and more and more frustrating. I did find some success there. I wrote some things that went viral. I was Voice of the Year for humor for BlogHer in 2011, so I got to go to San Diego and read my post.

After a while it started to wear down on me, just trying to be funny every day. The more and more I got into performing and improv, all I was doing was funny. I realized I had something else to say. I kind of outgrew the need for snark and for mean humor. This year I changed the format completely. I wanted to share my story, and I knew a lot of really funny women and really talented writers who also had incredible stories. So I changed that, where we pick a theme every month and we write toward that theme.

So you think doing improv comedy helped you refine your humor taste?

The more you get into improv and the more you think about comedy professionally, the more you realize making fun of people is really easy. It’s the easiest form of humor. It’s also the dumbest, I think. I don’t like it. It screams of insecurity. I wanted to do something different. I wanted to do something a little bigger than that.

*This interview was edited for clarity.

—Brittany Nunn

Stay cool

East Dallas pup Osito likes to eat ice from his water bowl during hot summers and steal a lick of ice cream from his owner’s, Cristina DeLeon, waffle cone. His favorite exercise is jumping from one couch to the other in the living room as if he is playing a game of Don’t Fall in the Lava. He exercises until he falls.

Writer in residence: Judy Ann Lowe

Although “The Little White Light” is a children’s book, it’s based on the real-life experiences of neighbor Judy Ann Lowe, who authored the story.

The book centers around a little girl named Penny, who is comforted by a little white light that follows her throughout her daily life.

The story is based on a light Lowe started to see when her late husband’s health began to fail him. Every night, a soft blinking light appeared in the corner of her bedroom.

“It wasn’t a strobing light; it was just a soft little blink,” Lowe says. “I thought, ‘OK, who’s in the backyard with a flashlight that shouldn’t be in my backyard?’”

But she never could find the source. Every night she’d say her prayers and look over and there it was, blinking softly.

She never felt any fear. Actually, it brought her comfort. After a while, she began talking to it.

One day, she came home from her work as a retired, part-time teacher, and she turned on her computer to check her emails. In her peripheral vision, she saw the little light sweep by.

Another night, while watching TV in her easy chair, she glanced up and saw the light dart across the doorway.

Penny, the little girl in the book, is based on Lowe as a child. She wrote the story at the encouragement of a friend, who had connections in the publishing industry. She sent it to J. S. Pathways, and sure enough it was embraced with open arms. It was everything a children’s book should be — positive, inspiring and adorable.

After encouraging Lowe to make some tweaks, J. S. Pathways sent it to illustrators Ayuna Collins and David Edward Martin.

The book is now available online on amazon.com and at Barnes and Noble bookstores.

After the success of her first book, Lowe recently released her second, “MJ’s New Friend,” which she describes as being about “acceptance, friendship and finding the courage to do the right thing.”

—Brittany Nunn

Strokes of genius

Although Dawn Cleaves has spent decades expertly wielding a paintbrush, artistic license is often the last thing on her mind.

The important thing, she says, is that the person paying for her time and talent gets exactly what he or she wants, whether it’s an elaborate wall mural depicting the Tuscan countryside, a cartoonish panda bear for a little boy’s room, or an entire wall painted to look like it is made of expensive marble.

“My designers like the non-pretentiousness,” Cleaves says. “If they ask me to change something, they know I’m happy to change it, because it’s my goal to make them happy, not to be stuck on some artistic vision.”

Cleaves is the owner of Artisan Finishes, an award-winning decorative arts company based out of Cleaves’ East Dal- las home. The bulk of her work is in faux finishes — painted finishes that look like something real, like marble, wood or stone but decorative art also includes murals, trompe l’oeil, lettering, gilding, plasters and antiquing.

“Most of my stuff is custom to the client,” she says. “In my world, everything I do is different. It’s rare that I do the same thing twice. I have people ask me all the time, ‘Well, have you done this?’ And I’m like, ‘No, but I haven’t really done anything I’ve ever done before, before that time that I did it.’ ”

Cleaves originally went to school for architecture, but she didn’t enjoy the bureaucracy and soon switched over to designing sets for theater. She eventually approached the movie union, seeking better work for better pay.

Her first assignment was to paint a patch that had been burned in the wood floor. Although she’d never been trained to paint wood before, she set to work matching the colors and grain. When she finished, she asked the producer to approve her work. When she walked back into the room, the producer was standing on the wet paint.

“I said, ‘Well, I guess it was OK because you couldn’t tell where it was …’ “ Cleaves recalls, laughing.

From then on, she began painting sets, furniture and pretty much anything else for movies, which eventually led her to New York, where she met her husband.

Her husband’s job brought them to Dallas. By that point, she’d already left the movie industry and had started her finishing business. It was a bit of a struggle to move the business from New York to Dallas, but she managed to make the leap.

Artisan Finishes won the American Society of Interior Designers Designer’s Choice award two years in a row for faux finishes and decorative arts.

Recently, Cleaves painted concrete bollards for Black Walnut Café, as well as the mural at the newly opened Ebby House at Juliette Fowler Communities.

—Brittany Nunn