Julie STAFFORD

Chasing Life 

WRITING

I didn't so much choose a writing path ... it was more a case of writing chose me. When my husband was diagnosed with life-threatening cancer, just two and a half years into our love story my attention turned from teaching art at that time to working with food. I wrote a healthy eating cookbook to support my husband’s immune system after aggressive cancer therapies, calling it - 'Taste of Life'. My first cookbook became Australia's biggest selling healthy-eating cookbook, selling a record 1.2million copies alone, and becoming the first book in a series of 22 best-selling healthy-eating cookbooks over the next eighteen years. My cookbook sales exceeded 2.2million copies worldwide leading me to open two successful health restaurants in Ballarat and Melbourne. Through the '80s and '90s, my healthy eating recipes changed a generation's eating habits. Inconceivably, eighteen years on, my husband was diagnosed with mesothelioma (an unrelated terminal cancer caused by asbestos exposure). Faced with building a new life for myself, while at the same time navigating grief, I set off on a solo journey across France, Croatia, Spain, Morocco, and Portugal. My travel experiences were healing and allowed me to develop my love of non fiction and fiction writing and telling stories through my photography. Along the way, I produced my debut novel, calling it - 'Seagulls on the Ganges', (not quite a memoir but close), and I created a screenplay adaption of this novel. Currently, I'm working on my next book and writing travel articles and blogs for different online spaces.

ART

Vincent Van Gogh is one of my artist heroes. I love his work but I more admire his tenancity to simple commit to the art process and get out of the way of outcomes. Art can tell a thousand stories depending on who is looking at the work and how wide their eyes are open to the artistic story.  Today, new art processes excite and inspire me to open doors wider to my creative energies. In this next chapter of my life, I'm embracing my passion for story telling through words and pursing my art, using photography and painting as my main mediums to tell my stories, but using technologies to manipulate images and art processes to produce unique fine art prints and NFTS. Photography connects me to my world. It allows me to get lost in moments of observation that make me stop and look deeper into what I'm seeing. My natural curiosity about life, things, destinations, history, cultures, philosophy, and people, means there's always something wonderful to capture through my camera lens. 

TRAVEL

RESIDING IN MELBOURNE

Through the lens of my camera I love capturing the spirit of my city as it awakens to become a new force after covid lockdowns. Hope you love my prints of Melbourne. But, I also travel annually across Australia, Europe, Croatia, Portugal, and Morocco to capture the inspirations that become my stories, my art, and my fine art prints. When I'm not writing or traveling I'm at home, in Melbourne, painting.

In the middle of all my cookbook writing, I paused to write a motivation book, titled, 'Turn Obstacles into Opportunities' (later republished as, 'Stepping Out'). My motivation strategies, outlined in this book, allowed me to add keynote motivation and education speaker on the lucrative speaker's circuit to my exciting career highlights, resulting in over 1500 keynotes to community and corporate organizations around Australia. Along with all my creative energies I continue to address how our best life can be found on the other side of our comfort zone, and that no matter our physical age, it's never too late to chase after life. Hence my new keynote is titled, 'Chasing Life'.