Excelsior Journeys: The Road to Creativity

On this week's episode of Excelsior Journeys: The Road to Creativity, host & producer George Sirois sits down with DE Walsh, a prolific poet who has his archive of more than five thousand works available on Amazon, and also has an extensive amount of experience - both personal and professional - with mental health counseling. He talks in his memoir about the psychotic break he suffered while i...

On this week's episode of Excelsior Journeys: The Road to Creativity, host & producer George Sirois sits down with Douglas Fifer, a decades-long member of the Alaskan Police Department who oversaw the development of so many depraved and explicit crimes that he knew would have an audience of true crime fans. So he took a collection of his experiences and turned them into an anthology called 50...

This week on Excelsior Journeys: The Road to Creativity, host & producer George Sirois sits down with Zack Zeller, a marketing mastermind who has gained the trust of several different 7-8 figure authors. For nearly ten years, he has pushed forward his strategy of making your publicity materials just as creative as the work you're promoting, and he is on a mission to reach as many different aut...

This week on Excelsior Journeys: The Road to Creativity, host & producer George Sirois is proud to sit down and have a chat with a man who was a crucial element added to the entertainment industry. In the late 1980s, Art Bell took a chance on an idea: to create a channel based purely on comedy. That idea became a reality for him when he founded The Comedy Channel, which would eventually be ren...

This week on Excelsior Journeys: The Road to Creativity, host & producer George Sirois welcomes back to the show filmmaker Michael Charron. As one of the writer/directors who sat in with George on a live recording at the Austin Revolution Film Festival last February, Michael got to share a little bit about his short film that was being screened there: The Time Capsule . Now, with a completed s...

On this week's episode of Excelsior Journeys: The Road to Creativity, host & producer George Sirois sits down with fellow author Andrew Serra. While the two share a passion for storytelling, Andrew's journey to get into writing is a far different, much more eventful path. Andrew has been a lover of storytelling for most of his life, but he has also lived most of that life in one of the greates...

This week on Excelsior Journeys: The Road to Creativity, host & producer George Sirois sits down with author & interior designer Amy Barrickman. Ever since she started her design business in 2010, Amy has been working nonstop with her clients and with her social media channel where she shares different designing tips on a regular basis. It didn't take long for these videos to go viral, and...

This week on Excelsior Journeys: The Road to Creativity, host and producer George Sirois sits down for a very open and deep conversation with filmmaker, publisher, and professor Autumn Karen. Having dedicated so much of her life to storytelling, Autumn has opened the doors to both authors and potential filmmakers with both Woven Lines Publishing and Medusa's Gaze Films. And Autumn has chosen an ex...

PRODUCER'S NOTE: APOLOGIES FOR THE AUDIO GLITCHES YOU'LL BE HEARING IN THIS EPISODE, MOSTLY WHENEVER YOU HEAR ME TALKING FOR LONGER STRETCHES. THANKFULLY, ANNIE'S RECORDING SOUNDS GREAT. ENJOY! This week on Excelsior Journeys: The Road to Creativity, host & producer George Sirois sits down with author, speaker, film & television actress, and social media personality Annie Korzen! Starting...

NOTE: THE CONVERSATIONS IN THIS EPISODE ARE OF AN EXPLICIT NATURE. PLEASE REFRAIN FROM PLAYING THIS EPISODE AROUND ANYONE 17 YEARS OF AGE OR YOUNGER. THANK YOU.  On this week's episode of Excelsior Journeys: The Road to Creativity, host & producer George Sirois sits down with director Vic Lagina. After answering an ad to take part in the production of an adult scene, Vic quickly became a stro...

This week on Excelsior Journeys: The Road to Creativity, host & producer George Sirois sits down with author Steph Katzovi. While in the third grade, Steph declared in an essay that when she grew up, she would become a writer. That drive to write for a living never fully went away, even when she went through law school and worked as a strategic communications consultant for Deloitte. Two decad...

On this very special episode of Excelsior Journeys: The Road to Creativity, host & producer George Sirois sets up a live conversation at the 2025 Austin Revolution Film Festival. On the night of the awards gala where George's "Minus One Plus" was nominated for Best US Short Script - SciFi, George opened the floor to any filmmakers who wanted to share their experiences when it came to putting t...

On this week's episode of Excelsior Journeys, host & producer George Sirois sits down with Katie Hallahan, a writer & marketer who has spent years in the publishing industry in many different roles before becoming the COO of Phoenix Online Studios, an independent video game production company. Katie & George discuss how Katie's love of storytelling pushed her in various directions befo...

On this week's episode of Excelsior Journeys: The Road to Creativity, host & producer George Sirois sits down with writer / producer / director / film consultant Summer Shelton. A true asset to the independent film community, Summer has been involved in cinema for decades. She is well experienced in lecturing about beginning, intermediate, and advanced level filmmaking as well as production sc...

On this week's episode of Excelsior Journeys: The Road to Creativity, host & producer George Sirois sits down with actor, writer, and stand-up comic Anand Mahalingam. A college dropout who spent his first years in Los Angeles sleeping on friends' couches, Anand pushed himself to get on the stand-up comic stage and not only made a name for himself on the comedy circuit, but also as an actor who...

Thank you for your patience last week while some technical issues were taken care of. I expect all future episodes to be released each Tuesday. It is also with sadness that I must announce the closing of the Once Upon a Podcast Network. It was a really fun run, but there is currently no momentum to carry the network as a whole properly into 2025, so the other two founders and I decided it was best...

This week on Excelsior Journeys: The Road to Creativity, producer & host George Sirois sits down with Daisy Eagan, the host of the hit podcast Strange and Unexplained and the youngest female to win a Tony Award. The two discuss Daisy's journey in creativity from performing to writing to getting behind the microphone, and both get to share their own insight on constantly moving forward with ADH...

This week on Excelsior Journeys: The Road to Creativity, host & producer George Sirois sits down with a fellow podcast host, Janet McMordie. After spending years in sports medicine, Janet decided to pursue her passion, acting, and has kept herself busy in film & television, on the stage honing her craft in improvisation, and even as a stunt performer. The two have a wonderful conversation...

This week on Excelsior Journeys: The Road to Creativity, host & producer George Sirois sits down with his friend, fellow author / speaker / writing coach Cherie Postill. As a constant presence with the St. Louis Writers Guild, Cherie has worked with young authors, with experienced authors, with aspiring authors, so many different people who have a story to tell but are unsure how to tell it. F...

Welcome to Season 10 of Excelsior Journeys: The Road to Creativity. It's a new year and a new release day for new episodes, so please note they will now be uploaded every Wednesday instead of Tuesday. This week, host & producer George Sirois sits down with Deborah Heiser, PhD. As the founder & CEO of The Mentor Project, she and her team have helped so many people connect with mentors in th...

Happy New Year and welcome to the Season 09 Finale of Excelsior Journeys: The Road to Creativity. For this brief episode, host & producer George Sirois looks back with fondness on several creative breakthroughs in 2024 that inspired his resolution in 2025: to stop getting in his own way and to remember what it feels like when he does that. For those who would like to get involved with the Once...

Merry Christmas! This week on Excelsior Journeys: The Road to Creativity, host & producer George Sirois welcomes fellow podcaster Dan Delgado (host of The Jockey Club Podcast) to celebrate 35 years of the 1989 Richard Dreyfuss / Teri Garr comedy Let It Ride . To listen to more of Dan's podcasts, click HERE . For those who would like to get involved with the Once Upon a Podcast Network, please...

This week on Excelsior Journeys: The Road to Creativity, host & producer George Sirois welcomes John David Graham, the Executive Director of Good Samaritan Home, a housing & mentoring program for men and women returning to everyday life after time in prison. John has been involved in this organization since he founded it in 2001, and at the age of 75, he added published author to his alrea...

This week on Excelsior Journeys: The Road to Creativity, host & producer George Sirois sits down with voice artist Liana Badawi. The two discuss the various twists and turns in Liana's career as a performer, including performing on stage - even as a Golden Girls puppeteer - and moving into the wonderful world of commercials and animation, all the way up to an opportunity of a lifetime: landing...

As the holiday season begins, it's very common for people to start feeling down, depressed, or worse. Excelsior Journeys host & producer George Sirois is very familiar with all of this, and so he felt this was the ideal time to have fellow author and fellow podcaster Thomas Brown as his guest. Thomas has two different mental health-based podcasts available - Inner Monologue and Stages - and th...