About (the Long Version)

I turned 11 and my Danish grandmother gave me a journal and a stern directive to fill it up. (That’s her, Margrethe Bramsen, at her 100th birthday, which she planned herself at the Orangery in Copenhagen’s King’s Garden.) That little diary was the first lily pad that lead me first to yearbooks, next to literary mags, and eventually to a magazine major at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. Since then, I have served as a staffer at Southern Living, Southern Accents, Weight Watchers, and a host of other titles. When I left what was then a Time Inc. group (it’s now Dotdash Meredith), I began freelancing for additional brands, like Better Homes & Gardens, Budget Travel, Coastal Living, Cottage Living, Garden & Gun, HOME, and Orient Express; contributing to travel guides such as Fodor’s and Moon Handbooks; crafting books for Better Homes & Gardens, HGTV, and TLC; and pulling together special interest publications for companies ranging from BellSouth to Safeway and Saks. 

to Charleston, South Carolina. Over the past decade or so a typical year found me spending about six months attempting to employ exceptional manners while acting as the editorial director of GulfStream Communications’ Wedding Division. Our tiny staff produced Charleston Weddings magazine, Asheville Wedding Guide, High Country Wedding Guide, as well as related social media accounts and blogs. The rest of the time, my everyday manners and I would slip back into flip-flops and tackle myriad assignments as the roaming senior editor of Charleston magazine. During that “off” time I also took on any fabulous flotsam and jetsam freelance work that came my way. That translated to creating coffee table books from concept up; ghostwriting branded custom-published books and “bookazines;” styling homes for shoots; writing who-knows-what; producing and art directing photo shoots; and editing this-and-that.

I stepped away from pretty much all things work to raise my then-preschool-age son—something I’d never been able to do before. We’re long out of our picket fence-rimmed Covid cave now, and like so many, re-entry saw me pivot away from magazines and toward books. Ghostwriting and editing have never been better.