Many moons ago, after earning a Masters degree in Art Education and a post-grad degree in Art Therapy Psychology, I worked for several years leading art classes and experiences with children in museums and school settings and with elders in skilled nursing facilities.  Life then took me in another direction, and I ended up having a productive 30-year career in marketing, co-founding two agencies (Atomic and H30) before starting my own endeavor, Helium Communications, in 2015, where I spearheaded strategic communications programs for a diverse roster of clients in the B2B and consumer tech space, managed an enthusiastic team of professionals, and dove deep into what I love to refer to as “the rich pageant of startup culture.”

Writing has been the cornerstone of my career for the last 30 years, but the truth is that most of it wasn’t my own kind of writing.  Maybe it came too easily to me when I was young, so I squandered my abilities. Rather than focusing on developing my own writing, I utilized my skills primarily for work – writing materials in the service of other people’s objectives, often under other people’s bylines, with a keen focus on efficiency, rather than on the experience or the outcome. In retrospect, I can see how damaging it was for me to write things that I didn’t necessarily agree with or believe in. I was abusing something that should have been treated as a gift.