“I write only because
There is a voice within me
That will not be still”

I’m Gabrielle, and I’ve been known to wax poetic about lot of things: well-organized public transportation; astrology; that video of Stevie Nicks singing Wild Heart in her dressing room. But above all, I’m a lifelong evangelist for words. Their possibility. Their limitless potential of syllable and sound and story. Their ability to put a verbal face to a shared name; to explain the inexplicable. To grasp the threads of our rich inner worlds and weave them into distinct outer ones. To make from scratch—to generate beauty from the bare essentials of language. 

It’s this fascination that led me first to journalism (with a brief stint editing my high school newspaper and later, as a reporter for my small town’s weekly circulation) and eventually to copywriting. But midway through my freshman year of college, I traded journalism for the lucrative promise of an English major, and I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I just knew it had to be about words. It was never about anything else. 

Copywriting came to me, accidentally and when I needed it most, as a broke master’s student in London. I’d moved there in 2012 for a study abroad program, fell in love with the city and never left. Working at Topshop and writing a dissertation about digital culture, I was vaguely familiar with copy as a thing that existed—I just don’t think I’d ever understood it as a professional option. Probably for the same reasons that most people don’t fully conceptualize that the words on their products don’t just appear there, that they’re someone’s job. Bad copy is noticeable, sure, but good copy is invisible. It blends in and feels natural; for lack of a better term, it just reads right. 

Bored and seeking extra cash, I’d signed up to do some experiential marketing work for health food brands: a job that essentially amounted to handing out free samples of green juices and vegetable chips outside grocery stores and Tube stations. But one thing led to another, and suddenly I’d landed an office job running social media and PR for those brands. That turned into writing content more generally, and before I knew it, I’d stumbled into a bona fide career as a copywriter—one that kept me in the UK for three years longer than originally planned and allowed me to adopt a cringeworthy British twang and veritable arsenal of slang terms, all while getting to create words for some really cool brands and companies.  

Seven years and counting later, here I am—back in the US and still at it.*

I think when I was younger I had this idealistic notion that I’d grow up to be a creative writer and just kind of languish in all black and write complicated poetry and be a Real Artist forever and ever amen. So maybe younger-me wouldn’t be impressed by my copywriting portfolio. Maybe she’d even call older-me a sellout. But one thing that I’ve learned over the years is that creativity is everywhere. Storytelling is everywhere. And it can be equally rewarding to cut through the chaos of a brand story and turn it into something engaging and meaningful as it is to reach into the chaos of my own brain and vomit out a poem. (Which I obviously still do, too. Old habits die hard.)

Joan Didion said “we tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Sylvia Plath said “I write only because there is a voice within me that will not be still.” And Louise Glück said that “writing is a kind of revenge against circumstance.” So I write. To locate clarity at the center of chaos. To navigate my way through those liminal spaces—the continents and countries and jobs and people and decisions and experiences. To reveal new possibilities. To write myself into existence, or something like it. 

I’m a copywriter. I like to tell stories. I like to make things and I like to make other people’s things sound pretty. And right now, I wouldn’t want to do anything else. 

☉ ☾ ↑ //

*The copywriting part, not the British twang part. The latter part is mercifully gone.