People hire me because I work as hard for their business as they do.

I fell in love with writing at a science and technology magnet high school, of all places. A cinematography class with full production from scriptwriting, filming to editing, a Spanish class where I had to write a full page a day even though I wasn't fluent, and a creative writing and poetry class. All three pointed the same direction: what I loved most wasn't filming or editing, it was the story itself. So when it came time to pick a major, I majored in writing with an emphasis in poetry.

I didn't go straight into writing as a career. I helped my brother with some copywriting, then started my own life insurance and securities business because I wanted to own something. I used everything I knew as a writer to market myself. But a couple of years in, I realized I liked that part more than the finance advice. So, I took a corporate agency job, kept freelance clients running alongside it the whole time, and eventually branded that side work to Copy by Marine, because I wanted a home, not to be an anonymous freelancer.

Copy by Marine is the version of marketing I believe in—plainspoken, not performative. That's what Marketing Without Performing, the book I wrote, is about: you don't have to put on a persona to market yourself. Talk about your business the way you'd talk to a friend. That's also where the poetry comes in—I write the same way I used to write poems, using the fewest words it takes to carry the most, because where you put the comma matters as much as what you say.

That poetry background isn't just a metaphor—I published a full collection, The Moon Taught Me, pulled from ten years of poems. Poetry is one of the hardest things to write well, and it's still one of the things I'm proudest of.

The Moon Taught Me Marine's poetry collection—view on Amazon