Howdy! I’m Mary.
I’m a storyteller with a knack for making sense of complex ideas and bringing them to life in any medium.
I’ve loved words for as long as I can remember. But it wasn’t until an unexpected college internship at the FBI placed me in the Bureau’s Communications Department that I realized just how much I loved telling other people’s stories. I spent that summer interviewing strangers, and realized that in doing so I could slip into so many different lives and see more of the world than I’d ever reach on my own.
That realization pulled me into travel and research, which I viewed as a way to satisfy my insatiable curiosity about the lives of strangers and the wider world. I wrote grants and built research projects that took me to South Africa, India, and Spain, where I interviewed people about local education plans, the impact of mobile banking, and other niche topics. I became fascinated with the question of how a place can shape us, writing my senior thesis on that very question.
These days, the stories I tell have less to do with place and more to do with power. I studied Politics in college, but working at The Motley Fool brought me up-close to the world of business and revealed to me how money drives just about everything around us. The stories that keep me up at night now largely have to do with money and power: who’s got it, what they’re doing with it, and how those actions impact real people living in the real world.
I’ve worked on both sides of the media business. I started my career in PR but quickly realized that I wanted to play a larger role in telling the stories that I was then pitching out to journalists. At The Motley Fool, I edited written content before stepping into the world of podcasting and audio storytelling – a medium where I combined my love of conversation and narrative with my passion for explaining the “why” behind a story.
