About Gracie Media

Gracie Media was named after my Chocolate Boston Terrier, who passed away at 12 years old in March this Spring.

But long before I created Gracie Media & Advertising, I learned that the best ideas begin with paying attention. Listening carefully, asking good questions, understanding what matters to people, and finding the story others might overlook have guided me throughout my career.

My professional storytelling journey began as a full-time newspaper reporter for the weekly Barnstable Patriot on Cape Cod. Each week, I attended public meetings, interviewed community leaders, developed feature profiles, and wrote as many as seven stories covering very different subjects. Reporting taught me how to enter an unfamiliar situation, identify what was important, speak with the people involved, and turn complicated information into a story readers could understand.

I also created the newspaper’s business section from scratch and served as its business editor. My reporting explored the Cape’s economy, its businesses, and the continuing challenge of building a sustainable year-round community. That experience helped me understand that communications should do more than attract attention. Good communications should help people recognize opportunities, understand problems, and imagine practical solutions.

My years of newspaper reporting, combined with firsthand experience in restaurants, waiting, and catering, led to my appointment as Communications Specialist and later Communications Director for the Massachusetts Restaurant Association, the oldest state restaurant association in America.

The association represented a remarkable range of restaurants and hospitality businesses across Massachusetts. I worked with many of the best-known names in the industry while developing newsletters, marketing concepts, member communications, promotional campaigns, and pages filled with new ideas. I learned how creative communications could connect individual businesses, entire industries, and the communities they served.

Gracie Media & Advertising grew from that combination of reporting discipline, business awareness, marketing experience, and lifelong curiosity. I approach each project by looking beneath the surface. What is the real story? What has not been communicated clearly? What possibility is waiting to be recognized? How can an idea become useful, memorable, and real?

Today, much of my work is centered in Providence, Rhode Island, the Creative Capital of New England. Through Gracie Media, Design Adventure Stories, Greyscale World: The Musical, DesigNautica, and other original initiatives, I explore how design, creativity, innovation, and storytelling can contribute to real-world change.

Design Adventure Stories represents the natural continuation of everything that came before. These short works of fiction place real-world possibilities into the hands of designers, makers, imagined characters, and their furry companions. Each story becomes a narrative prototype, allowing readers to see an idea in action before it exists in the world.

My background may cross journalism, restaurants, marketing, advertising, fiction, design, and community development, but the purpose connecting it all has remained consistent: discover worthwhile ideas, communicate them clearly, and help people imagine what could happen next.

Gracie Media is where those experiences come together. It is built on the belief that an idea should not simply fill a page. It should open a door.

If we can design, create, and innovate, we better not wait.