Fusion Communications (the daytime me)

I am often asked what it is that I actually do: What is that daylight-hour work of which you speak? What do you mean, a boutique marketing communications firm?

Sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words, and since we at Fusion recently assembled a few snapshots of projects completed over the past few years, I thought it would be fun to share that with you. In some cases we took the photos. In other cases we hired the right teams. Behind the words are long conversations about industries, trends, corporate cultures, and objectives. Behind the chosen designs are multiple iterations of the possible.

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The Poet of Property (and For-Hire College Essays)

So there I was, taking a break from not writing, reading the New York Times, about to rush right past the Real Estate section (I own my house, and I'm not moving) when a headline—The Poet of Property—caught my eye. Since I've written about real estate and architecture since I started my business at the age of 25, I thought I might stop to discover what I might learn from a NYT-worthy subject.

I learned, among other things, that Valerie Haboush, the story's star, pens "property descriptions" and "online biographies of brokers" for a nice little sum, collecting between $150 and $250 for bios featuring such lines as "She dabbled in merchandising before realizing her true calling, residential sales," and he "built his career from the ground-floor up, ultimately earning the kind of success that most agents only dream about," not to mention he "possesses an innate gift that allows him to connect with individuals, understand their needs, and deliver results that often exceed expectations." She is able, I also learned, to write 50 such bios each week.

I couldn't help myself; I just kept reading. And then I got to the end. Where I learned that Ms. Haboush doesn't just write for real estate brokers. She writes, for an unspecified sum, college application essays for the children of, well, anyone who might ask, I imagine (though the story lists brokers). Herein are the penultimate words of the story.

“Sometimes they’ll come to me with an outline, or else I’ll interview them first,” Ms. Haboush said. “My feeling is, it’s a very competitive world, and everything you’re writing about yourself, you have to sell yourself, you have to position yourself in the best possible light. If that child can’t write an essay — well, that’s not my business. Let’s at least get that kid into the school.”

Ms. Haboush has no idea what her track record is with school applications. “I always tell them to let me know if their kid gets in, and I never hear from them again,” she said.

What say we, I wonder?

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And Now a Few Words on What I Also Really Do, and Why

I started my own business at the age of twenty-five—hung out my shingle and began to consult with a dozen or so design and engineering firms. I worked on branding and positioning, wrote brochures and proposals, conducted research, trained internal staff. I continued along in my tried-and-true Undercover fashion, ghosting articles and writing talks for the city's architects.

Within a few years (following a brief full-time stint for a major consultancy), I had expanded my range—put my History and Sociology of Science degree to work for pharmaceutical companies like Merck, DuPont Merck, AstraMerck, and AstraZeneca (there's a pattern there, do you see it?). I was writing internal magazines by then, annual reviews and annual reports, corporate histories. I was working behind the scenes, again, to craft the talks that others gave. It all kept changing, shifting, growing. There'd be years when I'd leave the consulting behind to focus solely on books—a grant would come in, an advance, a spate of magazine assignments, competitions to judge. And then I'd be back at my work-a-day desk—interviewing executives or civic leaders, trying to see the world through their eyes, forging friendships that have lasted straight through to now.

Seven years ago my husband left architecture to enter the field of graphic design. We've since built a boutique communications firm that incorporates not just strategy, research, writing, and executive coaching, but also photography, video montage, and design. Whatever the work is, it always takes me somewhere new, and while it is true that at times I lose my literary self for weeks on end, that I fail to find the time to read a book, to dream something personal and bright, to comment as much as I wish I could on your blogs, this work that I do is also often a refuge—a peopled landscape with clearer border lines. It's a chance to make another kind of art, to stare down a challenge and emerge on the other side.

The literary life is rich and essential and often heartbreaking. The business is engaging and rapid-fire and deeply taxing. I once thought that I needed the one to survive the other. I've learned since that I need both to survive myself.

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