ORIGINS

If careers had soft-launches, mine quietly kicked off with a pair of pieces for New York’s Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art.  The first was a retrospective on an avant-garde psychonaut, and the second, an interview with a Playboy Playmate turned painter. 

They became my calling cards, and opened a few doors. But levelling up would require more than a couple of cult-culture pieces.

I’d have to chase the money, and the luxury vacation space was printing it. If careers had hard-launches, mine was travel writing. But it came at a cost—I'd traded passion projects for paycheques. The worst kind of writer? An uninspired one.

 

Then, I went out for dinner.

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Bearfoot Bistro, Whistler. My publisher and I were discussing the idea of a field guide for the resort town's top tourist experiences.

And as one world-class dish followed the next, something struck me: Maybe it was the Muscat talking, but what if we ignored the alpine activities altogether and focused solely on destination dining? That night, Taste Dining & Après was born. And I was back. The scene was alchemical—restaurants riding razor thin margins, chefs spinning through kitchens casting spells like mad wizards,

as sommeliers flitted through candlelit dining rooms, and mixologists summoned spirits with every rattle of their cocktail shakers. There was a palpable magic when you walked though the doors, long before you'd tasted anything. That was a story worth telling, and this was the lesson I carried, long after I'd finished being a food writer: Move people, and they will move.

 

Eventually, I learned to make data-driven decisions, too, but I never lost sight of that truth. It was there with the launch of iGrill,      as the product joined Apple's MFi Program and garnered praise from The New York Times as, “the hottest product at Macworld.”

It was instrumental in the second-screen experiences I crafted for the Gemini Award-winning television series ICE PILOTS NWT, and every script and pitch package I developed at Gun Lake Pictures. It was the driving force behind each asset I built for TELUS, and informed high-stakes communications like Justin Trudeau’s briefing notes for his speech to the Vancouver Board of Trade, 

and the strategies I built for clients in the highly-regulated sectors of pharma and government. It's a truth that's never let me down.

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If you want someone to do something, you’ve got to make them feel something. 

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It's that simple.