I’m Lois

I write features, essays + direct response copy. I'm a messaging Strategist and a Professional uncoverer of inconvenient truths.

I'm nothing if not painfully, embarassingly honest, so if you must know: I hate writing bios. If I could sum myself up in two tidy paragraphs I wouldn't have spent fifteen years refusing to call myself a writer.

My whole professional life has been an elaborate form of hiding. I wrote books that went on other people's shelves with their names on the spine. I wrote ads that sold eye-watering amounts of things for excruciating amounts of money I never saw. I got a first-class degree in journalism + strategic omms, took an MFA in creative writing, and introduced myself at parties as anything but what I was. Advertising executive. Digital marketer. Social media strategist. Copywriter, if I was feeling spicy. Never just, writer. That word was a trap door my family history told me not to fall through.

I come from the North West of England. Working class, loud at the dinner table, Irish on both sides a generation back. Where I grew up, "starving artist" was a warning. You used the phrase the way other families said "mind the road". So I did every adjacent version of the job, and none of the job itself.

I live in Costa Rica now. In a treehouse, in a rainforest, with a partner I met on holiday, two remarkable children I made with my very own body, who find me both embarrassing and fun, close enough to great, historical rivers that move exactly as fast as they feel like moving.

 It took fifteen years to put "writer" in my bio. Once I did, everything sharpened. These days I work in the narrow, strange overlap between direct-response copywriting and the kind of writing you hope someone might underline in a book. Advertising that could plausibly be art. Art that could plausibly be advertising. I help founders, writers, and people tired of sounding like everyone else say what they actually mean, in language you can't quite un-remember. I know the mechanics of "good" writing. I know how a paragraph earns trust. How a CTA earns a click that doesn't come with a receipt of regret. I also know what gets lost when everyone uses the same words in the same order, which is, more or less, everything interesting.

I don't know how you got here. I'm glad you did. There's quite a lot of writing going on over here. Some of it's even good.