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Lotus Alumni Chat: Maria Del Russo, '12

Ava: Tell me a little bit about your career and your life post grad.

 

Maria: My career has kind of taken a couple of twists and turns since I graduated. I graduated in 2012 and I immediately started in editorial. I applied for a position at what is now the website PopSugar, or although, I guess they just rebranded to PS, so they were Pop Sugar at the time, they were hiring for beauty editor, and I had an internship at Women's Health while I was there at Manhattan College, and my editor there put me up for the job. I interviewed. I got it. I started, like, two weeks after graduation, and I was pretty much on the beauty editor path for a while. I was at Pop Sugar for two years, and then I went to Refinery 29 for two years. And during that time at Refinery, I had been playing around with, like, what kind of made a beauty article? This was during the time of like “it happened to me” journalism in women's media, like xoJane was huge. Refinery 29 was really kind of at its pinnacle at that point, and I just kind of started becoming the guinea pig. And so I would do all these, you know, mini challenges where I, you know, drank a gallon of water every day for 30 days to see what I did to my skin. And I was also dating at the time, so I would do these funny things where, like, I would only wear red lipstick on first dates, or, you know, just whatever it kind of was. It was such a fun time of the internet. I'm so nostalgic for that time, because you kind of just do whatever you wanted, and that type of essay writing got me on the path of, you know, a little bit more culture writing. 

I was doing sex and relationships for a while after I got laid off from refinery, I was a freelance writer for a good chunk of time. I published my first little book called Simple Acts of Love. I was the advice columnist for Playboy magazine for two issues. I published all over the place. I had a great career, and then covid happened, and a lot of that type of work shifted in major ways, especially given the other people of the country at the time, it was the summer of 2020, and people were less interested in hearing about a single girl running around New York not being able to find a date. So I really started to kind of dig into other avenues for myself, and that’s where I started really enjoying branded content work as well as commerce writing, um, you know, BDG and Shoppable articles and, you know, the strategist for The Cut, those were all really new around that time. They hadn't really built up into the behemoths that they are now. And I kind of got it on the ground floor doing that type of work. Because of my time in beauty, I also was able to keep really good contacts with brands and do a little brand work on the side. 

I eventually transitioned back to full time doing commerce, writing for Business Insider before transitioning fully over to branded content. I was at a newsletter called the Newsette for a little under a year, and I'm now at Betches Media. I run their branded content there. I found that doing this writing, which is really figuring out ways to incorporate brands into like, you know, our voice to be very fun. I really liked being a freelancer for as long as I was, it really gave me the ability to write in a bunch of different voices. And so I'm able to kind of graft the Betches voice on to, like, our brand partners, messaging priorities in this like, it's always like a fun little puzzle. And so now I'm responsible for all of the branded content that comes out of batches, which has also opened me up to be able to do my own writing. On the side, I have a newsletter called Sunday sauce, where I write about all the things that I used to love writing about when I was a full time writer um, as well as some recipes. I'm still cooking through, um, I grant my folk, my grandparents recipes, which is a lot of fun. And I just feel like I've, you know, I'm what, 12 years out of college, and I feel like now I'm finally in a place where, like, I'm able to do the thing that I love during my nine to five but my real passion, I'm able to kind of explore outside of my job, and it took me a really long time to find that balance, but I'm very happy to be here now having found it.

 

Ava: Do you think there's a boundary between what you consider your work writing, I guess in the past, when you wrote for a living, and your personal writing that you do on the side?

 

Maria: It's a very interesting balance to strike. I feel like when I was a little bit younger, I didn't really have a healthy balance between that, when you're writing personal essays, when you're doing that type of very inner exploratory writing, and trying to connect it to a larger cultural issue, when you're young, you just kind of, you have less. I feel like I had less of an understanding of my own boundaries. So I would really put it out there, everything that I wanted to do, and I would put it out there in the hands of other publishers. You know, not that I felt like I was used or manipulated in any kind of way, but like I didn't really have many people who were kind of telling me, like, ‘Are you sure you want to do this? Are you sure you want to write about, like, a one night stand that you had in Greenpoint in the summer of 2007? Is that actually something that you want to write about?’ 

And then I finally had one editor of mine. Her name was Laura, she was a former colleague of mine. She now works for the BBC, and I pitched – I can't even remember what it was, hard up for money. And I pitched her some type of very exploitive, exploitative essay. And she was like, I don't actually think you want to write this. And that really forced me to pause and think about what parts of myself I was kind of commodifying and selling to a publisher for them to make money off of. I'm sure I was getting paid for it, but at the end of the day, that is their IP now, it's not mine. And it was around that time that I was making the transition over to branded content, and I really realized that I wanted to have control over the narrative of my own life, and that was part of the reason why I really kick started the newsletter. Um, I had a following that really wanted to follow me, and I wanted to ensure that I was giving them, like, unvarnished writing. That's how I feel the best when I'm producing that kind of work, and so the newsletter really just kind of allowed me to be in control of my own destiny, in a way. 

Now, when I do freelance writing on the side, I don't do it that often, because I really like to do it with editors who I trust and editors who I feel like understand the the effort that goes into constantly mining your personal life like that, and really kind of take the care to help usher my work into the public. Otherwise, I would just so much rather write about myself on my own platform. And again, that was, like, a really hard lesson for me to learn. There are some articles that are like, in the deep recesses of the internet that I wrote when I was 26 just trying to make money because I was broke. And I like, cringe thinking about all the stuff that is out there that someone–  I recently got married in June, and my husband said that after we met for the first time, he did a Google of me, and he went down a rabbit hole of all my like, weird old articles, and he's like, I learned a lot about you before our second date. And like, I'm happy that I did, I cut my chops, but I'm really glad to have found that balance now, yeah, definitely.

 

Ava: You write about sex and relationships, which is a very personal and intimate thing. Is there anything that, as you've gotten older and you've learned a little bit more about the industry, there anything that you omit from your writing in terms of your relationship life?

 

Maria: I mean, I always like to say that when I was writing, I tried to achieve a type of practiced coyness where people would never really know the details of my sex life, but, like, they knew that I was having sex. That was kind of the length that I really wanted to go. I never really wanted to get super hard up into the details. I'm very jealous of people who can be very open like that, but that I was raised in an Italian-American Catholic family, and soI still carry a little bit of that guilt with me, butI don't think that I omit anything now. I think that I just approach the topic very differently, becauseI do have more experience now and I am the women who read my writing now tend to be a little bit younger than I am, and so I do feel like I have this responsibility to kind of say things to them that I wish that I knew, while also understanding that people are only looking for, what is it? They're looking for confirmation of their own already held beliefs. They're not actually going to change their mind based on what I'm saying. So like, what? What are the ways in which I can kind of talk about myself and my experience in a way that, like may help someone figure out something about themselves? I never want to be prescriptive. I never try to be coming from a place where I know everything, and I think that that was something that I was a little I, I was a little cocky back in the day. Now, being in my mid 30s, I realized that, not only do I not know everything, but I'm also, like, a privileged white woman living in New York, and so my experience is very different than a lot of other people's experiences. So I really it's not about like, omitting, it's just about carrying all that information in the back of my head while, like, also trying to get the point across. 

 

Ava: If you could go back in time and become a senior in college again, what is something that you wish that you could have known?

 

Maria: Well, I have, like a funny answer, and I have a not so – I have an actual answer, the first thing I would tell myself is, start posting your shit to Instagram, because you could be an influencer and make a million dollars. Like, I have friends who have more of a following than I do. And I'm kind of just like, I wish that I had had the foresight to do a little bit more of that. That's obviously like, you know, hindsight is 2020 but from a real point of view, I would say that you don't need – the thing that I feel like I did with my writing was I would write through my pain and publish in real time. I wish that in the past, I would have stopped myself and said, like, you are allowed to process things before you put it out into the world. Like you are allowed to, like, take a beat and figure out how you feel about it and be okay with the fact that your feelings may change. You don't need to constantly be updating about how difficult things are at the moment. If things are difficult, you can write through it, but you don't need to necessarily share that with the world in real time. You're allowed to experience things personally and then write about it. I feel like we are in an era now where information is just like, constantly coming at you and you feel like you have to share, share, share, and really put yourself out there. I do worry sometimes that, you know, people who are just coming up feel like they need to cry on camera, or, you know, really write through a breakup that they haven't actually processed yet in order to feel like they're contributing something and you are – writing about your pain and writing about your experiences and things that are happening to you is an incredible way to gain clarity and exercise that stuff from your mind. But you're also allowed to do it on your own time, like you don't need to write and publish and be doing it all in real time. Yeah, I would say that's probably what I would tell myself. Like, just take a breath and write it in your journal and then write an essay about it in two weeks and see how you feel. 

 

Ava: Many of our readers and members are aspiring journalists, myself included, both in the fashion world and beyond. Do you have any closing advice for us?

 

Maria: I would say my best advice is – what is my best advice? I would say that my best advice is to realize that there is no real linear path to this type of job. You know what I mean? I feel like the questions I get from young writers when they're coming up and stuff is “how did your career evolve?”, and “what did you do to get to where you are?” I literally just strapped my ass in and went along for the ride. The way that digital media has really changed things is that it used to be that you interned at a magazine, and then you made your way up through the ranks of that magazine, until you became a fashion director, and then, you were set – you know what I mean. This industry is ever changing. People are constantly trying to figure out what the next thing is. My best advice is to understand that your path may not look like other people's do on social media or when you're sitting at a networking event talking to them, but also know that everyone is kind of struggling, even the people who have the Gucci bags who are attending Milan Fashion Week. One of my dearest friends, she's the style director of Vogue.com. She is incredibly fabulous. During the Olympics, she was there. She did an amazing segment on the Today Show. She's incredible. She has a job. We joke all the time, that line from the Devil Wears Prada, ‘a million girls would kill for her job.’ And I know, because she is one of my dearest friends, that she has very hard days, like it is not as glamorous. You know what I mean? Like she has hard days where she questions, like, am I even good at what I do? So always keep that in the back of your mind. People may look like they're thriving, and they may look like they have everything, but, you know, they're probably not. 

And the way that I try to deal with that is when I see someone who I feel a little envious of, or who I think their career is going in a better direction than mine. Instead of like, stewing and Instagram stalking them two years into the past, I shoot them a message and I just say, “hey, I really kind of love what you're doing.” Or I invite them out to coffee or try and make a connection, instead of making up a story about this person in my mind. And the thing that has been interesting is that there have been times where I've reached out to people who I feel are doing so much better than me, and they'll respond back to being like, ‘oh my god, I love your writing. I'm such a fan. Let's get a coffee.’ So, you've made a connection, instead of going down this comparison rabbit hole. Um, it's hard. It really is. It's like, it's very dog eat dog. And the industry makes you think that all these people are your enemies, and that there's a limited amount of cake to go around, but there's plenty of opportunity for everyone. You know. You just have to find your lane.

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