ABOUT ME
ROBBIE TARPLEY RAFFISH
It may be hard to believe, but it is difficult to write about myself. I have a LinkedIn page that shows my work history, and hundreds of writing samples across on this site and others.
​
“Really,” she thinks, “Shouldn’t my writing speak for itself?”
​
If it were only that easy. While you can read selected writings in my portfolio, you’ll likely want to know something about me before you reach out.
​
I have been a writer since before I could write. My mother once told me that as a small child I told her all kinds of stories about characters only I could see and hear.
​
Once I could hold a pen, I wrote poems, lyrics, school newspaper articles, research papers. I was first published in a book of student creative writings in middle school and I was hooked. I won an award for a series I wrote about Alcoholics Anonymous in my high school paper. I wrote and wrote and won some more awards and people kept telling me I was pretty good at it.
​
I spent the first decade of my career working for public relations agencies on accounts you likely know by name. It was a challenging, demanding and exciting. We wrote all day under exacting pressure and I loved it.
Then I went to work for a corporation for 10 months – and, plot twist – the management team was arrested and eventually went to prison for selling 'used' products as 'new' ones. Lost and without a job (I was not in any way involved in the legal misdoings) I was again fortunate. Many of the people I had worked for previously asked me to help them – PR, annual reports, direct mail, video – and I quickly had enough work to start my own agency.
Here I am, years later, still writing. I have branched into feature writing, scripts of all kinds, and a lot of management consulting for external, internal and crisis communication. My favorite book remains the dictionary, and my bliss is getting lost in the process of writing.