Mary Stone

I am an adjunct writing professor at St. John Fisher University and Rochester Institute of Technology in NY, where I teach students how to use research in their college writing. 

I'm a former newspaper beat reporter and magazine editor. 

On the side, I am a freelancer for local print publications and interpreter for French-speaking African patients in Rochester.

That's the short version.

The long version starts in my twenties. I spent them in France as an undergrad, then in England getting my MBA and then back to France, where I became a naturalized citizen. I worked in Paris, first as a freelancer for fashion and cosmetic trade magazines at Condé Nast, and later as a project manager for a communications agency serving mainly European luxury brands.

By 30, I wanted to come home, which at the time felt as impossible as moving to France had been a decade before...

I was looking for a position where I could use my business and journalism degrees. I landed the perfect job at the Rochester Business Journal, where the editorial team at the time helped me develop my skills as a writer and investigative reporter. 

At the RBJ, I covered technology companies, architecture and engineering firms, the local media and publishing industry, the environment and half a dozen other beats, in addition to a handful of Rochester-based publicly-traded companies. I became skilled at translating complex technologies and concepts to non-experts.

At 40, I was channeling my energy and skills into POST magazine, a publication I helped develop to tell the story of an emerging economy in Rochester (after the fall of Eastman Kodak Co. and other key manufacturers). With two very talented partners and a team of passionate journalists, photographers, designers and illustrators, we put out more than 25 print editions. With photography and online video to complement the print edition, POST employed a documentary approach to capture the life and work of locals and the issues Rochester faces, such as poverty and unemployment. 

As a quarterly magazine, POST folded in late 2018, but I continue to use the magazine’s intimate style in my writing—where my assignments permit. 

While occasions are limited for me to write about the experience of poverty in Rochester, where nearly half of children live below the poverty line, the subject is central to courses I teach at St. John Fisher. In this way, students shed light on the problem through their own research and writing. 

Good writing, like research, is a recursive process. We research, think, write, rethink, rewrite, revise, refine and repeat. My aim, among others, is to show students good writing follows almost inevitably from a commitment to this process.