Marianne J. McNee grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut, and knew, from a young age, that she loved to write. In elementary school, her most favorite class was Language Arts, as they called it back then. She joined the staff of her high school newspaper, the Beak. At Creighton University, she received a BA in Journalism, and won an award for best feature article in the Creightonian, the campus newspaper. While there, she also worked for KETV, the ABC television affiliate in Omaha, Nebraska and reported seven on-air stories.
Returning to New York after college, Marianne launched an eight-year career in advertising, working for William Esty Company. She spent two-years in media planning, and six-years in account management, supporting iconic consumer product brands and new business development. She very much enjoyed woking on the launch of 1-800-Flowers.
After leaving advertising and starting a family, Marianne began freelance writing, both for personal initiatives as well as in support of various organizations. This included her first paid byline in the now defunct Tidings Magazine, as well as writing for the American Red Cross and The Westport Young Woman’s League. In addition, for four years she edited the local elementary school’s PTA newsletter, as well as provided feature article and press releases promoting the award-winning Coleytown Company middle school theater productions (Grease, High School Musical).
Following a move to Florida in 2016, she immediately began writing in support of the Ponte Vedra High School Marching Band, and for a local golf group, publishing articles in the Ponte Vedra Leader, Ponte Vedra Recorder and the Florida NewsLine.
For the past year-and-a-half, Marianne also has been been taking on freelance clients, and has been publishing pieces in Naples Illustrated magazine, the local Ponte Vedra papers, in addition to the Valdosta Daily Times.
Over the past two years, Ms. McNee has won two Florida Magazine Association’s Charlie Awards, both in the Best Writing: Service Feature in the Consumer Circulation over 20K category. The first was a 2021 Silver Award for her debut piece published in Naples Illustrated, entitled Take Flight – Birding in Naples. In 2022, she likewise won a Silver Award for a feature published in Naples Illustrated, entitled Felines of the Floridian Forest. Ms. McNee especially enjoyed writing about the current status of the Florida panther, and the multi-pronged approach to protecting this endangered animal in the face of habitat pressures.
Marianne McNee enjoys writing feature articles, profiles, business-related content, sports organization news, historical fiction, human interest stories, personal and organizational events or appointments, travel destinations, ancestry research and other subjects.
While on a bit of a back burner right now, one of her personal projects over the past several years has been researching and writing the story of my mother’s WW2 job in wartime propaganda at the Office of War Information in London and Paris, and how this experience shaped her life. Although many of the posts in this blog drill down on aspects of her OWI work, she’s exploring this period more fully in her yet-to-be published book entitled, The French Desk: A Brooklyn Gal’s Journey into Wartime Propaganda. A first draft has been completed, but Marianne is trying to scale back the scope of the treatment as she works on a newer version.
Marianne and her husband Bill live in northern Florida and summer in Rhode Island.