Many of my beloved readers and clients might not know that before I became a REALTOR®, I was employed in the publishing industry for a number of years. I majored in Advertising at the University of Texas and was part of the creative sequence. While I complemented my major with a concentration in Business Foundations, my heart leans to the creative. My first "real" job was as an advertising sales assistant in San Francisco for a premier West Coast publishers’ representative firm. While it put me in the magazine business, it was not what I was seeking to do. I wanted to write and be on the creative side of the business, not in sales. To get more relevant experience, I wrote copy for a start-up website delivering online content until finally landing the job I wanted--an editorial position at a magazine. I worked as an editorial assistant at
Golf Magazine in New York, mostly doing research, copy editing and small writing assignments but occasionally getting to interview famous
PGA players and actors with a penchant for golf. It was great! But after two-and-a-half years I decided I'd had enough of the long New York winters. When I moved back to Texas, I helped launch
Houston Magazine. I wrote articles and eventually became the associate editor doing a number of things, but mostly writing and editing. It was a fun job with good people and was a great way to reconnect with my hometown. I just didn't feel that Houston offered the progressive career in magazines like New York did, and I knew I would not be moving back to New York soon. Don't get me wrong: I heart New York! But my roots were planted in Texas, and that's where I saw them growing old.
My roots also have so much real estate in them, from my grandmother to my mom and now almost everyone related to us! So my blog is a way for me to merge that creativity that I enjoy with my real estate career. But sometimes I feel stifled by the fact that my blog is about real estate. I want to blog about real estate, home maintenance and the like, but I don't want to feel boxed in anymore. Real estate is my career now, but it is not everything I am. I like photography, eating out, bookstores, interior design, window shopping, antiquing, old buildings, baking, etc., etc.
So, much like the Future Mayor of Cherryhurst's blog post, "
We Need to Change," I hereby declare that H-Town w/Emily Covey will from this day forward be called Magnolia City.
Magnolia City? Yes. It is one of the earliest of Houston’s many nicknames.
The Texas World, a newspaper first published in 1900, is said to have labeled Houston
"the Magnolia City," but the nickname had been in use among the locals since the
1870s. Areas of east Houston, particularly
Harrisburg and
Magnolia Park, were once natural magnolia forests that were wiped out by
urban sprawl by the 1920s.
To me, the title represents not just where I am writing from and where I am working, but what Houston once was, what it is now, and what it can be. I am hoping that this change will allow me to blog in a more free-wheeling style--and more often. I'm not sure exactly what this means yet, but I hope it works out better for all of us. I feel better already!
