Hello! My name is Helena and I'm a seeker & collector of stories at heart, and a writer, editor & journalist in practice.
For five years and counting, I’ve served as the editor of Newport Life Magazine, a publication covering the lifestyle and culture of the place I call home: Newport County, Rhode Island. Overseeing the curation and production of this publication, along with cultivating relationships with freelancers and community members, while also continuing to write features and profiles, is a dream job.
Newport is known for many things, but to me it is first and foremost home; Aquidneck Island is where I grew up, where I returned to after college, and where I have worked as a journalist and in local media ever since. Being able to share Newport’s stories — from the gritty to the gilded, the quirky to the bougie, the nautical to the nuanced — is something I love to do.
To learn more about Newport Life, visit the magazine’s website and follow along on social media. To read my editor’s notes — which I still first write by hand — click here. And for a full archive of what I’ve written lately, visit my Authory page.
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Before becoming editor of Newport Life, I spent several years freelancing for a number of publications in and around Rhode Island, including: Art New England, Edible Rhody, Newport Life Magazine, Newport This Week, Providence Business News, South County Life Magazine and The Newport Daily News.
For three years, from June 2015 to April 2018, I was the Features Editor for the Arts & Living section of The Independent newspaper, a weekly in South County, Rhode Island. And for seven years, from March 2011 to April 2018, I was a copy editor, page designer, and staff writer for The Newport Daily News, at the time a sister publication to The Independent and my hometown paper.
In addition to my journalistic work, I sometimes write essays that are a bit more personal and which veer from the usual AP style. One such piece, “The Ascent,” was published in the water-themed Issue No. 18 of Chautauqua Literary Journal (2021).
Following extended travels in the spring/summer of 2018, and in response to the quiet that resulted from the pandemic of 2020, I enrolled in a low-residency MFA program to explore writing in a different and more creative way. From summer 2020 to summer 2022, I was a student of the Newport MFA through Salve Regina University, where I dabbled in all things literary nonfiction.
Attempting to reconcile my journalistic brain with my literary being is an ongoing pursuit and work-in-progress — I’m forever writing & editing stories in my head, and usually existing somewhere in the overlapping gray space or lost in thought on the periphery.
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When not working (or on deadline), you can find me people-watching from my balcony, sipping a cappuccino at my favorite Italian cafe, walking around town (usually with my earbuds in, listening to one playlist or another), sitting at a bar with friends, lounging at the beach on summer weekends, or perhaps detouring to see the sunset over the harbor (and snapping a picture with my favorite filter, of course).
Want to chat? Have questions? Or a project to collaborate on? Send me a note via: helena [dot] touhey [at] gmail [dot] com