Selected Writing

The Spirit Of Form
Though the paint is dried, the movement is alive. Inside Fabienne Verdier’s exquisite abstract works
(Luxury Magazine)

A Mobile Museum At Sea
When Frédéric Jousset wanted to build a bridge to the art world, he built a boat instead.
(Luxury Magazine)

Four Bouquets and One Bonsai, Thousands of Feet Under the Sea
A botanical artist surrenders his work to the ocean
(The New York Times)

Nat Bowen Cover Story
Vibrant and alive, prismatic and textural, the abstract artist’s work brings color to life layer by layer.
(Luxury Magazine)

Color Her World
The ocean, the human experience, and the ever-expansive vision of photographer Andrea Hamilton
(Luxury Magazine)

Perfect Place
Cinnamon Toast Crunch and the Afterlife: A long-distance chat with Lorde
(Billboard)

The Graduate
Maggie Rogers on her debut LP and stepping into ‘colors that take up space’
(Billboard)

Meet Makoto Azuma
Inside the artist’s subterranean laboratory in Aoyama, Tokyo
(GQ)

The King And I
A rare interview Elvis Presley’s personal jeweler
(Billboard)

Halsey And Charli XCX
From the stage to the dinner table, to the bathroom stall:
An uninterrupted conversation with two of pop’s most unfiltered provocateurs
(Billboard)

The Sod Of Music
Tracing the origins of the grass we stand on at music festivals
(NPR)

For The Love Of Women
Pedro Almodóvar on his new film, and the power of nuns and complex women
(Paper)

Some Girls
Keith Richards on the genesis of three songs
(Harper’s Bazaar)

Here’s The Beef
Kim Gordon, Chef Curtus Stone, and a Fred Flinstone-sized steak
(Billboard)

Born To Ride
The South of France with Jessica Springsteen and Zecilie the horse
(Robb Report)

A Chicken-Fried Friendship
Nathan Followill and Chef Jonathan Waxman smash the heck out of a pork tenderloin
(Billboard)

A One Time Little Mermaid Remembers Swimming with Esther Williams
Encounters with a synchronized swimming legend
(Vanity Fair)

The Bold And The Botched
No one said innovation was easy
(Robb Report)

Personal Writing

My Mother’s World

A daughter reflects on wanderlust, travel, and her mother’s life before triplets

Lost By Design

On losing and finding direction, over and over again

Experience

Read

Selected Dream Journal Entries

Background

Hi there, and thank you for stopping by.

Bios can sometimes feel like stilted snapshots.

There’s always more to the story.

For now, I’ll leave you with these pieces:

I am a screenwriter, storyteller, and triplet who grew up on the outskirts of a town named Boring in rural Maryland.

As a child, I was curious and empathic. I wanted to understand how the world was made, humans and human nature, and why certain perceived imbalances existed. I felt freest outside in the backyard, where my Dad kept a garden. I also felt freest in my mind, where I’d often see stories play out like movies—so many images, so many plotlines, so much color.

Before I learned how to read or write, I’d narrate these “mind movies” to my siblings. It felt to me like painting with words. So when I finally did learn how to put those words onto paper, there was no stopping me. By seven years old, I was cutting gym class to write letters to the White House.

If the acorn theory—the idea that people enter their lifetime already encoded with the unique potential that is theirs alone to realize—holds true, these early moments were like faint etchings of some of the work I have since gone on to do.

My first feature-length film, THE OFFER, is a magical-realist thriller that is currently in pre-production with Killer Films (Past Lives, Carol, Still Alice). I co-wrote it with two wildly talented women, and the process reawakened that childhood movie-making mind that had long gone dormant.

At present, I’m writing my first television series.

My career as a journalist has been guided mostly by curiosity. I’ve gotten chefs and musicians to let me interview them as they’ve battered chicken-fried pork. I’ve tagged along with artists in search of precious obsidian glass, and have spent entire days on sod farms investigating where the ground we stand on at music festivals comes from. I love asking questions and I love not knowing where the answers will lead.

My writing has appeared in The New York Times, NPR, GQ, Variety, and Longreads among other outlets, and my essays have been finalists in the Tucson Festival of Books Literary Awards and the New Millennium Writing Awards.

Prior to freelancing, I spent a decade steeped in the world of magazine editing, working as the Senior Features Editor at Harper’s Bazaar, and as a Senior Associate Editor at Billboard. I was mentored by the late Vanity Fair contributing editor Patricia Bosworth, who quite literally invited me into “the party” (she threw the best literary shindigs at her Hells Kitchen apartment). She’s the one who told me: “Of course you can go live your life as a writer” when I doubted it could be a real, lived path.

Much of my current creative work connects the threads of spirituality, ecology, and the vast living web we are a part of. I am fascinated by the human condition, our relationship to death and dying, and the way the earth, dreamscapes, myth, and the medium of film all speak in metaphor—in image. I believe firmly that stories are also acorns that contain within them enormous potential. Rendered to their fullest expression, stories are capable of seeding a more expansive future and nurturing a more understanding humanity.

Most of my time is spent in Maryland, a place I love for its fern-tessellated forests and for the way its green summers seem to reach back into deep time. If I sneak away, it’s often to the wild, unmoored beaches of Galicia on the western coast of Spain. I think that nook of the world is something of a soul home for me.

For editorial inquiries, you can reach me here:

brooke.victoria.mazurek@gmail.com

Sound + Central Visual recorded at a brook in front of my paternal great grandmother Julia’s home in Kam'yanytsya, Ukraine.

Handwriting from my maternal grandmother, Pearl.