Canadian freelance writer and journalist, (and archaeological dig illustrator) Gabby Peyton

Like so many creatives, my October guest host, Gabby Peyton, has many passions: writing, journalism, photography, food, travel, business, fine art, history…. But this freelance writer and journalist from St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, has found a way to pull them all together to build a life and a career that feeds her soul.

In this week’s episode of our Creative Canadian Women series I sit down to chat with Gabby about her career path and how she has found a way to bring together all of her passions and move back home to St. John’s to make a living and a life.

Gabby Petyon is a freelance writer and editor whose writing has appeared on CBC, USA Today, The Huffington Post, Eater, Daily Hive Toronto, Atlantic Business Magazine, Food Bloggers of Canada, Eat North and more. She is the restaurant critic for The Telegram in St. John’s and a former associate editor at Atlantic Business Magazine. She has worked as an archaeological dig illustrator multiple times in Turkey and for the last 8 years she has been chronicling her food and travel adventures on her website, The Food Girl In Town.

Listen To the Episode

Here’s a direct link to Episode 29 - or you can listen via the players below:

Like a lot of Canadian girls (myself included), when Gabby Peyton was growing up as a very young girl in Newfoundland, Anne Shirley was her kindred spirit. Like Anne, she wanted to be a writer, and maybe even a history teacher. At the age of 10, she wrote a newspaper (the whole paper) while spending Easter break with her grandparents. She “covered” the town where her grandparents lived - complete with interesting articles of “local interest”.

Somewhere along the path of growing up, the dream of being a writer fell behind and it wasn’t until she was doing her master’s degree in Art History that she started to feel the tug of the pencil drawing her back to thoughts of being a writer.

After finishing high school she went on to university to do her BA in History and French with full intentions of becoming a high school teacher herself. For somebody interested in the arts in Newfoundland at that time, it seemed like the best, most logical option. But during a trip to Greece, as part of an archaeological studies program, she realized she wanted to do something more after graduating. And that led her away from home to the University of Toronto to do her art history master’s degree. While she was in Toronto contemplated carrying on along the academic track - even going so far as to be accepted into the PhD program at The University of Victoria - a spot she ultimately turned down.

Digging In….

Gabby Peyton in Turkey 2017 in the field.jpg

But it was also at this point where she had an opportunity to go to Turkey to be part of the Cadir Hoyuk archaeological dig. When she realized that the garden spade she brought with her in her backpack wasn’t going to cut it she quickly fell into dig illustration. When her dig supervisor recognized she had a knack for it, Gabby was assigned to illustrating the artifacts that were uncovered while they were still in situ (still in the ground) as well as drawing pottery shards that had been recovered. So far she has spent three summers out on digs and hopes to do more.

After deciding not to pursue her PhD, Gabby left Toronto and headed to Halifax with her then boyfriend, now husband, Adam, while he went on to law school. That’s when she started her website, The Food Girl in Town and decided to head back to school once again - this time to do a Bachelor’s degree in Journalism at University of Kings College - Canada’s oldest chartered university.

The Beginnings of a Freelance Life

Her time in Halifax coincided with a period where the food blogging community in Nova Scotia was one of the most active and engaged in Canada. Bloggers like food photographer and recipe developer Kelly Neil and food stylist and restaurant blogger Kathy Darbyson (who now owns the Halifax restaurant Side Hustle Snack Bar) took Gabby under their wing and welcomed her into their community of supportive women. All three of them would also go on to write for the Salt Water Network of Atlantic Canada newspapers and Gabby suddenly found herself coming full circle from that early childhood dream of wanting to be Anne Shirley.

After they both finished their degrees, Gabby and Adam headed back to Toronto - it seemed like the right place to go for a young lawyer and a young journalist looking for more opportunities to spread their wings than they thought St. John’s could offer them. She had started pitching other blogs, often in the travel sphere, while in Halifax - hoping to get guest writing spots which later led to paid writing gigs. She jokes that she became “Hali-famous”, getting recognized in restaurants and becoming well know in the small but very robust food writing community. But once she landed in Toronto she found herself on the bottom rung of the ladder in a city full of aspiring writers and journalists that was more than a little intimidating.

So she dove into the food history niche, feeding her love of both eating and history, which gave her the opportunity to write for larger sites like The Daily Hive Toronto, giving her that all important by-line. It was also around this time that she started writing a regular column on Food Bloggers of Canada featuring “Iconic Canadian Foods” with many of those articles being picked up by teachers on Google Classroom to supplement Canadian history lessons. It was a field where there was a big appetite (pun intended) for the content but very few people were writing about it.

It was her blog, The Food Girl in Town, that helped her get started with pitching and that gave her some street cred when she landed in Toronto. People could see that she could, indeed, write and that she was passionate about food, travel, history and culture. Her pitching improved the more she did it (and she did a lot of pitching) and sometimes the no’s she heard were the biggest pitching lessons of all. (We’ll be talking about pitching your writing in a future episode with Gabby!). She slowly started to accumulate by-lines by writing for smaller publications, often for little or no money, just so she could put together that all-important portfolio that she hoped would lead to bigger gigs. And slowly it did as some work she did for Travel Zoo led to opportunities to write for Huffington Post and get that all important Huff Post byline.

Home Was Calling

While their life in Toronto was moving forward, Newfoundland was calling. They started to contemplate the opportunity for a better work/life balance for a new lawyer, a lower cost of living, being closer to family and friends and as Gabby says, she was seeing more and more people writing about Newfoundland - particularly the culinary and tourism scene - who weren’t from Newfoundland and it was irritating her. She knew those were stories she should be telling. There were very few active food writers in Newfoundland and it was a very tempting opportunity to dive in and make the niche her own.

A better work/life balance for Adam also meant that they could travel more which led to even more writing opportunities, not just in Newfoundland but all through Atlantic Canada and internationally.

Landing The Coveted Print Gig

Not long after moving back to Newfoundland, an opportunity came up with Atlantic Business Magazine - the only real business magazine in Atlantic Canada - for an associate editor post. And while business and finance might not have seemed an obvious fit for Gabby at first glance, it was an opportunity she couldn’t resist. It fulfilled a dream of steady job in the print industry - specifically in magazines, something she had always wanted.

She also saw an opportunity to bring more stories about small businesses - something she is very passionate about that lie at the heart of so many communities across Canada - to the pages of the magazine. While there she reinstated the magazine’s culture column, started a column called Let’s Do Launch that focused on young start-ups with just a handful employees and spearheaded a small business issue.

Back to Freelancing

By now, Gabby was feeling that she had the experience and portfolio under her belt that she could go out on her own and make a living as a freelance writer and journalist. When the food writer for the Telegram in St. John’s retired, she put herself forward for the job and landed it which allowed her to have a small steady income while still being able to write for other publications.

As we all know, 2020 hasn’t been a stellar year. Newfoundland kicked the year off with “snowmageddon” and then the global pandemic swept in on its heels, bringing a lot of the activity in food and travel to a grinding halt. But with the Atlantic Canada bubble proving to be quite successful at keeping Covid-19 cases at bay, opportunities have started to ramp back up and Gabby has been doing work for Destination St. John and diving into more food history writing.

The Kraft Dinner Show Down

Not long after returning to St. John’s, Gabby gathered her friends over and they conducted the Kraft Dinner Showdown which resulted in one of the most Canadian food articles I have ever read! The bought every brand of boxed mac and cheese they could get their hands on (ultimately they found 9 different ones), cooked them all up according to the box directions and did a taste test.

Who won? You’ll have to check out the article to find out but, it has become one of the most popular posts that Gabby has ever written on her blog! For me, it sums up who Gabby is - a writer, a food lover, a fan of pop culture and Canadian history, an entertainer and people person, and somebody who is ultimately curious about everything life throws at her but who doesn’t take herself too seriously.