Elizabeth  C. Hutchison ’08

Writer for a lifestyle — Southern

To Elizabeth Hutchison, There’s certainly no place like the South. It’s a special place with a rich culture and colorful characters. As an assistant editor with the popular lifestyle magazine, Garden & Gun, Hutchison — or Hutch, as she likes to be called — is responsible for helping give a voice to the place she calls home.
Until her junior year, Hutchison was a marketing major before switching and graduating with a degree in English. She found herself feeling far more at home among the works of Jane Austen and J.K. Rowling than the numbers and lists of accounting. After taking a fiction- writing course, Hutchison knew that she belonged in a world of letters. There was also her creative inquiry class where she was part of the groundbreaking group that organized the University’s first Literary Festival. The festival has remained one of the biggest events of the year for the English department as well as for the arts community in Clemson.
It was in working with the Literary Festival that she recognized a gift for crafting a community through literary culture. When she interned in the summer of 2008 with Garden & Gun, Hutchison fell in love with the magazine industry, deciding that was what she would pursue after graduation.
Having grown up in Mount Pleasant, the opportunity with Garden & Gun meant a sort of homecoming. Inspiration still struck her at every corner; it seems to her that people have a story to tell and it’s up to her to help them tell it. Her columns such as “Good Eats” and “Belle Décor” cultivate a uniquely Southern focus that speaks to tens of thousands of readers.
Go to gardenandgun.com/blog/elizabeth-hutchison to peruse Hutchison’s writing for Garden & Gun.