carrie foley
CONTENT
WRITER, JOURNALIST, AND CREATIVE
CREATIVE PORTFOLIO
Has Formula 1 Stopped Being About Racing?’ for Divebomb Motorsport, 2023
About Me
My name’s Carrie Foley, I’m a freelance writer based in Gloucestershire, UK. A recent graduate from the University of Gloucestershire with a joint BA Honors in English Literature and Creative Writing, I’m thrilled to be beginning my professional content writing career.
I have been a passionate storyteller since I was a child, and have known for pretty much my whole life that I wanted to be an author. As I’ve gotten older, this passion has broadened from dreaming up fictional worlds, to finding connection with people through real conversations. Over the last year I have been getting my teeth into digital journalism, working with independent magazines as well as launching my own personal website for my essays and musings.
As far as personal passions go, I’m an avid film fan--I unintentionally have the eight rules of ‘Fight Club’ memorised--and amateur collector of Vogue magazine. I love browsing Sunday markets, hosting game nights with my friends, going to art galleries, and trying to take photos that tell a story.
‘Summer Series’, 2023
‘ODE TO ALL THE WOMEN I KNOW’
Growing up, I felt somehow outside of my womanhood. It didn’t feel like it was mine to begin with, nor was it mine to claim. I attribute that to a great deal of internalised homophobia, comphet and just general teenage unhappiness with who I was. I was always a tomboy growing up and I was happy that way. I was most certainly not a ‘girly girl’ and I never wanted to be. My mother was always trying to force me into things with frills and lace and scratchy knitted jumpers and shiny shoes that pinched and ugly pink floral patterns To this day I can’t wear anything with even the suggestion of a frill. My tomboy-ism was most likely a direct rebellion against the godforsaken frills.
Throughout my teenage years I remained that way--any attempt at femininity really did make me feel like a pig in lipstick. I rejected symbols of femininity at every turn: no pink, no nails, no skirts if I could help it (I wore my school uniform very begrudgingly), no pop music, no boys. No boys. When I was 14 or 15 I figured out that I was a lesbian, and that only made my relationship with my femininity worse. I didn’t know how to be a woman without men at the centre of it. I’m sure you’re familiar with the quote from Margaret Atwood: “You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman”. What was all this for, if not for Atwood’s internal male voyeur? And what was there for him if I couldn’t be what he wanted? Men have their fists around society’s necks and anyone who doesn’t--or cannot--be a smooth part of it does not belong. I did not belong. I was Other It took me a long time to evict my male voyeur and understand that my queerness would never, not for a moment, take away from my womanness
Sometimes it feels like a lot of female connection and solidarity is directly because of a man. Because of a man’s ignorance, because of a man’s abuse, because of a man’s power. We stand together because we need to protect each other from men. I wonder if female connection would always feel so potent otherwise, if it only exists because of our pain. Would women still share knowing looks, would they still sit next to one another on an empty train carriage with a drunk man at the other end of it? I wonder what female connection absent from a male reign of terror would look like, and then I think of being in school sitting on the carpet, and the girl behind you starts playing with your hair. I don’t think there is anything more the epitome of girlhood and innate female connection than that. 2023 was a great year for the resurgence of ‘girlhood’, and led to so many discussions around what girlhood is and what our fondest memories of it are. The best part of it was how innocent and genuine it was, completely separate from interactions with men. My favourite recent example of pure female connection is when Barbie released in cinemas and for weeks, little girls and teenage girls and young women and older women all poured to the cinemas head-to-toe in pink. In the UK especially we are, most of the time, notoriously miserable and antisocial people, but during those weeks I witnessed so many “hi, Barbie!” exchanges between perfect strangers. People were genuinely beaming. It was a beautiful reminder of the intrinsic goodness that exists, and how people really are just people. Girls really are just girls, and they always will be.
This International Women’s Day, I’m thinking about all the women who I am so lucky to know, and to have crossed paths with over the last year. I’m thinking about my friends, and the circle of constant feminine energy I am able to have around me: I live with three other women and it’s allowed me to heal my own relationship with femininity--it no longer feels inauthentic, and I finally feel like the woman I am. Part of that is surely just part of growing up, but I firmly believe my girls’ house has had a huge impact. Living with women who are entirely themselves, comfortable in their womanhood and what that means for them individually, no matter if it looked different to each other, always encouraging me to do the same. Our girls’ house means constant Friends reruns, it means outfit hauls and try-ons and shared makeup and clothes and cups of tea and ‘love you!’’s a hundred times a day. It means a bathroom overflowing with haircare and skincare products and the upstairs always smelling of Snow Fairy by Lush and pre-date hype and post-date debriefs and crying and dancing and singing and love, always love. Of course it runs so much deeper than that, too: for the first time my femininity and my queerness have been able to coexist and it is my girls’ house that has nurtured it, has welcomed it in Watching my partner be embraced as ‘one of the girls’ and, for the first time, having people actually recognise two women in a relationship as two women, healed so much of the internalised homophobia towards myself that I was still carrying from adolescence. I’m thinking of my best friends, old and new. I’m thinking of the girls I grew up with. The daisy chains on the playground, the horror movies at sleepovers, the baby blue nail polish, the first crushes, the arguments, the makings-ups. Over the years we split off, all over the country now and worlds away, but I still think of them on their birthdays There is nothing in this world like the friendship between young girls and I don’t believe that love or loyalty can ever really go away I’m thinking of the women I know now, the women who I am planning futures with, whose hair I have held back in the club bathroom and who have held back mine in return. The women who I have met for coffee the morning after the worst nights of my life, and who have so gently set the world right again with just a few comforting words. We’re not huggers, but I always look for my best friend first when I enter a room She always leaves the window seat free I think love can be as simple as that I’m thinking of women who were perfect strangers When I worked in a convenience store which people staggered into on their way home from the bars, some were kind and some were less so. Men, drunk and hungry-eyed, liked to leer over the counter at me as I rung up their cigarettes. After a particularly busy weekend which drew lots of rich and boozed-up men into town, two separate women made sure to ask if I was doing alright. None of the men I worked with had. I won’t forget how genuine their question, and the kindness in their eyes, was. I was, in fact, doing alright, and most of my customers hadn’t been as awful as I’d feared they might be Regardless, the sense of mutual understanding was powerful and I knew that they were genuinely checking in Their kindness all but made me cry in the breakroom afterwards. They said it with their eyes, they didn’t need to ask me at all for me to understand. I’m thinking of those women for protecting me, and I’m thinking of the many other kind strangers I have met: girls complimenting each other’s outfits in the street; the older women who have shown me their jewellery and talked passionately with me about how stacking is an art; little girls and mothers and girls my age and girls a few years older so ready with real advice
Every single woman I have ever met has been a mosaic of every single woman she has ever met. Womanhood is community. The ability to nurture such a community and understand exactly what female connection means in your life is a gift. I am so glad to be a woman, and to have such powerhouses and such kind women in my life. There is no ‘wrong’ way to be a woman. (You don’t even have to wear frills!) You need only to know who you are. And if you don’t know yet? Look at the women around you Then you will know
‘Love Letter to Pittville’, 2024
Divebomb Motorsport
‘OPINION: HAS FORMULA 1 STOPPED BEING ABOUT RACING?’
Formula 1 can be represented by one word: passion People don’t just like this sport, they fall completely and utterly in love with it. Something about it is irresistible, appealing to petrolheads, adrenaline junkies, and racing nostalgia lovers alike. Once you’re in, you’re in.
For many of us, we grew up watching it with our dads. We’d happen to be sitting in the living room floor, doing whatever eight-year olds do with their Sundays, and he would turn the telly over to a Grand Prix I wouldn’t have been able to tell you much else about the sport back then, but I could have drawn the Monaco track with my eyes closed.
In all honesty, I forgot about it for a long time. It’s only in the last couple of years that I started paying attention to it again. The beauty of this sport is that it is everywhere. It took me less than a year to catch up on everything I had missed, to find out everything I needed to know (including the fact that many of the drivers I watched as a child were still racing!)! There is a conversation to be had about fan culture and the treatment of drivers and the people around them -- all real people -but gatekeeping based on how long someone has been a fan, or what started it all for them, is not it.
The way in which Formula 1 is viewed has changed, as has just about everything now social media, television and broadcasting has completely transformed and evolved. The Internet is the way forward, and now anyone can hear about it and find out more with a single tap and three minutes of their time It is certainly this online age that has led to Formula 1’s massive growth of popularity, and perhaps it is also why people are becoming unhappy with their perceived “authenticity” of new fans, because it is difficult to believe someone could find out so much in such a small amount of time, when others have spent their whole lives doing so. Let me ask you this: isn’t the whole point of the Internet accessibility? If this sport is something you love and think is beautiful, why wouldn’t you want others to have an opportunity to fall in love with it like you did?
The new style of conversation around Formula 1 is fun, allowing drivers to be more interactive and involve fans more. There’s less of a disconnect: with their active social media presences, drivers aren’t just larger-than-life legends. We are increasingly being reminded that they are just real people. Extraordinarily lucky, extraordinarily talented, but ultimately normal people.
With this increased interaction, however, comes an element of invasion. People feel more entitled to know about drivers’ personal lives On-track conflicts become gossip that leads to deep-dives into those drivers’ entire history with one another. Hounding a driver’s rumoured girlfriend, or gossiping about a driver’s personal issues or traumatic events like it’s nothing is concerningly rife. It’s invasive and not at all representative of what fans should be.
If only we put our energy into respecting real people’s privacy and reducing this invasiveness rather than agonising over who is and who isn’t a real fan based on whether or not they have watched Drive To Survive, maybe a more productive conversation about fan culture could be had.
In some ways, then, apprehension towards how the fanbase of Formula 1 is changing is founded: drivers are being turned into celebrities and treated like fictional characters, and that is where the line is becoming blurred
There’s nothing necessarily wrong with innocent edits or fanfictions, but it can quickly become disrespectful, and that is where an issue arises. As with any celebrity or person in the public eye, boundaries will inevitably sometimes be overstepped. People, especially younger and more impressionable fans, must always be reminded that these are real people. Be careful and respectful with what you are saying, reading, writing, or putting out there. Especially if the subject of these things has already stated that it makes them uncomfortable Even if they haven’t, it’s easy to use common sense. The key word here is respect. There is a line that we should be careful to never cross.
Otherwise, there’s nothing wrong with liking the sport because you like the people behind it. We all know that the passion surrounding Formula 1 is a huge part of why it is so great and passion is human. People and their stories, their motivation, and their individual passion is why we are so hooked by the sport, because we care about them It feels like there is something to lose
Consider Niki Lauda, for example. His story is incredible, and that gritty resilience represents the heart of Formula 1. As does Aryton Senna’s, as does Schumacher’s, Fangio’s, Hamilton’s… so don’t ever try to tell me that the people aren’t important. Being “in it for the drivers” is a good thing, and it’s the natural thing, and it doesn’t for a moment mean that you’re not “in it for the racing.”.
A particular point of concern is that many of these fans being criticised are teenage girls The problem then stops really being about fans and starts becoming about the rampant misogyny surrounding women in the world of motorsport. Teenage girls have mastered the Internet, and they are at the heart of Formula 1’s growing online presence. The well-deserved huge popularity gain we have seen for the sport we love so much? We owe it to teenage girls, and when their love for the sport is made so abundantly clear through what they are doing, they deserve to be taken seriously.
Unfortunately, not everyone seems ready to accept that women can be interested in the sport, and can care about a driver’s racing story, without it being only because they think a driver is attractive. This is the kind of ignorance that we must drive out of our sport.
Everyone who loves Formula 1 does so because they fell in love with the racing, with the passion, with the stories. It’s about time we acknowledge that we are all here for the same reason: we love Formula 1, and it loves us back
Prospective Project: Digital Magazine
I’ve been inspired by the growing digital journalism and ‘zine’ community, taking particular inspiration from WILFREADS, created by Pauli Sprenger, and SERVICE95, founded by Dua Lipa. I want to take my personal project writing a step further, and turn it into a brand. Hence WEIRDGIRL, a prospective new digital magazine, drawing on the typical styles and standards of print magazine such as ‘Vogue’, blending high-end fashion and styling with current internet culture and conversation topics The world of fashion journalism and print magazine has always been, in my view, one of class and high-end stylisation: what might now be likened to the ‘clean girl’ aesthetic. My aim with WEIRDGIRL is to bring such magazines closer to everyday people, making the content more accessible and personally relevant.
Combining fashion journalism elements, in a manner reminiscent of 2010's internet nostalgia such as ‘haul’ videos and similar content, as well as media, culture such as that found in ‘Vogue’, WEIRDGIRL will blend the old and the new and cater to a new market. Created “for the girls that grew up weird”, it will centre heavily on ideas of ‘girlhood’ and femininity, queerness, alternative fashion, as well as film, TV, and literature that reflects similar themes. The concept of female friendship and connection is one which is very important to me, and a key element of WEIRDGIRL would be collaboration with other writers with a shared passion One such piece would be an interview with the women in my life about what ‘womanhood’ means to them, with their answers blended together to provide a diverse and enlightening insight into the how multiple generations of women identify with the concept of ‘womanhood’ and what it might mean. WEIRDGIRL will centre women’s narratives to provide a refreshing and like-minded publication for its audience.
WEIRDGIRL would be published via Substack, and have a connecting Instagram, Twitter and Tiktok page for interaction, reach and engagement.
The ‘Home’ page of wilfreads.substack.com
FARID Magazine
‘ON TURNING TWENTY’
I went into 2023 knowing it would be a big year. Somewhere in the middle of 2022, my mindset shifted. Maybe this was the last stage of my frontal cortex development— maybe it was something else entirely, who knows? Either way, it was the first time I have really, genuinely not recognised the person I was at the start of the year. And I really liked the person I was becoming. I knew that in 2023 I would be turning twenty. It loomed over me definitely — but even so, I can’t say it felt like a bad thing. In a way, you mentally prepare for turning twenty months before it happens It’s like: OK, the last two years have been a practise, just dipping your toes in. Now it’s for real. You’re going to be an adult this year. It’s time to grow up. Are you ready to grow up?
And twenty does feel different It was instantaneous I woke up on my birthday and came downstairs, picking my way through the aftermath of a party and thought, “I’m actually a grown woman now.” I remember how right in my body I suddenly felt. There’s something gratifying about knowing you’ll no longer have your every thought or want dismissed because you’re a teenager, and can’t possibly know what you’re saying You’re an adult now, and people have no choice but to take you a little more seriously I walk down the street now and wonder what I look like to other people; if I still look sixteen, or if they recognise me as an adult. And I’m learning a lot about myself. I’m learning to listen to my body, to recognise what things mean I have more freedom now to not stay somewhere that is bad for me I’m realising that you can’t really get away with the things you could get away with at seventeen. You need fuel, and you need rest, and you need sun, and you need to move. You can’t run on fumes the way you used to thank God.
I make my water with ice and cucumber slices now because it feels fancy, even though it’s only water I’ve figured out what works for my skin, and established a consistent skincare routine. I’ve started going to the gym because nurturing your physical health in turn nurtures your mental health. I feel a hundred times better for it I have rules, like ‘never leave the house on an empty stomach’ and, ‘never go more than a day without getting out of the house’. I switched my phone to light-mode because the harsher screen makes me more aware of it, makes it harder to get sucked into hours of mindless scrolling. I make decisions because I know what is best for me I’m re-learning my relationship with femininity, because for many years I didn’t know how to be queer and feminine without feeling like I was lying I’m not lying I’m talking to my family. We’re learning how to live. I’m teaching them how to understand, and they are trying.
I think the point I’m trying to make is: ageing is not something to be afraid of Ageing is an incredible thing, and with every year I feel a million times surer of who I am than I was during the previous one. Media has made women terrified of ageing, terrified of losing the body or the face they had at sixteen, and it is a vicious thing Twenty is still so young, you have so much time to keep learning and keep growing and your time isn’t running out. Your time still won’t be running out at thirty, or forty, or even fifty. Your interests will change, your personal style, your mindsets and opinions may change, but that is not something to shy away from. Honour yourself the way you deserve to, by leaning into it. Change is something to be embraced, because with change comes growth Your twenties are for learning who you are. Learn how your mind works, and how best to help it. Relearn looking after your physical health without all that toxicity that was around it when you were younger. Nourish and strengthen yourself so that you can feel stronger, so that you can have complete trust in your body and your mind Wanting to work on yourself doesn’t have to come from a place of self-hatred. You know where you were at fifteen years old, and chances are you know you deserve better than to ever go back there again. Thanks to you, you never have to. Take care of yourself. Let love guide the choices you make, including the choices you make for yourself
For my full works, please visit: carriefoley.substack.com linktr.ee/carriiefoley and @foley.oh on Instagram
For business enquiries, please contact:
carrie.foley.business@gmail.com or call: 07951 734010