About
Varina Buntin Willse’s career spans 25 years and covers a range of industries, including writing & publishing, education, and strategic branding & communications.
With degrees from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Oxford University in England, she launched her career working in the magazine industry in New York, first at Conde Nast Women’s Sports & Fitness and then at Harper’s Bazaar, where her team of two people was assigned to develop and launch the brand’s inaugural website. Thus, she found herself at age 22 at the forefront of digital marketing and branding.
Varina has continued to work in that space, collaborating for the past ten years with Nashville-based branding firm, Circa, to help nearly 100 different organizations create and/or refine their brand strategy and narrative. Her sweet spot is asking the right questions to help businesses flesh out their mission, vision and value proposition to drive differentiation in the market while staying true to their core identity.
Foundational leadership is a through-line in Varina’s work. Not only has she helped numerous businesses move from ideation to articulation, she also served on the Administrative team that was tasked with establishing the new Ensworth High School in Nashville in 2004. Her job responsibilities ranged from working in admissions to hiring charter faculty members to determining the school uniform. Once the doors opened, Varina served as a member of the English faculty and later as an Essay specialist in the Office of College Counseling.
In 2016, she founded her own writing firm, Willse Ink, which specializes in legacy books for organizations and high-net-worth families. She has written five books, all private commissions except for Home To Us: Six Stories of Saving the Land, which was published in 2012 and which earned her two awards in the category of regional nonfiction. She has recently re-launched her Substack platform, Ponder Effect, which encourages the integral work of inquiring and discerning hearts, and she is currently seeking publication for a book of spiritual nonfiction with representation by Don Pope at Pope Commons.
Perhaps most significantly, Varina is the wife of Walker and mother of three daughters, Pierson, Mary Varina and Campbell. Her most common piece of advice to them is: Let your light shine.
Featured Work
Home To Us: Six Stories of Saving the Land
Home To Us: Six Stories of Saving the Land offers six in-depth portraits of families who have made the decision to protect their land. Though regionally specific to Middle Tennessee, the scope of the book’s meaning and relevance extends more widely to the South and to the nation as a whole. Ultimately, it is a tapestry of stories—woven beautifully through interlacing words and images—that explores the timeless and essential connection between people and the physical environments they call home. The fundamental question driving the work is, Why do certain people decide to forego maximizing profits in order to protect their land? The initial answer is that these people believe that there is nothing more valuable, not for their children and grandchildren nor for the nation as a whole. They choose their legacy to be in the form of hills that please the eye and soil that yields food and grasses that nourish wildlife. To read this book is to meet and get to know these wonderful people. It is to comprehend what motivates a human to be forward thinking and selfless in a world too often defined by instant gratification and greed. It is to appreciate the land around us and the regular folks who have secured its existence. And, it is to come ultimately to the same understanding that they have: The land is bigger than us. It’s bigger than money. It’s bigger than time. And it has to be protected.
