Our work
Highlights of projects featuring the stories behind people making a difference in their companies and their communities
Alaska Airlines
Strategic Storytelling
The Woman in the Room: A Memoir
Publishing Consulting
Costco's 2025 Sustainability Report
Content Strategy
Inside Pike Place Market
Publishing Consulting
Our story
Denise Clifton founded Tandemvines Media to provide organizations and individuals with the strategic tools to celebrate, tell and own their stories.
For corporate clients like Alaska Airlines, Denise develops compelling written features and leads interviews at the heart of videos illuminating the unique stories driving the brand on its owned channels. The sharp editorial content she crafts for clients often becomes a resource for media outreach. Denise has also produced several books, including a visually compelling digital book for Pike Place Market, and in hardcover and paperback, The Woman in the Room: A Memoir for pioneering Seattle architect L. Jane Hastings.
Denise has a deep passion for telling the stories behind food, and she developed a two-year narrative project celebrating the alumni of Project Feast, a Kent, Washington-based nonprofit that provides immigrant and refugee cooks with professional culinary skills. She is also the author of Tables From the Rubble, which explores the role of San Francisco restaurants in the recovery after the 1906 earthquake and highlights a few from the time period still feeding the city today.
Before starting Tandemvines Media, Denise worked for nearly 20 years as an award-winning journalist and art director for the Seattle Times — giving her a foundation in leading collaborative storytelling projects that she continues to build on today.
Our approach
Your story is about you — your business, your people, your mission. The most important thing we do is listen. We learn about your goals, your strategies, your challenges, and most importantly, about you and the people at the heart of your work. Our role is to partner with you to strengthen and elevate your voice. So, when you share your story, everyone else will listen, too.
Strategic storytelling
We develop content initiatives, editorial calendars and communications plans that elevate how organizations tell their stories on their own channels, and we often lead projects that include both internal teams and external partners. We write everything from concise email newsletters to website copy to blog posts to longform magazine-style pieces — content that is amplified on social media and deployed as resources for media outreach. Learn more
Publishing consulting & editing
We create customized publishing plans for authors and organizations to share their stories and showcase their legacies in print and digital books. Our teams have produced books ranging from the visually rich history of Seattle’s legendary Pike Place Market to hard-hitting investigative journalism to a book of mini-crossword puzzles for aspiring cruciverbalists. Learn more
Video interview coaching & scripting
Denise loves helping people gain the confidence to share their stories in front of a camera crew. As a video interview coach, her expertise includes documentary-style interviewing, as well as scripting and crafting narrative shot lists. The best part is the process of collaborating with directors, videographers and production teams — and watching the star of the story shine.
Our book
Tables From The Rubble transports readers to San Francisco in the years just after the Great Quake of 1906. Amid the ruins, restaurants rose to feed the hungry and lead the recovery. Today a handful of the restaurants that opened at that time remain in San Francisco, serving customers in many of the same spaces they first opened and offering food and stories with a link to a century-old past.
Events highlighting Tables From The Rubble have included “taste of history” dinners, combining recipes from the book with a visually rich presentation and discussion.
Tables From The Rubble is available in paperback and a multimedia edition for Mac/iOS with videos, recipes, historic menus and an interactive map. Or buy it from our favorite San Francisco independent bookstores.