Stories inform who we are: both the stories we are told and carry with us, and those we create and share with others. The creation and telling of a story is the invention of a whole world. Through my collaboration with The Creative Process, I am creating opportunities for new, unheard stories to come into being and to helping share these invented "worlds" with others.

I recently completed a year-long story-collecting project in collaboration with my grandparents. Every week for a year, I emailed them a question which I wanted them to answer for me. These questions ranged from things like "What were your grandparents like?," to, "What are your biggest regrets as parents?," to, "What questions do you wish you would have asked your parents when they were still alive?," to, "What stories you were told as a child have had the greatest impacts on your adult life?" They answered these questions via email, which helped me to stay in close contact with them while I was away at college, and at the end of the year I compiled their answers, many of which were many pages long, into a book. This project has been more rewarding than I could have ever imagined, and the stories they so graciously shared with me will be as valuable to the generations to come as they are to me now.

I do not currently have any plans for future creative projects, but in a couple of months I will be beginning my work on a year-long senior thesis for NYU's English Honors program. 

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Many of my fondest memories from my childhood come from springs and summers spent outdoors. Growing up in Minnesota, spring and summer was our reward for bearing through the long, bitter winter. As soon as the ice melted, we would spend as much time as we possibly could outside because we knew the warm weather always came and left too quickly. We swam and canoed in the lakes, hiked in the woods, bird-watched, played with bugs in the dirt, swatted at mosquitos, and sat around the campfire singing songs. That these experiences which were for me so formative will not be accessible to future generations, and are even inaccessible to much of today's youth already depending on the extent of environmental destruction which has already been done where they live, is heartbreaking and disturbing.

The sustainability pledge I have taken for myself is to make my own lifestyle as sustainable as I can, sacrificing convenience and resources to the extent that I am able, in honor of those who do not have the privileges and resources needed to be able to make those choices. I pledge to continue to educate myself on the topics of sustainability and food production, environmental racism, and the interconnectedness of capitalism and climate destruction. Lastly, I pledge to decenter white, wealthy, and Western voices and to keep marginalized communities at the forefront of my learning.