Written by Madeleine Minks
Art by Lillian Anderson
Picture: a girl, eighteen, moving out for the first time in her conscious life. As she walks through the parking lot and up towards the dorm that will be her home for the next nine months, a cat with a limp trails her. His hips sway back and forth as he takes the weight on his bad leg, like a gently swinging pendulum. He is the first friend the girl makes at college, and she thinks if this is what it’s like, maybe college won’t be so bad.
I have a confession: the eclipse terrified me. This might not sound surprising or even remotely unique of an experience, but it’s something that has deeply frustrated me because almost everyone around me seemed to have a mostly positive experience. As a space-obsessed optimist, I was hoping to have a beautiful, awe-inspiring, life-changing event. Instead I had a panic attack and a dissociated sense of having witnessed something cool.
When totality ended, the friends I was with must have gone their separate ways; I have a vague recollection of shared goodbyes and then teetering, alone, towards the dining hall. When I got there I couldn’t eat, couldn’t even sit down. I spent maybe two minutes there, floating from station to station, aware of all the people around me and yet feeling like either they or I wasn’t really there. I turned and left and must have gone back to my room; I remember collapsing on my bed like a puppet with its strings cut, craving normalcy, craving the pen.
I needed to write what had happened and what I was feeling. This is what I know–feel, preserve, and make sense of. And yet moving was a monumental task.
As I lay there, I must have grabbed my phone at some point, because a series of text messages between different people led to an open invitation to do work in a study room in the library. Somehow I made my way up there and shuffled in. Five of my friends who had watched the eclipse were there, and two more joined shortly after. It was eight of us crammed into a six-person room, giggling and joking and writing even as we were all clearly stunned from what had happened only an hour before. The partial had barely ended when I left my room, and yet the experience was slipping away with the moon.
I knew everyone there, in more ways than one. That’s the thing about a small school with an even smaller number of writers; you get to know each other and find out you had a class together two years ago and have three mutual friends. In there was my best friend, her roommate from freshman year who was also in my major, another friend in my major who also shared my minor, a friend who shared my minor but not my major, their roommate who was also–oh, you get the point. We were an interconnected web that had no real reason to be there together, and yet it felt right. Even exhausted and off-kilter, it made sense to do something that was both novel and familiar.
We didn’t get much work done. Not the kind you were supposed to thirteen weeks into the semester, anyways, but no one really cared. We were writing about falling in love with the moon, and being terrified, and not knowing what to make sense of it all. We were sharing ideas and reading each other’s snippets and wondering why we hadn’t done this a long time ago.
A few of us ordered Kountry Kart Deli and Saniyah and I walked down to pick it up for everyone, and when we came back, the sunset was so beautiful we all gathered on the terrace and watched the sky turn molten pink. Despite seeing the sun disappear out of the sky, we still found beauty in the mundane.
Picture: a girl, eighteen, falling somewhere between writer and artist. She has to make a short video about herself for a high school project that will never get finished, for a class that will end abruptly in March and that will be that. In the video, the camera goes up the stairs and into the girl’s bedroom, where she looks up in surprise, covered in paint.
For five months, the girl painted and crochet and created. She had the idea of going to art school and maybe taking some creative writing classes on the side, but had at some point stopped calling herself a graphic design major and started calling herself a writing major. It just sort of happened, and art became a hobby instead of an aspiration.
Is there a line between artist and writer? Is a writer inherently an artist? She certainly doesn’t want to let go of her artist identity; even if she doesn’t feel comfortable using the word on herself, all of her friends are artists. But writers? She doesn’t know any writers. Lately, all she knows are her parents, her cats, and the paints. She barely writes during this time, just covers herself in acrylics and wonders what college will be like.
There will be writers, she thinks, as she notes every writer in her online orientation group. I hope I get to know them.
Little does she know, she has no choice. To write is to share your heart. These people will hold her most precious organ in their hands, and she will be better for it
I’ve been thinking about job interviews lately. Not because I’ve gotten any–I haven’t. Everyone around me seems to be flying through job applications like a workaholic in a cartoon speeds through paperwork, but I barely have the energy to put together my capstone. As badly as I wanted to be able to say that my final semester of college was a collage of bar crawls and karaoke and sunset viewings at the waterfront, it’s been all capstone and leaving the dorm at noon. The work piles up even higher than the stack of unread books on my desk–and trust me, that’s pretty high.
A common question that potential employers will ask you at a job interview is, “What are you looking to get out of your time here?” That question is circling through my head right now because I figured someone must have asked me something similar when I was looking into going to Champlain College.
Why did I go here? Something must have made me pick this place over my other options. It met all of my basic requirements: writing major, located in New England, small campus, and dubiously edible food, but so did the other two schools who had made it into my final roster.
Environment was, I think, the deciding factor for me. My other two choices were too suffocating or too isolating, respectively. Lesley was sandwiched in the armpit of Boston, surrounded on all sides by more prestigious universities, and Roger Williams involved crossing a bridge to get there, leaving it feeling like the campus broke off and drifted away from the mainland. Champlain is nestled with something not-quite-city and not-quite-suburbia, a happy medium that allows access to things like cafes and craft stores but still allows you to slip away into nature.
I think there was something else I hoped for at Champlain, and that was a sense of community. I doubt there’s many people who have sought higher education who haven’t sought some sense of community. I’m not sure I even had the awareness at seventeen to voice that, though. At seventeen, you know you want friends, and you know you want to belong. But your understanding of community at seventeen is worlds away from your understanding of community at twenty-two.
Picture: a girl, freshly eighteen, blowing out the candles on her cake. I can’t recall this girl in this moment, even though she was me, once. The days blended together like a book left out in the rain, pages reduced to a monotonous pulp.
The girl was lonely, but not terribly so. She could text her friends at any time, and even got to meet some of them outside, masked. It felt almost like it had always been like this, and so it was hard to want more. This was how it was and there was nothing to be done. She couldn’t mourn what she’d lost because she was no longer aware she even had something to lose.
Some friends drifted away like seeds in the wind. She knew they were out there, growing into beautiful things that she could always visit later.
There are worse ways to lose friends.
I try to think about what my community was growing up, and it feels like trying to fit the pieces of several different puzzles together into one coherent amalgamation. There was my geographic community, the quaint, well-off suburban town I’ve lived in since I was a baby. There’s my family, whom I’ve been lucky to be close to for most of my life–I lived with both my parents and within driving distance of all four grandparents, and would often fly out to visit extended family across the country. There was school, of course–I went to my town’s public school system for K-8, then went to a vocational high school for graphic design to avoid the stress of my town’s nationally ranked public high school.
Then there were my friends. Friends, I think, are an amalgamation of their own: you gain and lose them, you form groups and watch them fracture and fall off and dissolve, you watch people move away or move away yourself. Almost none of it seems to happen cleanly or consistently; sometimes you have one good conversation at a birthday party and you’re best friends, sometimes you spend years quietly admiring each other before a shared interest finally gives you the opportunity to bond. Sometimes friendships end in quiet dissolutions after you go to different schools, and sometimes your best friend of two years cuts you off without the slightest warning. Friends are messy; so is community.
Maybe the puzzle pieces aren’t even meant to show a clear picture.
Picture a girl, eighteen, outside with a dining hall takeout box on her knees and a stranger in front of her. In order to get food from the dining hall, you have to go in there, wait in a line spaced six feet apart at your station of choice, and tell the servers what you’d like. They dish it out into “compostable” trays (they’d be declared landfill-only less than a year later) that you could then take outside or back to your room.
The girl has had some sort of premonition of a future where she isn’t surrounded by writers if she doesn’t make an effort to know them, right now. Or maybe she’s just lonely. So she emailed one of her classmates, a nice girl who always had interesting things to say, and really, that’s all anyone needed for company. The two of them are sitting on large concrete steps a little ways away from the dining hall. The sky is one continuous mass of white-gray that feels like it would never end. It’s the kind of sky that makes the girl feel small if she isn’t careful. So she’s careful: she talks, she listens, and unbeknownst to her, the seeds of something that might be called a community start to take root inside of her.
Enough writing professors have advised us students to “find our people” that I can’t even think of who said it first or who I should credit with the sentiment. “Our people” in this context didn’t refer to friends, but rather to writers we worked well with. “Worked well with” might not be the best phrase, as it implies some level of collaboration. While “your people” might include people you collaborate well with, it can also include the people you ask to take a look at early drafts, who you’re happy to edit for, who you bounce ideas off of, who listen to your insane whiteboard ramblings at ten pm in the library, who stay late so you have someone to body double off of. These are people who support you and you support them, even in the smallest ways. These are people who ask you how you’re doing even while their own mental health is being held together with the psychological equivalent of dental floss.
Your people do not have to form a clear, consistent group, just like your friends do not all fit into one group. Your people don’t even have to be friends, though they often are; your people might include professors, family members, and peers who haven’t gotten the chance to become friends yet.
I can see my viewpoint on this changing in the future; if I go to grad school, maybe having a cohort will shift my perspective. Maybe working in the professional writing world will do the same. But something I have been reflecting on the past few weeks, as the date of graduation crawls closer and closer, is that college is not about finding concise solutions to things. It’s not even about finding answers (though I’d like to think I’ve found a few), it’s about finding even more questions. You are always going to be a messy, complicated human being, and your people will reflect that. Being messy together might just be the best thing you can do.
Picture: a girl, twenty, stood in front of a podium with her work in front of her. She’s just about reached the halfway point to her bachelor’s degree in Professional Writing, but this is the first time she’s been to a proper reading. The pandemic had prevented any in-person events her freshman year, and people are just building up steam to host them again.
She must read something–I must have been reading something–but the scene merely hovers there, her in front of the podium, straightening so her mouth can actually reach the mic. What did she read? A poem? Prose? Was Luisa there? Maybe Sheila was sitting front row–no, that was a different reading, the one where I didn’t know how to pronounce my own title. Maybe I read “pink’s interlude”–no, no, I hadn’t written it at that point. What on earth was I reading that day?
I suppose it doesn’t matter. The girl reads something and people listen. The seed is undoubtedly growing.
Readings are perhaps one of the best opportunities I’ve gotten here at college. Over the past two years, I’ve fallen in love with them, even if the nerves have never gone away. Just as your growth as a writer is not linear, your growth as someone who reads your work aloud isn’t either. Sometimes I feel my heart rate pick up hours before a reading (such as right now; I haven’t gotten the chance to go to a reading all semester, so this is my first one since December), and sometimes the nerves only set it when I’m about to read.
There is a magic to reading your words aloud to a crowd, especially a crowd that wants to be there. Your words come alive in a way they don’t on the screen, or on the page, or even read aloud to yourself. When you read to a captive audience you are passing art, your art, from your mind to theirs. You are handing them something uniquely your own and letting it become their plaything, while still retaining the source material for yourself. And you’re only one small sliver of it; in turn, you get to hear everyone else’s beautiful work and take what you want from it.
Another wonderful thing about readings, especially at a small college like Champlain, is that the people show up continuously to readings become a sort of community. You start to become familiar with people’s work, even if you haven’t had a class with them. You get to hear just-budding writers, eighteen and freshly out of college, stake their claim in a community that welcomes them with open arms. You get to hear fantasy and horror and sonnets and comedy and everything under the sun, all one after the other, the energy chaotic and infections. And yet there’s a comfort in that energy. I think it lies in knowing that even if capitalism and our school, itself a product of capitalism, does not give us the resources and respect we deserve, we have this. The words, people to read them, and people to listen are all we need.
Picture: a girl, twenty-one, cooped up in a classroom because the library closed early and there’s no space for writers at this school. No, literally–there is no designated physical space for writers, or the overall Creative Studio (writing, film, creative media, etc.) to go. The girl complains about this a lot, but she and her friends do the best they can to make public spaces their own.
There are five people in the room and a midnight deadline: the girl and one friend have a short story due (on a Friday!), and the other three are there because the girl put the offer out and the three of them showed up and worked on their own projects. They stayed long after the shuttle stopped running, keeping the other two company as they abused their poor keyboards. Two of them are in a Monster of the Week game (think Dungeons and Dragons but with less rules) together and spend an hour covering an entire whiteboard with information about the game so far, just because. When the girl’s classmate finishes her piece, she practices her dance routine in the middle of the classroom. They stay awake by eating cake one of the other three had brought from an event earlier in the day.
The midnight deadline gets met, poorly done but in good company. Afterwards, they all go back to the girl’s dorm, shivering in the unexpected rain, and the girl thinks wow, okay, maybe this is what college is really about.
Sometimes I wonder if I’m just a collage of all the people I’ve met. The experiences we have together form my bones, and the stories they tell me become my blood. My lungs ache with their absence–or sag in relief at it, if they did me more harm than good.
To be a writer–to be an artist–is to add another layer to that collage, to be moved not only by the people in your life but by the stories they impart on you. Not only that, but by the connections you build as part of a community.
Looking back on my four years here, I am filled with immense gratitude for the people I have met. Whoever we may become and whether or not our paths continue to cross, I’m grateful to have written beside all of you.
Picture: a girl, twenty-one, surrounded by fifteen or so other writers at a student-run reading. The room is normally a printing area, but tonight it is theirs. Tonight, the creatives have a space.
There’s something different about this reading. The girl feels like there’s a thread in that room connecting all of them, pulling them together and keeping their rapt attention on the front. The girl feels her heart ebb and flow with the movement of each poem, riding the tide like it’s the only thing that matters, like college was never about the classes or the degrees, but about this, this beautiful moment, raw and personal.
Every single person reads. Once they’ve all gone, the host asks if anyone would like to go again. The girl reads another poem. One guy sings “Boho Days” from Tick, Tick…Boom! and everyone claps along. Then someone else, a stranger to the girl, goes up and reads a poem. This stranger had spent the latter half of the reading scribbling in her notebook, and it quickly becomes clear why.
The stranger reads a poem about them. She talks about the girl and her poem about the color pink, and the singer, and one by one weaves together the works shared that night into a complete tapestry. It’s like an oral zine, captured swift and raw. The girl wants to cry. She wants to hug the stranger. Instead, they all snap, throw away their hot cocoa cups, and go out into the night, hearts full in their chests.
I was talking with a friend recently about Jean Paul Satre’s one act, existentialist play No Exit. You might not have heard of it, but you’ve almost certainly heard its most famous line: “hell is other people.” My friend and I went to high school together and have been talking about this line since we read the play in our senior year English class.
Recently, he brought it up again in the context of his capstone, which is a zine related to the people in his life.
“I think Satre got it right,” he told me, “hell is other people. But other people are heavenly, too.”
So here’s to my community. To Emily, the first writer I met here and an incredibly stubborn, dedicated journalist; I aspire to be as determined and caring as you. To Ayanna, the queen of fairytales who keeps me grounded while the weight of all my writing assignments feel like they’re about to crush me. To Rhi, who always takes the care to ask how others are doing and who writes and illustrates fantasy like no other. To Annabel, who brings light and energy into every room she walks into. To Ella, who writes a mean personal essay and, despite being a self proclaimed hater, goes out of her way to give thoughtful critique, host readings, and genuinely listen to what you have to say. To Saniyah, who wrote the best script I’ve ever read in my life and puts their whole heart and more into every project. To Meaghan, who isn’t afraid to make their protagonists reap what they sow. To Leah, who possesses the incredible skill of getting me attached to her stories before she even starts writing. To Ethan, who never fails to make me laugh and knocks some sense into me when I’m overcomplicating things. To Dani, who is perhaps more dedicated to whiteboard insanity than even Leah (this is saying something), and whom I’m comfortable around despite only recently becoming a good friend. To Alanah, whom I lived next to for a whole year without exchanging a word and wish so badly I had, because I can think of few kinder and excitable people. To Beck, whom I’ve had the honor of watching grow from someone who complained about having to write poetry in my DMs to a published poet. To Josh, who kept us all endlessly entertained with his eccentricities and once spent two hours straight explaining what “Blaseball” was to me (don’t look it up unless you want to waste an afternoon). To Sarah, who writes fantasy as if Florence Welsh were the muse that moved her hand. To Birdie, who nearly made me cry over Pattie Boyd three nights in a row and who moves through life like the protagonist of an indie coming-of-age film. To Stos, who just today I learned to be an incredible slam poet. To Clara, who fulfilled my dreams by reviving Chivomengro and spreads love and positivity everywhere she goes. To Sam, who let me have a fancy job on Willard & Maple and is the only person I know who can find the good in 2016.
To Tanya, who keeps me sane and made the class of 2024 feel seen and wanted even though we spent our entire first year on Zoom. To Sheila, who tolerated four years of me showing up uninvited at her office to complain about classes and always gives me the critique I need to hear. To Jim, whom I’ve handwritten a total of 150 poems across three years for and would gladly do it again. To Banfill and Weiling, who made Core not only bearable but informative and experimental.
To the groups, clubs, and classes that have made me feel seen. To my Intermediate Poetry class, to the Middle Grade/YA Fantasy group, to the friends I made in Transmedia Storytelling despite being a sophomore surrounded by upperclassmen, to my co writers on the 2023 issue of The Well, to the writing discord and all of their insanity, to the Willard & Maple crew, to the Chiv crew.
To Mom, who listens to me complain about absolutely everything and ramble about things she has no understanding of. To Dad who helps me make sense of my scatterbrained ideas and pulls me back to earth when I start spiraling. To Grandpa, who made me into the storyteller I am today.
And last but certainly not least, to Luisa, who has put up with four years of my insane ramblings and gratuitous Gravity Falls references. I would not be writing this essay without you by my side.
Oh–one more. To you, dear reader. I’d write even if no one was listening–I can’t help myself, after all–but you make it all the more real. Thank you for taking time out of your hectic life to experience art. I hope you cherish and nurture the creative communities in your life, and let your own creativity bloom.