"...however you may have come to it, whatever the opinions you might have professed, literature throws you into battle. Writing is a certain way of wanting freedom; once you have begun, you are committed, willy-nilly.”
—SARTRE
PROFESSIONAL BACKGROUND
I graduated in 2008 with a Bachelor of Arts in English writing and a dream to spend my life crafting probing human interest pieces for outlets like The New Yorker and The Atlantic, but like many in my cohort who graduated six months before one of the worst economic collapses in history, my professional journey looks different than what I imagined.
My very first gig out of college was an internship with a documentary filmmaker in Philadelphia, writing blogs for his projects, copy for his email newsletters, and researching things like the involvement of a Canadian mining company in the sudden death of an environmental activist in El Salvador that he encountered while filming there for a month during my internship. I made several calls to Canada on my personal flip phone that day to track down damning evidence. There wasn't any, and their receptionist was quite lovely to chat with. Aside from that slice of international intrigue, I was essentially doing content marketing before it was a buzzword.
That led to more web content jobs, some of which I'm prouder of than others, like three years of blogging marketing advice for small business owners at a software company (proud), writing and managing content for an online magazine for women entrepreneurs (proud), and writing keyword loaded articles about payday loans (not proud, but it paid the bills for a few months).
Eventually I made friends with a staffing agency to land assignments for nonprofit and higher education clients, because true to the millennial stereotype, I get the most fulfillment from working for organizations that make positive impacts on the world. Temple University hired me for two projects—a short assignment to create some print and web collateral for a new professional alumni network, followed by a three-month contract to re-write ask letters to their high profile donors. A year later, La Salle University contracted me for an open-ended assignment writing press releases, website copy, video scripts, and writing and editing articles for their quarterly alumni magazine.
Then in the summer of 2016, I saw an open content manager position in the communications office at Dartmouth College and applied on a whim. One phone interview and a full day of in-person interviews later, they offered me the job and I moved 300 miles from Philadelphia to a tiny town in Vermont across the Connecticut River from Dartmouth's campus with my husband and three cats. My day job is project managing the gathering of assets for stories on Dartmouth's news website, creating original social media content with our social media director, writing the occasional news article, and managing production of the college's annual commencement booklet.
I'm currently pursuing a Master of Liberal Arts in creative writing at Dartmouth. You can find me outside exploring the mountains of Vermont from April to October—i.e., months that don't require furry boots and a parka. Before I moved up here, I hosted a weekly indie music show for an internet radio station in Philadelphia for six years. I've got plans for three podcasts that I really should just sit down and start recording. I'm also a pretty great swing dancer.
I graduated in 2008 with a Bachelor of Arts in English writing and a dream to spend my life crafting probing human interest pieces for outlets like The New Yorker and The Atlantic, but like many in my cohort who graduated six months before one of the worst economic collapses in history, my professional journey looks different than what I imagined.
My very first gig out of college was an internship with a documentary filmmaker in Philadelphia, writing blogs for his projects, copy for his email newsletters, and researching things like the involvement of a Canadian mining company in the sudden death of an environmental activist in El Salvador that he encountered while filming there for a month during my internship. I made several calls to Canada on my personal flip phone that day to track down damning evidence. There wasn't any, and their receptionist was quite lovely to chat with. Aside from that slice of international intrigue, I was essentially doing content marketing before it was a buzzword.
That led to more web content jobs, some of which I'm prouder of than others, like three years of blogging marketing advice for small business owners at a software company (proud), writing and managing content for an online magazine for women entrepreneurs (proud), and writing keyword loaded articles about payday loans (not proud, but it paid the bills for a few months).
Eventually I made friends with a staffing agency to land assignments for nonprofit and higher education clients, because true to the millennial stereotype, I get the most fulfillment from working for organizations that make positive impacts on the world. Temple University hired me for two projects—a short assignment to create some print and web collateral for a new professional alumni network, followed by a three-month contract to re-write ask letters to their high profile donors. A year later, La Salle University contracted me for an open-ended assignment writing press releases, website copy, video scripts, and writing and editing articles for their quarterly alumni magazine.
Then in the summer of 2016, I saw an open content manager position in the communications office at Dartmouth College and applied on a whim. One phone interview and a full day of in-person interviews later, they offered me the job and I moved 300 miles from Philadelphia to a tiny town in Vermont across the Connecticut River from Dartmouth's campus with my husband and three cats. My day job is project managing the gathering of assets for stories on Dartmouth's news website, creating original social media content with our social media director, writing the occasional news article, and managing production of the college's annual commencement booklet.
I'm currently pursuing a Master of Liberal Arts in creative writing at Dartmouth. You can find me outside exploring the mountains of Vermont from April to October—i.e., months that don't require furry boots and a parka. Before I moved up here, I hosted a weekly indie music show for an internet radio station in Philadelphia for six years. I've got plans for three podcasts that I really should just sit down and start recording. I'm also a pretty great swing dancer.
ADOPTEE ADVOCACY
I didn't know any other families like mine when I was a kid. I had four parents but wasn't allowed to see two of them because a judge, a lawyer, and my parents—the ones raising me—said so. I had six siblings but we couldn't play together because we were legal strangers to each other. I didn't even know where they lived. I was an only child in legal status but number five of seven genetically.
Because I had no siblings or adopted peers to guide me as I navigated my tangled-up identity, I turned to stories. I was drawn to tales of people losing and finding family and claiming that definition for themselves. But even in the world of literature about adoptees' journeys—like Anne of Green Gables or A Little Princess—I didn't see anything like my own reality reflected. In fact, I didn't see myself represented in any kind of media—movies, tv shows, even news reports. They all told binary stories of people who'd been abandoned and either fully embraced their adoptive families or left their adoptive families to fully embrace their biological roots. Neither reflected my experience or how I felt. I hadn't been abandoned. My biological mother wanted to keep me, but a lot of people in her life told her she didn't deserve me or any of my siblings. And I had a lot of love for the parents who adopted me. I was always curious about my genetic heritage and I desperately wanted to connect with my siblings, but that didn't mean abandoning the parents who were raising me. I always viewed reunion as adding to my family, not choosing one or the other, even though that's not how most popular media portrayed adoption relationships.
My experiences with adoption growing up have made me an active voice for adoptee perspectives online. I tweet about adoption topics that are underreported or are missing an adoptee perspective. I've shared my story on podcast episodes and began self-publishing articles on Medium during National Adoption Awareness Month in 2017. I actively advise adoptees and adoptive parents on Reddit. And for several years, I've been studying the history and cultural attitudes that have shaped adoption over the past century.
Currently, I am pursuing a Master of Liberal Studies in creative writing at Dartmouth's Guarini School of Graduate and Advanced Studies with a research interest in how the language we use to talk about adoption shapes cultural perceptions, misconceptions, and prejudices towards adoption triad members. For example, we use the same word to describe rescuing an abandoned pet from a shelter as we do for adding a child to our family through adoption. Does that language parallel impose a false rescue narrative on stories about human adoption? I want to find out, and then I want to work to change the words we use to describe how adoption and families work in our culture. Because if there's one thing that adoption has taught me, it's that the experience of family doesn't have the strict definitions and artificial boundaries that Western culture suggests. My family extends beyond legal definitions, shared experience, and DNA, and if more people understood that, I believe it could improve child welfare and adoption policy for many families.
I did eventually meet my siblings, by the way. The seven of us connected in college through a series of reunions, and my oldest sister wrote a book about it, which I think everyone should read (but I might be a little biased).
Because I had no siblings or adopted peers to guide me as I navigated my tangled-up identity, I turned to stories. I was drawn to tales of people losing and finding family and claiming that definition for themselves. But even in the world of literature about adoptees' journeys—like Anne of Green Gables or A Little Princess—I didn't see anything like my own reality reflected. In fact, I didn't see myself represented in any kind of media—movies, tv shows, even news reports. They all told binary stories of people who'd been abandoned and either fully embraced their adoptive families or left their adoptive families to fully embrace their biological roots. Neither reflected my experience or how I felt. I hadn't been abandoned. My biological mother wanted to keep me, but a lot of people in her life told her she didn't deserve me or any of my siblings. And I had a lot of love for the parents who adopted me. I was always curious about my genetic heritage and I desperately wanted to connect with my siblings, but that didn't mean abandoning the parents who were raising me. I always viewed reunion as adding to my family, not choosing one or the other, even though that's not how most popular media portrayed adoption relationships.
My experiences with adoption growing up have made me an active voice for adoptee perspectives online. I tweet about adoption topics that are underreported or are missing an adoptee perspective. I've shared my story on podcast episodes and began self-publishing articles on Medium during National Adoption Awareness Month in 2017. I actively advise adoptees and adoptive parents on Reddit. And for several years, I've been studying the history and cultural attitudes that have shaped adoption over the past century.
Currently, I am pursuing a Master of Liberal Studies in creative writing at Dartmouth's Guarini School of Graduate and Advanced Studies with a research interest in how the language we use to talk about adoption shapes cultural perceptions, misconceptions, and prejudices towards adoption triad members. For example, we use the same word to describe rescuing an abandoned pet from a shelter as we do for adding a child to our family through adoption. Does that language parallel impose a false rescue narrative on stories about human adoption? I want to find out, and then I want to work to change the words we use to describe how adoption and families work in our culture. Because if there's one thing that adoption has taught me, it's that the experience of family doesn't have the strict definitions and artificial boundaries that Western culture suggests. My family extends beyond legal definitions, shared experience, and DNA, and if more people understood that, I believe it could improve child welfare and adoption policy for many families.
I did eventually meet my siblings, by the way. The seven of us connected in college through a series of reunions, and my oldest sister wrote a book about it, which I think everyone should read (but I might be a little biased).