Bildungsroman: a type of novel concerned with the education, development, and maturing of a young protagonist; a body of work about the moral and psychological growth of the main character.

Born in Boulder, CO and raised in the Midwest, I’d like to think my personality is a mixture of both of those influences. I graduated from Indiana University (Bloomington) in 2013 with a B.A. in English Literature, also acquiring a concentration in Creative Writing and a minor in Spanish. Over the last decade I spent a lot of time working in hospitality and hostels up and down the West Coast and around the world, jobs which allowed me to pursue my passions of writing and travel. I’ve visited 21 countries, and have lived in Boulder, Colorado; San Sebastián, Spain; Seattle, Washington; San Diego and San Francisco, California; and Cave Junction and Portland, Oregon. I’ve lived in tents, garages, offices, co-ops and hostels, and have had over 200 roommates from 40 different countries. 

In 2016 I attended my first-ever music festival by myself in a foreign country, the same summer during which I threw wine in the Batalla de Vino and attended the Running of the Bulls in Pamplona. I’ve sung evensong in Canterbury Cathedral, been an exchange student in Barcelona, participated in the raucous squirt-gun fights of Songkran in Thailand, lead wig-laden bar crawls in Seattle, watched the sunrise at Angkor Wat and the Taj Mahal, moonbathed in Joshua Tree, hiked in Patagonia, ridden a camel through the Thar desert, swung at the end of the world in Ecuador, and attended a friend’s traditional Punjabi wedding in India.  In the fall of 2017 I worked on a sustainable organic homestead in Southwestern Oregon, and the following year spent six months living in a 31-person international cooperative house in San Francisco —a famed four-story Queen Anne mansion in the heart of the Haight-Ashbury district, right around the corner from the Painted Ladies. I backpacked through India and Southeast Asia from November of 2018 to May of 2019, and spent the following pandemic-addled summer of 2020 working as a summer camp photographer in Sequoia National Park.

A consummate rolling stone, I love to experiment and tend to follow my curiosity wherever it leads. I believe that courage is a muscle, and that the best version of ourselves often lies just outside of what we find familiar and comfortable. This blog is something of an online portfolio, a curated collection of my writing and photography efforts as related to travel, music, food, and personal discovery.

A Few Other Things About Me:

• I’m a total language geek, and love learning new languages. I took Latin and Greek for fun in high school, in addition to minoring in Spanish in college (bilingual woot woot). I find language endlessly fascinating, and make a hobby of learning anything new that I can—at different periods I’ve dabbled with learning French, Portuguese, Mandarin, and Russian.
• Also a huge music nerd, and will listen to pretty much anything aside from ‘pop’ country or tunes that makes my blood pressure spike (i.e. lots and lots of screaming). One of the best compliments I’ve ever received to date was being called a ‘human shazam.’
• A passionate dilettante in most things, including: sewing alterations, cooking, guitar playing, sketching, watercolor painting, and gardening. I love trying out new DIY craftsy projects (especially if it’s something sustainably focused and upcycling-related), so you may see a few of those efforts around here.
• Hoarder of washi tape, cameras (vintage, digital, analog, you name it), and antique enamel pill boxes (would’ve collected more of the latter by now if I had anywhere to put them!).
• Have a random knack for telling a person’s heritage based on their last name, which I largely attribute to my time spent working the front desk at various international youth hostels—have seen a lot of passports in my day.
• Happy places include: museums, dive bars, national parks, coffeeshops and cafés, arts & crafts supply stores (Blick & Michaels), vintage/thrift stores, farmer’s markets, bookstores, natural grocers, and my parents’ back deck in Indiana. And pretty much anywhere I can people-watch.
• Random life goal: to someday publish a cookbook of all the recipes I’ve learned from different friends and roommates throughout my travels.

All writing, photography and graphics used on this site are my own, unless otherwise stated.

Feel free to say hi! Follow me on Instagram, or shoot me an email.