Indoor Inspiration
A Reflection on My Roots and
Writing in the COVID-19 Pandemic
I was five when I first read Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak and missed the point entirely. My sticky kindergarten hands hurriedly flipped through the picture book’s pages, eager to read how Max, who seemed so much like me, sailed across a vast sea and arrived in a strange wood where he ruled creatures the likes of which had never walked my small stretch of earth; for as much as I enjoyed the story, I was unsatisfied by its end, in which Max came back home after his long journey. I wondered, how hard could leaving really be? To an ambitious small-town girl, it seemed like the easiest thing in the world.
Writing became my quasi-escape from home—taking me somewhere between my physical form, sitting at the dining room table with a bright blue Crayola marker and a wide-ruled notebook, and my creative consciousness, flying to far off fantasy lands where Magic wrote the laws instead of Nature. I resented the home that I had been raised to love and dreamed of the day when I could travel to a place where I could thrive as a writer, believing the four walls of my childhood bedroom and the borders of my rural town to have limited my authorial aspirations. Goals are important, but bitterness is no foundation on which to build passion.
Leaving for college and continuing my studies in writing was to be my first step on a hopefully more successful version of Max’s adventure, that is, until the COVID-19 pandemic grounded the planes I had booked and plans I had made, sending me back home. Blinded by privileged, youthful rage, I quit writing for weeks in a narrow-minded attempt to spite the indifferent Universe. But it is not in a writer’s character to stop for long, and I felt that familiar urge to pick up the pen once more, but no ideas flowed from its ink. In believing myself to be limited, I had made myself so.
Forced introspection was perhaps the greatest gift that I could have been granted, as it taught me that imagination, not setting, is my only restriction as a writer. If one silver lining has arisen out of the pandemic, it is that I have learned to look for them: from the ant hill that collapses under the weight of your heel, making you realize how large you seem in that moment and how small you are in all others, to the tadpoles that hatch in the puddle in your backyard, oblivious to the pond teeming with trout not a mile up the road. I write it all down, in the hope that even the most mundane will mean something to someone and in the knowledge that it means everything to me. In 2020, I have learned that the greatest inspirations can be found right where you are—with a plate of warm supper and even some wild things too.
Creative Experiments
Poetry, Photojournalism, and Portfolio
Our creative world can be expanded through medium and audience, in addition to imagination. I have thus far spent 2021 exploring new outlets for my creativity and sharing them with others.
Poetry
Poetry expanded my writing even further, freeing me from the confines of the traditional syntax seen in prose. I further reflect on my future aspirations and homesick nostalgia in the following poem “Land and Life,” which was published in the Stonefence Review, Dartmouth’s premier journal of arts and letters, on June 6th, 2021.
Read my poem here:
Land and Life A petrifying paradox plagues the ambitious small-town native, Who is so filled with love for her home and yet has no greater desire than to leave it. Standing in her yard (Or is it a forest?), dandelion stems and dark soil between her bare toes, Starlight swallows her like the bulbs of a blazing marquee printed with celestial showtimes; Cricket song choruses in her eager ears, echoes of a creeping and crawling city; Maple trees scrape the sky with soft splinters—forever growing, never reaching. She is doomed, she thinks, for a life of striving for the future and longing for the past. She may never roam so far that the green peaks of her mountainous cradle escape her view. Though, perhaps, there lies comfort in such a curse. Her childhood home sits upon the edge of a tectonic plate, Where earth slipped away to carve the cliffs over which her sun rises each dawn. To grow up is not to grow apart: that knowledge reassures her, in a restless sort of way. Glaciers, creatures, and people leave valleys, trails, and footprints in our wake. We move onward, over land and life, with direction not limited to a simple forward or back. Between scarlet leaves and against blushing cheeks, the well traveled wind whispers, Return.
Photojournalism
Photography has broadened my storytelling to the visual medium, given me a larger platform for my work, and taught me that some of the best stories are based in reality. This winter, I was chosen as the Section Editor of Photography for campus newspaper The Dartmouth. In being promoted to this position, I was able to produce freelance photography for The New York Times on an article about Dartmouth alumni Leon Black’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.
View the article here:
A Donor’s Ties to Epstein Are Criticized at MoMA and Dartmouth
Portfolio
My DartWrite portfolio, the very website that you are viewing, has acted as another creative outlet for myself. The platform allows me to consolidate my writing, photography, and design projects and share them on the Internet. I have used DartWrite to apply skills that I learned in Computer Science 21: Introduction to Digital Design—taking inspiration from my mock websites in Adobe Photoshop to build a functioning website.
Head back to the home page for a glimpse at a few of my many academic and creative projects and use the navigation to explore even more.
Angelina Scarlotta | Dartmouth College 2023