Born in Vermont, started in North Carolina, raised in Arizona, and matured in Massachusetts, one may say I’ve had a scenic life so far. I was born in Vermont on Father’s Day, promptly leaving to spend three years of my early age in North Carolina where I initially got my hate of humidity. When the age of four came around we shipped off to Tucson, Arizona, where I spent the most memorable years of my life exploring the arid desert and finding my love for Paleontology and then soon after, Marine Biology.

      Many might think the desert is all dust and dirt, but I can assure you there is nothing more beautiful than the floral desert breeze, the towering cacti covered mountains, and the incredible clear night skies devoid of light pollution so that the sky looks more like a puff of glitter and a void with a few pinpricks of light. This was a place that trees attacked you with three-inch thorns, lizards stood at your porch light, June bugs were the most half-witted creature you’d ever seen, and visiting the Saguaro National Park was a field trip you took every year. Quail and their chicks would run around the neighborhood, and fire ants were more terrifying than spiders and scorpions. This was a place where it got so hot that one year the airplane tires melted on the runway, we would cook pizza in the back of our cars and make solar ovens that sometimes worked just as well as a conventional oven. Arizona is the one place that I’d visit in a heartbeat.

          Then right before I turned eleven I moved to Massachusetts, where I saw my first autumn color change in nine years. Here I continued developing my intense love for the ocean and the environment, getting a vocational education at my high school in Environmental Science and Technology. Getting a plethora of lab and field experience collecting and testing samples and raising endangered species with Mass Wildlife. I developed a immensely deep love of the outdoors and every recreational activity you could think of.

         My junior year of high school I found a passion for writing. I had struggled with it for years until I got an incredible English teacher who said something that changed everything for me. “You don’t have to be perfect the first time.” It was reasonably simple however I had always presumed that if I couldn’t do it perfectly when I initially tried then it was just something I didn’t have the cognitive strength to handle. Through this I learned that creative writing, and really any writing, is a constant process. You will be constantly editing and revising, finding new ways to describe something and enrich your text. It is a eternal process of discovery and learning, but if you find meaning in it and learn how to connect and enjoy it you’ll never get tired of it. They say writing is like a drug, once you learn to love it you can never get enough.