By Sara Hinojosa 16-year-old, Valentina sat across from me. She was in the midst of her journey from Colombia to Utah and was eager to ask all about life in America. Her questions were shaped by the American life she’s seen in movies. She asked about American music, high school, and if I’d ever been surfing in California. Her eagerness almost completely disguised her fear and exhaustion that came from the journey that had already been in motion for many months. She didn’t say much about the home she left in Columbia, but she talked a lot about where she was heading. She and her family hoped to make it…

By Sara Hinojosa I had always known a God. My father was raised Catholic, but I can’t say I’ve ever seen him in a Catholic church. My mother, on the other hand, is a devout Christian and raised my older siblings in church. Their faces were well known in the community and some of their closest friends were made at Sunday schools, youth groups, and Bible studies. They all moved out by the time I was in kindergarten and I couldn’t say when they last stepped into a church building. Maybe a wedding or a funeral. I came into the picture much later and never experienced church in the same…

by Julia Ditto It was the first of July, and the thirty-first day in the Brooks Range for our team of five. The crew was led by Dr. Roman Dial, a professor and biologist at Alaska Pacific University. The three others and I were all undergraduates. Russel Wong, our mathematician, Duncan Wright, our musician, and I, the artist, were all students from APU. Ben Weissenbach, our writer and fourth undergraduate, was from Princeton University on an assignment to write an article about our adventurous scientific expedition. Little did we know, the next few hours were about to be the most adventurous of our entire six-week expedition. We departed camp as…

by Julia Ditto On my return trip from the Brooks Range, while traveling through Arctic Village, Alaska, I witnessed the arrival of the mail plane. Such an event could be seen as mundane in the average twenty-first century society; for me it was anything but. It was July 12, the last morning of a 42-day expedition for our group of four undergrads. Our remote experience in the Brooks Range contrasted with the sudden commotion at the Arctic Village airstrip. It is a memory that will never leave me.  “Alaska isn’t one place. It’s many places. You can’t really see all of Alaska,” our pilot Kirk Sweetser said, his voice cutting…

by Lou Mei Gutsch A lot of people told me that spirits are not real. I didn’t think they were real either until I moved to St. Louis when my culinary school, Oregon Coast Culinary Institute, required us to do a paid internship (externship) for six months. In Missouri, I lived with my brother and found a vegan and vegetarian restaurant called The Tree House to extern as a vegan baker. For a while, everything was going well. That all changed, one early morning, round 5am, on a typical shift when I was the first one there rolling the dough for the doughnuts. I needed some flour, so I walked…

by Johanna Kumpula Ghost has been floating over my shoulder like some ill-willed phantom for over ten years. He haunts the little things I do, like checking if both the front and back doors are shut tight, locking the car doors exactly three times every time, or making sure my phone is off whenever I’m in a theater because inevitably someone is going to call. Ghost sits by my ear and sings, typically to the tune of a children’s lullaby, or obscure pop song, that doctor you most certainly saw is going to call with your nonexistent cancer results in the middle of Miles Morales trying to impress Gwen Stacy.…

by Gregg Oakley As the guards were speaking amongst each other in Russian, I kept thinking to myself, “why am I here? Why do I always buy so many books? My whole reason for this trip was to buy books, of course I bought so many!”. Their voices became louder as they passed the books around and scanned a page here and there. They were getting even more angry when they noticed one book in particular and kept glancing back at me. As they passed that book around one guard yelled something and he threw the book down on a desk. The feeling in the small room got worse. I…

By Peter Venardos   The ruffling of sleeping bags and zippers is just enough noise to wake him up. He doesn’t mind though, because he knows he still has an hour of rest left. Laying in the damp sleeping bag, he falls back to sleep running through what to expect on the climb they will embark on in a few hours. “Waters hot!” His partner yells through the tent vestibule. Stiff and groggy, he crawls out to start the morning ritual with instant coffee, oatmeal, and the highlight of their dirtbag diet: graham crackers and peanut butter. Amidst the half awake conversations and sips of coffee, they gather the gear…

By Allen Ginnett   Imagine the reality of what N.W.A did to the world. I, like most white kids, was exposed to reality for the first time. I remember getting that Snoop’s greatest hits album for Christmas and it was on. Then, like a west coast scholar, I did my homework. I’m in Alaska, I’m getting exposed to all kinds of shit, Mac Dre to Odd Future. I’m from Anchorage, which is a city of a quarter million so the homies I grew up with playing basketball were hustling and going hard in the streets. Alaska has the same realities influenced by California. I use all of California’s influences in…

by Johanna Kumpula   I’ve accumulated a total of almost 120 hours playing The Witcher 3. I completed nearly every side quest, monster hunt, main quest, and point of interest in the game, except for quests related to Gwent because the last thing I want to do while hunting monsters is bet on my inability to win a card game. My favorite character in the game is Olgierd von Everec – a character accessible with purchase of the Hearts of Stone DLC – and my favorite monster is the Griffin. Whenever I got bored playing the game, I’d switch over to Skyrim or Divinity, games with a combined play time…