CURRENT MISSION

Cross-Country Interstate Narrative Composition (Writing! Photography! Gas Mileage Calculation!)/ Or more sensitively, exploring the ways in which where we're from informs who we are and what stories our lives are comprised of

ABOUT ME

The Project: We are two Hamilton College Creative Writing majors, setting out on a Western-bound expedition of adventure. Our mission is to see new places, meet new people, have new experiences, and write as much as possible in the meantime. A poet and a fictioneer respectively, we're working on separate travel-based writing projects, and CS is a pivotal part of that experience - most of a country's stories lie in the people who live in a place, not those who pass through it in a night or two - to be able to say anything about anywhere, its important to have spoken with the people who live there.
Katie: I'm a recent college graduate happy to have a geographic dislocationedness to accompany my separation from an old life - In addition to my writing project, I'm trying to think about where to move, what kind of work to do to support myself, what kind of people I will surround myself with in the next part of my life. I'm really interested in meeting different people and having different experiences than I did for the past four years in school.
Rachel: I just returned from a semester in Europe, so everything about the US is pretty fascinating to me. Easy-going, shorter than I'd like to be, and always up for an adventure. I'm about to enter my senior year at Hamilton and enjoying myself more than I probably shiuld.

PHILOSOPHY

The project: Going West and writing.
Katie: Seeking an essential humanity, which for me involves the almost forgotten joy of the most basic elements of being alive - eating, feeling the earth and the sun, interaction with animals, with other people, with watching and with sharing.
Rachel: We must all relax.

Why I’m on Couchsurfing

HOW I PARTICIPATE IN COUCHSURFING

We're new in Couch Surfing, and we're traveling right now, but in the Fall Rachel can offer a place to stay at Hamilton College, and Katie, hopefully, wherever she is, should she have a couch to call her own.

COUCHSURFING EXPERIENCE

None as of yet - eager to gain some.

Interests

The Project: Words, America, American words, dogs, adventure.
Katie: I am interested in living authentically, whatever that means, in vegetarian cooking, photography, hiking, rock climbing, swimming outside, and classical music (I play the oboe). And of course words: reading - poetry, and recently anything with facts in it - and writing. And after the tardy evaporation of an animal allergy, a veritable obsession with animals of all sorts (including dogs).
Rachel: enjoys sewing, amateur comic-drawing, and can play a fierce game of Scrabble. Writing is my top priority in this lifetime, and hopefully I can affect some good through it. I was once the General Manager of my college radio station (WHCL.org) and still love being a DJ. I cannot cook whatsoever, and hope to remedy that someday.

• animals
• dogs
• writing
• poetry
• photography
• cooking
• vegetarian
• reading
• traveling
• cars
• drawing
• music
• classical music
• outdoor activities
• hiking
• surfing
• rock climbing
• swimming
• chemistry

Music, Movies, and Books

Rachel: Anything and just about everything. I have seen The Third Man around 2 dozen times, leans towards the indie side of music (with an irrational enjoyment of minimalist classical music), and reads just about anything written with complete sentences. More specifically, I have an embarrassingly large collection of Best American compilations, only a handful of DVDs, and enough MP3s to last me the rest of my twenties.
Katie: Movies - Big Fish, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, things set in the south, Leonard Retel Helmrich's The Shape of the Moon
Music - anything with folky roots, classical music especially Brahms symphonies, Aaron Copland
Books - a lot of poetry especially Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Hass, also Virginia Woolf, Faulkner.

One Amazing Thing I’ve Done

Rachel just recently returned from 6 months in Germany and Austria; Katie spent a semester abroad in Paris in 2007. Rachel saw the Northern Lights from Minnesota, nearly died in a car wreck in Missouri, and recently had a story accepted into the minnesota review.
Katie: I spent a lot of time trying to think of some particularly amazing thing, but really what comes to me are the normally amazing things - right now, spring in central New York, having found the unlikely path I did.

Teach, Learn, Share

We can both suggest some good reading, and hopefully some interesting indie film and music. Katie has gotten down the basics of some basic vegetarian dishes, rock climbing indoors (which she hopes to take outdoors during the course of the trip), and is more or less conversant in French, literary and feminist theory, chemistry. I could give you oboe lessons... I really like teaching people new things.
Rachel is semi-fluent in German (though that's about to wear off), appreciates vintage cars, and will happily take your dog for a walk.