Hi.
So I'm Carlin Ring.
I'm also a Senior at Mt.
Holyoke.
And unlike a lot of my fellow LEAP presenters,
I didn't do an internship or a research project this summer.
I actually worked on a creative project through LYNK.
I worked on a verse novel.
And for anybody who might be wondering
what a verse novel is?
It's a novel length narrative told in poetry, or verse,
instead of prose.
The first one that kind of most people are familiar with
is actually Beowolf.
But it continues to have a pretty long tradition today.
So what was my first novel in particular?
So this novel was Saga's Skin.
It's a young adult coming of age story with selkies, mermaids,
and a train ride.
It's set in a small town in Iowa and in San Francisco,
and the moments in between.
Starring the main characters of Adelaide, who is 15, confused.
She loves swimming, painting, and Saga, who is also 15,
is a selkie, and is completely confused
about what her place is in the world.
It follows them through the last couple
months of their freshman year of high school,
and into their summer break.
And then something terrible happens during Saga's--
during their last couple of weeks.
So they decide that they need to take a trip to San Francisco
to find Saga's mother who she's never met before.
In order to do this, there were a few logistics to figure out.
For one thing, the LYNK funding doesn't actually
advertise a creative project as something
that you can do for it.
They hide it.
They bury it a little bit in the material.
[LAUGHTER]
For good reason.
Because they have had experiences.
But it was so exciting to me when I was looking through
and saw, if you're doing a creative project,
fill out these things.
And I said, OK.
What's this?
Tell me more.
I need to do figure it out.
So I figured out that I needed to have an advisor,
I needed to have a plan, and I needed to have a home base.
The advisor was just as difficult
as finding out that I can do a creative project
in the first place, because most of the people at Mt.
Holyoke who deal in poetry and creative writing
are doing it themselves, or have projects
that they're doing over the summer.
So I ended up finding Professor Sally Sutherland, who,
while not directly involved in poetry,
was directly involved with me and my Mt.
Holyoke journey.
And she ended up being the perfect person.
I also developed a plan.
Google Drive, Scrivener, which is
a program that would let me see all of the poems
and not just have to scroll a million miles--
[LAUGHTER]
--ended up being the tools of the trade.
And I settled on 17 poems a week.
Somewhat arbitrary.
But I figured 200 poems over the course of the summer,
how hard can that be?
I can write 17 a week.
And that will be great.
It was a step up from the one poem
a week that I had been doing in Verse 1 and 2--
[LAUGHTER]
--at Mt.
Holyoke.
But I figured if I'm going to fail, I'm going to fail hard.
[LAUGHTER]
And I went to my home base of Lincoln, Nebraska
where my family had recently moved.
So I didn't grow up there.
But it is close enough.
But in order to do this, when I got on the ground in Lincoln,
I needed to do some research.
First thing first was selkies.
Selkies for those of you who don't know, are seal people.
They live as seals that are able to shed their skin and come
live as humans.
And oftentimes get trapped there.
A lot of people who steal them away.
It's all very tragic.
It's all very Irish, which is where most of the folklore
comes.
Ireland, Scotland, and the Faroe Islands.
But this is research that I've been doing for years.
My primary interest lies in folklore.
And so this was something I was like OK, I've got this.
Same thing with being a teen-aged girl.
I was one at one point, and I recently
acquired a stepsister who is currently one.
[LAUGHTER]
So I knew that I would have not too much difficulty there.
My main issue laid in San Francisco.
I'm from Iowa.
I've only stepped in the ocean twice.
[LAUGHTER]
Once in the Atlantic, once in the Pacific.
San Francisco was not a place that I
was at all familiar with.
So I turned first to the thing I knew best, which was podcasts.
Podcasts being people talking about things
was the best way that I knew for me to auditorily process
the information.
I found there was one podcast in particular, 99% Invisible, that
did a podcast about how San Francisco was built,
being kind of sand and rocks thrown onto the ocean.
And it gave me a great sense of what
it might be like for somebody just
to be dropped in the middle of this strange landscape.
I looked at newspapers.
I even found one letter to the editor of somebody
who was so angry at their views being blocked.
But in their anger, gave me a great description
of what those views were.
And I was also lucky enough to have a friend who
grew up in San Francisco.
And even though we were 600 miles apart over our summer,
she was gracious enough to send me
an auditory tour of from the train station to the pier.
And that informed a lot of what I was working on.
And it worked pretty well.
When I was writing I had these immediate experiences.
And even though they were secondary,
I would revise and get better wording, better choice,
better order of things to figure out how to portray something
that I had no familiarity with.
But I began to run into some trouble.
While the poems set in San Francisco were pretty solid,
small town Iowa wasn't doing as hot.
Now part of this might have been the order that I wrote it.
I started off with Iowa since that's
where the girls started off in.
And as I wrote 17 poems a week, which
I did manage to keep up with--
[LAUGHTER]
--it's a lot.
And it flexes those muscles.
And so those muscles weren't as strong when I began in Iowa.
And by the time I got to San Francisco,
they were worked out a fair amount.
But I also think it was about how much attention I
was paying to the research.
I had been looking at Iowa and Nebraska
as a place that I already knew, and not as a place
that I needed to look at.
I chose Nebraska because of its convenience,
but I needed to start looking at it because of its setting.
I started to look around.
I went downtown and sat in coffee shops to write,
and hopped from one place to another to people
watch and take in my atmosphere.
I took trips back to my hometown in Iowa,
where Adelaide and Saga's hometown
was based pretty heavily on, and sat and looked
at the cornfields not as a memory, but as an experience.
And in that, I was able to go back to the poems
that I had already written and figure out
how to make them better.
How to better-- how to take--
pardon me.
Because memories are something that, as you remember them,
they degrade.
And I had to make new ones.
This experience worked because I had a plan.
One of the other big challenges that I ran into
was somewhere around week three, I
realized that I wouldn't have 200 poems worth of material.
I was on track to do it time wise,
but I wasn't on track to do it within the story.
But I realized that and shrunk that down.
I spent a month and a half writing,
and a month and a half revising.
And even though my plan was adjusted,
I kept it updated to be something that gave me
a better product in the end.
I had a fully revised manuscript instead of
a brand new fresh one.
And I had support.
I had Lynk funding, I had a place to live,
and I had an advisor who I knew was
on the other end of the computer screen.
That was crucial.
Most importantly, I had a story that I wanted to tell.
I had something that I was able to take from idea to almost
completed product.
And that was something that I wouldn't
have been able to do without the resources that Mt.
Holyoke gave me.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]