By: Linda Jiang According to Merriam-Webster, friendship is the state of being friends, but it means something more to me. The purest form of friendship comes from a relationship like a sun and a moon where you complement and support each other. There's not a moment that they will diminish even if the whole world … Continue reading Friendships Change Life →

Sophia Boquist A topic we have discussed extensively through our reading of If I Ever Get Out of Here is the impermanence of life, particularly during adolescence, and learning to cope with its harshness. As it happens, this is a subject I’m all too familiar with thanks to my upbringing in an Air Force family, … Continue reading Coping with Impermanence →

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett tells the story of two identical twin sisters, the Vignes twins, who grew up together in a small, southern black town. As rebellious teenagers, they decide to run away at age sixteen to venture into the lives they have dreamed of living, away from their small hometown. Desiree Vignes, … Continue reading Blog #2: Conforming to Societies Standards →

Anne Solomon - Blog 2 “If I Ever Get Out of Here” depicts the life of an adolescent Native American boy, Lewis. This tale depicts many parts of adolescence: music, first girlfriends/boyfriends, friendship, and junior high. But this novel also depicts the harder parts of this critical time in a person’s life, particularly for a … Continue reading Hair →

My dad used to always play me classic rock from the 70s and 80s when he took me to dive practice each weekend. He’d play the local classic rock station, and at each song he claimed was good, he’d tell me the artist who’d sang it, and he’d ask me about it later. I’d always … Continue reading Adolescence in The Who’s “Quadrophenia” →

Media is constantly around to remind consumers what is normal, what is different, and essentially what they should be thinking. However, when certain groups of people, such as minorities, are rarely in the media, it can be very damaging. In an interview for the 25th Anniversary of The House on Mango Street, author Sandra Cisneros … Continue reading Lack of Representation in the Media →

Violence between and against adolescents is typically a difficult subject to broach. Often, it is easier to simply look away than to confront the ways in which young adults inflict pain upon each other, as well as the pain inflicted on them by others. Sometimes, this violence is even turned into a spectacle to be … Continue reading The Bruises of Youth: Violence in Young Adult Fiction →

Uncle Mike is my godfather. He was one of my favorite people when I was growing up, always being the jokester and goofball in the room. He would always give me noogies or ask me how baseball and hockey were going. He was the uncle who was always throwing the football around with me and … Continue reading Uncle Mike →

-Starr Church Figure 1 found from https://creativemornings.com/themes/identity If you were asked to describe your identity, what would you say? Your first thought may be which gender you identify as. Some may immediately think of their economic class. Others may associate their identity with their race.  If I were asked, I may say, “I identify as … Continue reading Shaping Identity →

            The concept of identity is something that I am sure every person has thought about in their life. We are always trying to discover who we are and who we want to be. I recently learned in a psychology class there are two versions of the “self.” The first is called the actual self, which … Continue reading Identity in Adolescence →