What is your current position?
I'm the editor of Orion Magazine, a national, bimonthly magazine about culture and the environment.
What was your major at Middlebury?
I was a joint major in Environmental Studies and Philosophy.
What was your favorite non-curricular activity during your college days?
I'm a transplanted Californian, and I really just loved the Vermont countryside.
Did any of your summer jobs or internships influence your thinking about careers after college?
Completely. In the summers I took environmental education courses at The Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research in Boulder, CO and The Sierra Institute in Santa Cruz, CA. I also worked for Outward Bound one summer. I knew I wanted to write my senior project on alternative outdoor education, so I taught a Winterterm course on nature writing. It was one of the most rewarding things I've ever done. I arrived at The Orion Society thinking I might be able to do editing and work on the education programs. I'm now primarily an editor, and I'm enjoying that a great deal, but the question perennially comes up, how can I be doing more teaching?
What person at Middlebury had the greatest impact on you?
John Elder (Environmental Studies/English). I didn't meet him until my last year at Middlebury when I took his "Visions of Nature" course, but we then did a lot of work together my senior year, and he put me in touch with The Orion Society.
In what ways did your Middlebury education prepare you for your career? For life in general?
For me, the biggest asset was the interdisciplinary nature of the Environmental Studies program. When I read environmental writing now I really do draw on the geology and biology and wish I remembered more of it! The fact that I was moving in a humanities direction but getting some pretty solid science has really helped. Middlebury really didn't prepare me for life; being a small New England college, it's a pretty isolated social experiment.
What do you wish you had known in college that would have benefited you later on?
I felt really strangled by a lot of the social pressures at Middlebury, and it took me longer to let go of that than I would have liked.
What was your first job after college?
I went right to The Orion Society as a paid intern. At that point the Society was in New York City, and I didn't think I could live there. I tried it for a summer and I just hung on. I had planned to try the job for three months, but at the end of that time I hadn't finished the project I was working on, so I stayed for two more months, and then was hired on as full-time staff. I came at a time of expansion. We started with four people in New York City and now we have a staff of nine based in Great Barrington, MA.
Have you earned any advanced degrees since Middlebury? In your field, when is the best time to pursue an advanced degree?
No. It's not necessary for the publishing side of my job, but for the teaching it is. I have been able to squeeze by doing workshops and teaching in adjunct faculty positions, but schools really want you to have a master's. I think about graduate school every year but I realize that the employment opportunities I have right now are greater than the ones I would get through grad school.
Have you found it challenging to balance your work life and your home life?
I really have, because I work at a non-profit, and non-profit work pretty much takes over your life. You believe so much in the cause and you really want to make things work, but non-profits are characteristically understaffed and less well managed than corporations.
What is your greatest career satisfaction?
I had a friend call me this weekend to say that she had run into someone who had taken my nature writing workshop at Middlebury and said it had changed her life. So I constantly question why I'm an editor, because there is something about environmental education that really works.