During the last two
weeks of June, we’ll be taking our annual summertime publishing
hiatus, in which we skip an issue to catch up on office projects
and maybe play some Frisbee in the park. Look for the next issue of
HCN around July 21.
WELCOME,
NEW INTERNS
During her first attempt to return to her
native West, new intern Andrea Appleton worked
as a school lunch lady and hot dog vendor in Phoenix. Eight years
later, she’s excited to be back, this time as an environmental
journalist.
Andrea spent her first 14 years of life in
tiny La Veta, Colo., then moved to the Midwest and got a degree in
English from the University of Illinois. After graduating — and
discovering that school lunch and hot dogs were not her calling —
Andrea took a series of entomology-related jobs, including driving
a mobile bug museum. Six months of insect research in Switzerland
convinced her that she’d prefer a career with a broader focus, so
she moved to New York, where she got a master’s in journalism from
Columbia University and worked as a freelance journalist.
Paonia may be a long way from Brooklyn, but she welcomes the
change. “The bird songs, the plant life, the color of the sky all
feel like home,” she says. “I guess even the bugs feel familiar.”
Rob Inglis worked in a sheet-metal
shop at McMurdo Station from October through February this year.
“The landscape of Antarctica is not as harsh as I thought it would
be,” he says, recalling the beauty of the sun’s late-night glow on
the glaciers and the Royal Society Mountains. Originally from South
Carolina, Rob finished his bachelor’s degree at Yale in ethics,
politics and economics last spring. He also participated in the
school’s nascent Journalism Initiative. Since graduating, besides
his Antarctica stint, he’s hitchhiked around New Zealand and
studied invertebrate sea creatures in Friday Harbor, Wash.
Rob says he’s always been fascinated by the West, and
sees journalism as an opportunity to explore a wide variety of
topics, from the environment and science to public health and
immigration.
Emily Steinmetz has made
some big changes in her life recently. In early June, she moved
from Albuquerque to Paonia to become HCN‘s first
multimedia intern. A scant three days before that, she eloped with
her boyfriend. “We were trying to get married the whole week,” she
says, “but we would go hiking or whatever and suddenly realize it
was 4:30 and the courthouse was closed!”
While pursuing
her master’s degree in anthropology at American University in
Washington, D.C., Emily spent dozens of hours in a prison
interviewing female inmates. As part of her Ph.D. work at
Northwestern University in Illinois — also on the anthropology of
prisons — she lived for a year in a rural New Mexico town,
one-third of whose residents were incarcerated.
There,
she was often mistaken for a reporter, confirming her hunch that
she’d do better as a writer than an academic. She chose
HCN because it seemed the perfect venue for
exploring her interests in journalism, social justice and the
environment.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Dear friends.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
