I don’t do well with change. I like things to stay exactly the way they are. Every time I go home for Fall, Winter, or Spring Break, everything around me changes. 

When I went home for Fall Break freshman year, my parents had completely renovated our kitchen from its original farmhouse design to a sleek, modern, white cabinet/marble countertop kitchen. I knew it was coming because I helped them pack up the kitchen before I left for school, but the place I had been making sweet potato casserole, apple pie, and cinnamon ice cream for every Thanksgiving since I was 6, was gutted. 

When I went home for Fall Break this past year, my 13-year-old sister had taken over my bedroom. All of my furniture and clothes were moved from the upstairs jack-and-jill room I had been sharing with my 17-year-old sister into our first floor guest bedroom. I knew that they were moving my bedroom because we briefly talked about it when I packed my things to go back to school, but I didn't think that things would change so soon, and without me knowing. 

When I left for college, my mom said something to me that I will always remember, “You won’t miss what you left behind nearly as much as the people you leave behind will miss you.” She reassured me that things at home will stay nearly the same while I am off in what feels like a completely different world. Yet, when I come home for breaks, it feels the opposite. I feel like 

I am the one left behind, and the world around me is changing. Every time I am home, I am the one who feels out of the loop with their lives. I don’t know the morning routine or after-school activity schedule. I can't help to decide what is going to be made for dinner that night. I don’t know what tv shows and music they are listening to, or who my sisters’ friend groups are. My mom always said that a family is a functioning unit, and all of a sudden I wasn’t a part of the unit. 

But everytime I go home, even as things change, I find myself in the same place. I am sitting at the kitchen table with my 17 year old sister, catching up on homework. Even though the table is new, I am doing the exact same thing I have been doing my whole life. 

I am sitting on my sister’s bedroom floor gossiping in the late hours of the night about dance class and theater drama that has remained the same since I was in middle school. 

I am forging my parents' signature on pick-up notes for my two elementary school sisters so that I can pick them up when 3:30pm rolls around, rather than having them take the bus home. The same bus that I had once dreaded taking at their age. And I am driving them to elementary school at 8:15 am. The same elementary school that I went to, which has the same staff and teachers that I once had. 

I am going through my mom’s closet and borrowing her clothes. I am binge watching Cobra Kai with my dad on Saturday nights. I am attending Sunday mass at the same church with the same smiling greeters at the doors when you walk in. I am laying on the couch with my two dogs on either side of me, petting them as I watch “When Harry Met Sally” for the 100th time. I am in my basement in the late hours of the night hunched over my sewing machine as I make a creation that I probably won’t ever wear. And per the request of my sisters, I am putting ice cubes in the toilets, a spoon under my pillow, and wearing my pajamas inside out and backwards in the slim chance that they will have a snow day the next day. 

So yes, things change - but funny enough, they also don’t. The feeling you get when you go home does not change. Under all of the new materiality that is change, there is so much that stays exactly the way it is, even if it is not obvious. 

Written by Giulia Mauro

Edited by Karlynn Riccitelli and Julia Brummell

I remember finding this club my freshman year, discovering interests in myself I didn’t know were there. I encountered people outside of the freshman-year-dorm-bubble I inevitably put myself in, and couldn’t believe the sense of community they offered me, a newcomer. I yearned to spend more time with them, despite my fear of being annoying, and through reading pieces as they were published I found we were more alike than I ever thought possible. I remember sitting at work reading all three blogs posted in the 2022 Valentine's day collection of blogs posted, one of them written by Kate Castello. Since that day, I hadn’t revisited these blogs. But as I scrolled through the website before writing this, please, leave me alone brought a sense of familiarity to me, as the memory of that day flooded my brain, and I took a reread.

I cannot imagine my freshman year brain reading this. The words hopeless romantic don’t quite encapsulate the state I fell into freshman year. It was a constant loop of a new campus crush, or person on Hinge, or someone I wrote a missed connection to, taking up every space in my brain. I was so focused on any ounce of romantic attention I could grab, no matter how it made me feel afterwards. I can picture myself reading the words “I want to be alone,” and thinking: well, this one doesn’t pertain to me right now. And I wish, so deeply, I could run back to that girl, sitting at her campus job, and beg her to just listen.

Two years later, I’m in a relationship I wouldn’t trade for the world. I feel loved in ways I didn’t think capable, understood, and cared for. I know the love I have to give and I know that it’s enough. And I know that, in order to get here, I had to be alone. I just wish I knew that sooner;I wish I listened to Kate. 

Link to original piece:

Written by: Elisabeth Kay

I didn’t write my first piece for the club until this year, so rather than giving a review of that piece, I figured I would choose one of my favorite pieces: Delaney Pipon's “Searching for Angels”. (You should probably go read her piece first, I couldn’t recommend it enough!) 

Delaney writes about her religious upbringing and how there are times where it feels like religion is only meant to tear you down– you walk around in your day to day life feeling a tiny bit ashamed and embarrassed and resentful towards the people who taught you to feel this way. 

I only went to Catholic school for one year, but I spent many years in Sunday school. I've noticed that many religious upbringings are similar– you end up with good and bad teachers. There are the teachers that convince you that birth control is wrong, being gay is wrong, wearing short or tight fitted clothes is wrong, premarital sex is wrong, and that as a young girl, your body is a temple. I’ll never forget my seventh grade CCD teacher who stood in a church basement classroom yelling at us until her face turned bright pink- all because some kid asked why is it wrong for a man to love another man. Worst of all, her husband stood behind her with glazed over eyes not saying a word, clearly dissociated. 

Unfortunately, for many years, this sticks with you. You feel like you don’t deserve to be where you are and you don’t belong because you aren’t as devoted as others, but then, you start to think about good teachers you had, the amazing people who taught you how to be religious without tearing you down. For Delaney, it was Ms. T, who taught her at the age of 10 to search for angels. For me, it's Ms. Bernadette and Ms. Loretta, Ms. Donna and Ms. Anna, Decan Cliff who would give us high fives after mass on Sundays, and Father Steve who we would see every time we went to Panera. These are the people I think about when I search for angels, the people who taught me that no one is perfect and that there is good in everyone. 

Delaney’s piece is beautifully written and I think it encapsulates how you tend to pull away from your religious upbringing while still remembering the good in a more diluted form. The good moments and teachings are the ones you remember, and even if they don’t fully pull you back, they are always there in the back of your mind. 

link to original piece:

Written by: Giulia Mauro

Edited by: Lauren Deaton and Elisabeth Kay

In 2022, Belle O’Hara wrote a piece titled “Basic.” This Studio 412 blog captured the idea of being basic, or liking what others like, and the negative connotations that can come with it. She discussed her favorite coffee brand being Starbucks, while admitting that she sometimes lies and claims it’s an alternative local coffee shop. 

Reflecting on the piece, this thought and mindset hold true. I sometimes feel ashamed or embarrassed when I enjoy something basic. I’ll think about how boring I am or how I am not being unique. We’re all trying to be different, to stand out, or to discover something nobody has ever heard of. But in doing so,a cold shoulder is turned to enjoying what the masses enjoy. 

But, like O’Hara says, things are basic because they are good! What’s wrong with enjoying something everybody else likes? It's likable for a reason. So, let’s be basic! Let’s enjoy what's enjoyed by others with no shame!

Link to the Original Piece:

Written by Charlie Kurland

Edited by Ashley O'Doherty and Elisabeth Kay

My first Studio FourOneTwo piece, which I wrote two and a half years ago—when I was two and a half years less wise—still holds up. As I was adjusting to the rhythms of college life, I used the media I enjoyed to understand myself so that I could project the “real me” to others through small talk. I found the friend-making aspect of school entirely overwhelming, but discovered peace and calm in the music, TV shows, and movies I knew were always in my corner. To this day I use them as a comfort blanket, retreating to my favorite AMC theater when times get too tough.

I wanted to write “Solar Power by Lorde Deserves Better and Here’s Why” for two reasons. Firstly, because I was very passionate about this album and wanted everyone to understand it the way that I did, and secondly, because I wanted to figure out why the album resonated so much. As I’ve grown and changed throughout college, this album has grown with me. Like I wrote in the piece, “[Lorde] was the older, wiser sister I never had, and she was telling me everything was going to be ok.” The beach breeze and entrancing vocals still calm me down whenever school becomes too hectic and it always makes me excited for warm weather. Now that we have some 60 degree days again and I begin to revisit the songs, I know it will be the perfect soundtrack to my first summer post-grad. 

Every day I hope there will be news that Lorde is announcing a new album. The rumors of a 2025 release excite me, and I can’t wait to see what she has in store.

Link to the Original Piece:

Written by Leighton Curless

Edited by Brynn Murawski and Elisabeth Kay

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

--- Mary Oliver, from Dream Work (1986)

"Wild Geese" is a poem I heard for the first time last summer. Over the Christmas break, I purchased a copy of her collection, Devotions. She is one of my current favorite poets. Reading her poetry, I found, is best read aloud. It is the ultimate grounding exercise -- something you can implement in your routine at the end of the day before you go to sleep. The diction almost feels like a prayer -- without the institutions of religion jading its authenticity.

My experience with God on an institutional level has certainly been associated with shame, and for my entire childhood prayer has not always been a ritual that grounds me. The poetry of Oliver has been a wonderful guide - literature that reminds me that I can implement radical self-forgiveness for my faults as I become wiser. Our concept of God does not need to be restricted to dogma. We need to make God for ourselves.

I admire that Oliver views her place of worship (her church) as Nature. Before I was introduced to her poetry, I knew the power that Nature had when I was amid my meditations. I would often go into the woods and use the clarity the wilderness brought to write my poetry.

The Christian dogma emphasizes the vitality of repentance in keeping one’s relationship with God stable; the believer repents after sinning in the mortal realm to maintain a devoted relationship with the Christian God in the heavenly realm. This process remains deeply rooted in God as a figure that dictates the ruling threshold of spiritual hierarchy rather than viewing Him as a force that influences all facets of humanity and nature. Oliver levels the human being as a presence within nature by rejecting that repentance represents a vital component of spiritual servitude to God and advocating for love as the only essential devotional practice.

A “God-fearing” person is an archetype that not only emphasizes the intense discipline religious guides enforce onto members of a religious and/or political institution but also enforces the belief of spiritual hierarchy in traditional belief systems about God. Before the contemporary exigence of Oliver’s poetry, “Divine rights” granted the ruling class justification for their oppression of the rest of humankind; this therefore made the lower classes believe that these higher classes remained closer to God than they ever could be. Their servitude to their oppressors thus conjured their image of God as a higher oppressor. Repentance was a process borne of fear and necessity. 

When Oliver asserts the believers “do[es] not have to walk on [their] knees / for a hundred miles repenting,” she grants the individual the liberty to approach the Lord less frighteningly than initially enforced by institutions of the church and modern politics. To the poet’s self-concept of devotional practice, the believer should feel free to relish in the splendors of nature — which she ceases to deem as products of God; in fact, the splendor of Him reveals itself in the vastness of the Earth’s landscapes, “moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and deep trees, the mountains and the rivers.” These lines evoke the astonishment of observing the natural world — a condition not jaded by the fear that hierarchical authorities inflict on individuals in the human-made thresholds below them. They alter the approach to faith as a way of living (something meditative) rather than a trial before dying.

To be a living being on Earth, according to Oliver, requires nothing except to exist “in the family of things.” She draws on the image of the “wild geese,” to create a picture of what it may mean for someone to return to themself, which is equivalent to returning home and returning to God. The migration patterns of the wild geese Oliver contemplates when she wrote this piece build on the feeling of awe she expresses in previous lines and reframes her focus from the planet’s landscape to the beings inhabiting it. When she observes the living, she spiritualizes the migration as “the world offer[ing] itself to [the imagination of the living].” The body of the Earth is connected to the living through this wonder: a holy matrimony rooted in absolute love and interconnectedness. This philosophy of love molds the foundation for wonder. 

The space left after the believer abandons repentance must be filled with something so this emptiness does not compromise the connectivity of “the family of things.” God encourages the beings of the Earth to experience Him by “only [allowing] to let the soft animal of [their bodies] / love what it loves.” Love without consequence is the most Godly virtue. In this light, awe becomes tranquil when compared to its presentation from a hierarchical religious system. Love as devotion dissolves the barriers of spiritual hierarchy, and allows the believer to experience God as the fruit of living. “[D]espair” exists as a minor cycle of death in the vast portrait of what living in God’s family encompasses. The believer should simply exist, love, and never self-mutilate. That has never been heaven’s mission.

Written by Eden Mann

Edited by Julia Allie and Julia Brummell

Patriarchy (noun): a system of society or government in which men hold the power and women are largely excluded from it.

Patriarchy, a word I’m sure many of us are familiar with. Whether you benefit, detriment, or are simply a bystander to it, it is an invisible force field that grabs our society and refuses to let go.

While I self-identify as a feminist and someone who is very anti-patriarchy, I am unable to avoid it. I can share as many “Boys are the worst” comments with my friends as I please, and feel joyfully inspired by my future as a woman in a male-dominated field, but I exist within the vacuum that is patriarchy. I’ll even go as far as to say that I am a hypocrite by denoting myself as a rebel against the system: I’m a key player in it every single day.

It wasn’t until I arrived home on break in the suburbia of my New Jersey town that I truly began to think. More importantly, it wasn’t until I shared a boy war story with my mother that I became enraged. It was my mother, a sixty-year-old, self-proclaimed feminist, who lit this fire: I wasn’t angry at the system, I was angry that I was so blindly engulfed in it. 

She told me of the mid-90s, a mystical time of Dr. Martens and NSYNC, and more importantly Sex and the City, a show that glamorized the life of single women. In between cocktail dresses, shopping, and bad dates with men, what more could a woman want! Maybe you were a little Samantha with a dash of Charlotte or a touch of Miranda with Carrie’s whimsy. However, this isn’t a show review: my point is, she brought up what she considered to be a similar literary masterpiece of the time: The Rules by Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider. 

Don’t meet him halfway or go dutch on a date. 

Don’t open up too fast.

Don’t call him and rarely return his calls. 

Don’t expect a man to change or try to change him. 

That’s just a little taste to give a general synopsis: supposedly a dating guide for women, what to do and not to do to catch a man. Well, you can imagine how far my eyes popped out of my head when my mother enlightened her twenty-year-old daughter with this wonderful knowledge. And you can maybe even picture my accompanied disgust when I realized that these printed words, patriarchal bits of knowledge, were things I subconsciously followed. Pieces of advice I often gave my friends in conversations. 

Now, I write all of this to share my epiphany: stop letting patriarchy bleed into your life. These supposed “rules” aim to benefit men and force women to act in a way so “perfect,” “classy,” or “ladylike,” that how could we not take the perfect man off the market? We are given this idea that we’ll find the perfect boyfriend or husband if we don’t become emotionally intimate and refuse to pay on the first date. Even worse, we’re told that men will NEVER change and that we must change ourselves to suit their needs. 

Patriarchy will not guarantee you the perfect life partner. Hell, if it does, I’m not even sure I want him. If I’m expected to follow a guidebook to make men want to spend more than two hours clothed with me, I will live peacefully in solitude. I will exist in this ecosystem of patriarchy and for once make men figure out what to do and not do to catch me.

Written by Ella Romano

Edited by Wendy Moore and Julia Brummell

Sitting in Silence

“We wouldn’t have gotten along as kids,” is something I’ve heard from a few people in my life today. 

You were sensitive? Yeah no. 

You had an almond mom? Yeah no. 

I literally would have bullied you. 

Well, too bad, I wouldn’t have talked to you anyway. I was one loyal ass friend. I had my two best friends, one in school and one out of school. And I had my little brother, and all the other younger siblings that were “built in.” 

I was always known as the kid with the biggest imagination. I would write crazy stories in class that I had dreamt about the night before, and everyone always asked me how to do the assignment in art class. I would lead a whole group of kids around the playground, in charge of the story telling of the giant fights we would have with goblins, dragons, and other bad guys. I could always climb the highest in trees, perched at the top while I watched kids fall out of the lowest limb. Some kids would get super frustrated that they couldn’t get up, even when I would tell them exactly how to climb the tree. Some kids would ask for a boost, but I would always tell them what my mom had told me. If you can’t get up, you can’t get down. One time there was this girl, the new girl, who couldn’t get up. We felt bad so we gave her a boost. She immediately wanted to get back down but couldn’t, so she cried until an adult came to get her out. 

There was this tree in the back of the playground across the baseball field that everyone wanted to climb. I would run over to it, find the limb, wrap my hands around it and walk my feet up the side of the tree. Then I would swing one of my legs around, grab ahold of that one piece of bark sticking out and hoist myself up. The higher I climbed up the quieter things would be. I loved seeing the world get small below me, and smelling the bark of the tree. I examined every little detail of the tree, the smooth wood and the rough bark. Sometimes I would see an ant crawling through the crevice and I would watch it hike to its destination. I would put my special rock in a hidden crevice between the branches far enough towards the top so I knew other kids wouldn’t be able to get it. I would check on it from time to time, lifting it up to see all the bugs that were crawling underneath. I hated spiders, but loved rolly pollys. There used to be wooden vines hanging down from that tree. But one of the parents tried to climb it one time and it broke. Stupid adults. 

There were even more vines that climbed way up high in another area of the playground. You could see houses from blocks away if you climbed high enough up there. I would sit on the vines or the limbs of the tree and think. I was dangling up high in the vines, and I melted into the bark of the tree. You could even swing on some of them, too. I loved talking to animals pretending they could understand what I was saying. I made little bunny “nests” with my friends in the grass, because we didn’t know that bunnies lived in burrows. We would place flowers in a circle and wait for them to come out of the bushes. One time my brother found a pile of “raisins” on the ground, and ate one. 

That still makes me laugh. 

In the spring and summer time, red berries would grow on the bushes surrounding the park. Do NOT eat those, our mothers would warn.

They’re for the bunnies and the birds anyway, we would always reply.

Behind the baseball field, there was a giant pile of wood chips and mulch. What do you think is under there? asked one of my friends. I thought about what animal could be that huge, and scary. 

A bull I replied. I imagined a really big one, with horns and fire in its eyes. The bull king, and it’s gonna come out soon, so we need to get weapons to fight it! We spent the rest of the day finding sticks for wands and swords. We had a huge battle and had many of the other kids join, even our little siblings. At the end of the fight, I buried that special sword with my friend in the dirt of the baseball field. It was as if we were putting it to rest. 

I tried going back to dig it up, but I never found it again. 

In the way back of the park, past the vines and the long stretch of grass, there was a small hiking trail. 

The teenagers go back there, warned the adults. Don’t go in there without one of us. 

There was a diamond yellow sign of a person hiking. Next to the entrance there was a thorn bush where one of the adults got stuck in it trying to get their toddler out. Once I got older, I went onto that trail. It was hidden, quiet, and you were basically in the backyard of this house that always had dogs barking at you. I still hear the silence. 

Slowly, the playground started to change. They cut the limbs off the tree, cut the vines down, and they replaced the wooden play sets with plastic blocks. They even took away all the slides. They made that long stretch of grass and where the vines used to be, into a disc golf course. What even is disc golf? 

Every time I go there now it feels like the place just gets smaller and dimmer. It used to be so bright and big. 

I don’t want to go to the playground. 

To 

Just five more minutes? 

However, despite how sad it’s been to see the playground turn into something I barely recognize, that imagination continued to work as a tool for me. My ability to describe my thoughts in different words and pictures helped me communicate what I didn’t fully understand at the time. To me, art and imagination isn’t something to show off, it’s a way to express yourself. It’s a way to connect with the world around you. So even though I became stuck in the back of the playground at one point, I was still near the tree and those vines. 

So maybe we wouldn’t have gotten along. Maybe you would’ve been afraid every time I showed you a cool bug I found, be confused about how to climb a tree, or see what imaginary creature we were fighting. Maybe you would’ve gotten frustrated with how sensitive I was, because you weren’t allowed to be sensitive yourself. Maybe you were fighting your own creatures at home, they just weren’t imaginary. Maybe we fought different bad guys at different points in our lives, so that’s why we understand each other today. 

So look at the bugs in the cracks of the sidewalk with me, and then look up at the sky to see that the world is so much bigger than this. Smell the warm leaves and see how bright their green color is, they’re so full of life just like you and I. Feel the calm warmth in your chest and move forward with me. The world is quiet in a good way again, so let’s just sit in silence.

Written by Mia Stack

Edited by Ruby Kolik and Elisabeth Kay

Six months ago if you were to ask me what was good for my soul I could tell you with full certainty. I would walk you through my different contingency plans for “soul healing”. Now as I’m in an entirely new city, it’s harder to figure out what to do. 

My fail-safe solution when I’m feeling down is to venture down Walker Way and enter my favorite simple hiking trail. This trail provides endless avenues of possibility. Leading to my best friend's house, my elementary school, the reservoir near my house, the University of Delaware, and a nearby state park. 

Starting on this trail I was able to walk to my elementary school. Before I started Kindergarten my dad, an avid trail runner, discovered a road less taken by that connected to the playground of Maclary Elementary. The night before my 1st day, my parents led the way to the playground and pushed me on the swings as we walked through the logistics of my 1st day and navigating the bus. Throughout my time at Maclary, my parents often walked me to school on that same path. I loved the days when it was nice enough to trek to school, it felt like an adventure straight out of Ramona and Beezus. This walk to school was sometimes orchestrated by my mother who realized that my best friend Rebecca’s house also connected to these woods. 

Becca has been my best friend and the first person I turn to since I was six years old. During elementary school, we were in the same Girl Scout troop, same class, and played for the same softball league. When middle school came we went to different schools and I quit softball, but that didn’t break our bond. I replaced softball with swim team to be with Becca. We spent our mornings diving headfirst into freezing water, and our nights sleeping at each other's houses. Our friendship has always been filled with childlike wonder and companionship, but at age 14 I think we started to realize the true nature of our friendship. Quarantine was a difficult time for everyone, but I had Becca by my side. I spent March-May of 2020 quarantining in upstate New York, but when I came home to Delaware, the first person I saw (socially distanced) was Becca. We went on a walk. We took the same trail outside of our houses, and met at the reservoir, a 1 ½ mile circular trail that overlooks Newark, Delaware. 

The summer of 2022. 

This was the summer we started truly feeling like teenagers. We finished sophomore year, eager to be upperclassmen at our respective schools, and counted down the days until we earned our full licenses. During those times when we couldn’t drive but wanted to hang out, we would meet in the woods. We’d lug our overnight bags to the other’s house until we finally started leaving things at the other's house. This was the summer I experienced my first heartbreak. Becca was there for all of it. This was also when we realized the true magnitude of trails accessible at our fingertips. We walked for miles after swim practice and the whole time she listened to me as I coped with the end of my first relationship. 

This cemented our walks as one of our many rituals. Anytime the weather was nice enough we’d simply text each other, “reservoir walk?” We bring our dogs and laugh until our stomachs hurt. We look at the middle-aged moms walking with their ankle weights and exchange a knowing glance, understanding that will be us in 25 years. 

Now I’m in Pittsburgh, and experiencing all of the mood swings associated with freshman year. In the cold of February, I can’t bring myself to walk outside or explore Schenley Park. But I know I have Becca, my beautiful best friend I can always call. All roads lead back to her.

Written by Olivia Kessler

Edited by Julia Brummell and Elisabeth Kay

this moldy strawberry was left 

under the bright red where it goes unknown 

to not take the vibrance in a role of theft 

it stays below to maintain its own

but this moldy strawberry lacks control

where knocking not one but two 

can distract a soul

with whatever comes to truth, 

external or youth be it so

as a moldy strawberry brilliance

lacking a basket 

to me a stem

with its longing root that was once content

Written by Alicia Sayaka

Edited by Kate Madden and Julia Brummell