Sponsor love: West Virginia m Wesleyan College’s MFA in Creative Writing and The Facing Project’s Empathy Prize for Nonfiction
Jess Phoenix. What else is there to say? She’s the author of Ms. Adventure: My Wild Explorations in Science, Lava, and Life (Timber Press, 2021). She’s a volcanologist and geologist (that might be like saying a square is also a rectangle, but we’ll leave it at that, mmkay?). She’s the founder of Blueprint Earth. She has studied English, history, geology, and earned an MFA in creative nonfiction. She also ran for Congress in 2018. She co-owns a horse farm where she rescues retired thoroughbreds from potential slaughter and re-trains them to be jumpers.
How’s your life going?
Oh, and she delivered a pretty baller TEDx talk.
You might wonder why someone like her would talk to a scrub like me. And you’d be correct to wonder, but here we are!
She’s @volcano.jess on IG and @JessPhoenix2018 on Twitter.
We talk about her path to studying volcanoes, her mentorship with Maddy Blais, subduction zones, how tectonic plates move, running for Congress, rejection, finding the through-line in a narrative, and how we likely saw each other every day at The Daily Hampshire Gazette in Northampton, Mass. without even knowing it.
Anyhoo…
The show has a new Instagram handle, @creativenonfictionpodcast, and you can always keep the conversation going on Twitter @CNFPod.
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