Q&A

I've been writing poems in my notes app ever since 2018. The idea of writing a book never encountered my mind until the Summer of 2021 when I was only seventeen. My first book had so many different titled when the thought first crossed my mind that I don't even remember any other title to ever exist. The poems in my collection are from different periods of my life ranging from 2021 to 2023, however they are not sorted by date. I've post poned the release date since September 2022 as I felt like I hadn't fully accepted myself to write the last part of my book until March 2023. So overall, the after writing process took about a month or two whereas the writing process itself took about two. 

I self-published my book on Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing to make my book available for paperback on Amazon and electronically on Kindle. 

A fellow Colleges of the Fenway undergrad student, Emma Levine, from Massachusetts College of Art and Design helped illustrate and design the cover and line work in my book. You can check out her art Instagram account @emmalevineartwork or her online portfolio! 

My Baby Blue Hydrangeas is split up into three sections: Pink Roses, Purple Delphiniums, and Blue Hydrangeas. I don't remember exactly the memory of my recieving my first ever flowers from a boy, but it was a event that I feel so many stressed the importance of when being with a boy for the first time. Pink roses covers a portion of mnay poems I have where I write about my early teenage experiences of love or what I had thought was love. A happy and bright color, pink represents my early innocence and happiness that is ironically lost throughout the section. The most basic and known flower to know, roses to a young and naive part of me were so much  yet were ironically only the start and expectation first touched. 

The book transistions to Purple Delphiniums which helps showcase how my innocence and happiness was lost into my own mental health. I explore various parts of my life concerning my own identity issues, insecurity, anxiety, sadness, and hopelessness in this section. With pruple representing bruises, it stresses the greater effect the aftermath of pain leaves. Delphiniums growing in clusters and groups standing upright in fields  that represent how the pain and trauma I have been collecting throughout the years grow in multitudes to affect me. In this sense, my mental health here is seen as an outcome where the previous pain of the past still grows back to haunt and torment me when I am most vulnerable even when I try to tame my own garden. 

The last part, Blue Hydrangeas, goes back to the title to stress my own self-discovery and growth. Being a Spring-born (May baby) girl, with a front and back garden, flowers were no stranger to me. Hydrangeas followed me everywhere I go as a teen: on my walk home from the bus stop, the flowers behind the dorm building I like the most, on my favorite place (Nantucket) on Earth. However to me, blue hydrangeas were some of the rarest ones I'd see. With hydrangeas coming in different colors, the pH of the soil they grew in all determined it. With this, my notion of my environment changing who I am created this book. No matter what, Spring will always come and Winter will always come back. Death, in any sense, is not something one can avoid but instead find a new birth in. Blue Hydrangeas is me taking charge of my new season and changing my environment to become better while still accepting that circumstances and inevitable In the end, I am the gardener.

Absolutely not. If we look in my 4th grade yearbook I wanted to be a singer and if we looked at my college applications and college posts, I wanted to be a high school math teacher. Who knows what I wanna be in the next year? All I know is that time will tell!