Mia was sitting on her bed, reading an email from one of her computer science professors, when she got a notification that intrigued her a lot more. It was yet another email, with the subject line reading, "Hi, what happened to The Blossom Review?" Not entirely sure herself, Mia immediately clicked over to it.
Dear Mia, it began. My name is Hannah, and I'm a poet from Northern Virginia. Hannah went on to explain that she was a junior at a high school neighboring the one Mia attended and wanted to submit some of her latest poetry to The Blossom Review—the literary magazine Mia had founded in the depths of her pandemic-induced boredom when she was fifteen. The Blossom Review had not published anything for the past three years—that is, since Mia had been accepted into Stanford to study computer science.
Her guidance counselor had said that coding required the same sort of creativity that writing did—except coding paid a lot better.
When she herself was a junior in high school, Mia’s high school guidance counselor had told her that computer science would be the perfect path for her—all because she had done well in the introductory computer science classes she had taken. Though she had yet to see any evidence for this, her guidance counselor had said that coding required the same sort of creativity that writing did—except coding paid a lot better.
Her parents were ecstatic. They had always supported whatever Mia was successful at. As long as they could brag about her to their colleagues, she thought bitterly, she could do whatever she wanted. But she could tell from their enthusiasm, a stark contrast to the strained smiles that settled across their faces whenever she brought up writing, that they clearly preferred this new vision of Mia’s future.
Mia came to crave the approval that accompanied telling people she planned to pursue computer science. “Wow, you must be smart!” was a much more pleasant response to one’s future ambitions than “And how exactly do you plan to make money with that?”
At the time, with Mia’s only exposure to the world of tech being introductory computer science classes and a few TikToks romanticizing the experience of being a woman in STEM, she believed that computer science was the right path for her. She thought tech would be a meritocracy that rewarded the most creative thinkers and the hardest workers. It wasn’t until a few devastating rounds of internship applications had gone by, where Mia was summarily rejected by every company she applied to, and the boys in her classes whose families had connections to the industry received those offers instead—regardless of their work ethic or critical thinking ability—that Mia realized how naive she had been.
At the end of the email, Hannah had attached some of her latest poetry and added I know The Blossom Review is closed for submissions right now, but I really wanted to reach out to you! I hope everything is going well :) I saw you’re a junior at Stanford, and I really want to study English there! If you have time to respond, I'd love to hear what the creative writing classes there are like.
Even after The Blossom Review's indefinite hiatus began, the magazine's dedicated inbox for submissions continued to receive emails. Hannah's email had gone to Mia's personal inbox, however, which could only be found via her personal website. So at least Hannah had done her research, and this effort on Hannah’s part compelled Mia to open one of the PDFs Hannah had attached. She skimmed over Hannah’s poem. Nothing about it really stood out to her, other than Hannah's obvious enthusiasm. She supposed the poem was relatively good for being written by a sixteen-year-old. She tried not to think that her own writing had been better at that age (even if it might have been). The mindset of constant comparison so prevalent in Stanford’s computer science department was one Mia was trying, though with little success so far, to shake. She read through the other two poems Hannah had attached as well. All three were inspired by various literary works, or at least Hannah's interpretations of them: the Iliad, Hamlet, and even the Bible. Mia had similarly been inspired by canonical texts at Hannah’s age, thinking that by drawing on great writers before her, she could fool the adults into thinking she was a great writer, too. She smiled a bit at Hannah’s youthful thinking, so reminiscent of her own.
Maybe spending too much time on LinkedIn had made Mia a bit cynical, but she was hesitant to respond to Hannah immediately. If Hannah asked her for a coffee chat about Stanford over Zoom and was only pretending to be interested in Mia’s work as a way to get close to her, Mia was fairly sure she would cry tears of frustration. She had received enough LinkedIn messages to that effect to be wary of high schoolers claiming interest in her poetry.
The past came rushing back to her—the elation of a submission accepted at a magazine she had thought was too prestigious for her, the quiet joy of reading a poem by an emerging writer who she knew would be a perfect fit for The Blossom Review, and even the devastation of having her work rejected.
Mia tried to ignore Hannah's email, finish her homework for the night, and go to bed at a reasonable time, which, to her and all of her responsibilities, meant two in the morning. Yet Hannah's email nagged at her. Mia hardly ever had time to miss the world of writing and literary magazines, but as she stared at her ceiling, the past came rushing back to her—the elation of a submission accepted at a magazine she had thought was too prestigious for her, the quiet joy of reading a poem by an emerging writer she knew would be a perfect fit for The Blossom Review, and even the devastation of having her work rejected.
She wondered if that startup founder had been full of shit. He probably was.
When Mia was a freshman, a startup founder invited to speak at Stanford told her and a room full of other exhausted but earnest undergrads that burnout was a myth and could be cured by simply trying harder. She had taken that to heart. But as Mia reflected on how dull her world had become since school had become the focal point of her life, she wondered if that startup founder had been full of shit. He probably was. His NFT-focused startup had declared bankruptcy months ago, after all. It was so easy to talk about burnout, Mia thought, when you based your life around fleeting technological trends and not genuine passion for what you were doing. She had been told plenty of times that passion had no place in the world of real adults with real careers, and found that as a result, passion had come to have no place at all in her life.
She hated that she missed writing so desperately. She hated that most of the time, she felt so drained from her latest, mind-numbing coding assignments that all she had the energy to do was scroll on TikTok, without the slightest thought given to how she could express herself. There was so much she kept entirely to herself that she once shared in her writing: her rage, yes, but also her love, excitement, and happiness, even her curiosity.
So Mia reached for her phone, and even if the writing she was about to do wasn’t exactly creative, she felt the same thrill she did when she began a new poem. Dear Hannah, she began, I appreciate you reaching out to me.
