Acclaimed American novelist Kurt Vonnegut once said, that “The most daring thing (a person can do,) is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.”

I started going to college in the heart of the COVID pandemic. It wasn’t until my third semester that I actually started going to classes in person; and, those classrooms were not at all what I expected. They were awkward, silent, uncomfortable. Nobody looked at each other, nobody spoke, and nobody was there to make friends or meet people. I was struck by the realization that despite being finally let out of the confines of our homes, we were each still firmly living within our bubbles.

It took a few years to come out of it. And that’s understandable. Society itself had to recover from a tremendous international trauma. Becoming ourselves again was going to be uncomfortable, it was going to be weird, and difficult. But, we did it. Now, after a couple semesters back, classrooms are filled with buzzing conversation before lectures, people are getting to know each other with ease, and almost nobody is staring at their phone in absolute silence anymore.

Right behind the millions of human lives lost during the Covid pandemic, one of the greatest losses we all experienced was the death of community. Being shut inside for so long, we forgot how to live and interact every day with each other. This was especially apparent on college campuses. But, not everybody stood by and waited for things to get incrementally better. A bold few took the courageous steps forward: to build a better future, and to get people interacting and simply having fun with each other again.

Autumn Kepley and Rachel Hendrix are two of those delightful, courageous human beings, and I am exceedingly thrilled to have them both on the podcast today. Both are graduate students here at UNCW, and are both people I have had the pleasure of knowing and working alongside for a number of years now. Together, they have been making significant strides to bring the UNCW English department back into a meaningful sense of community. Their endeavors have been fun, creative, unexpected, and utterly necessary in this time of societal reconstruction. Their work has created an exciting and tangible sense of camaraderie and family, in a place and time where those two things felt distant and almost entirely forgotten.