It is with big sad hearts that we have to say goodbye to this season's residents of the Peach Seed Apprenticeship for Emerging Editors, Charlotte Hughes and Dohyun Kim. They gave us a stellar year of editing youth work for our journal! Reminisce with us:
September: Charlotte Hughes and Dohyun Kim
October: Kirby Wilson
November: Youngseo Lee
December: Dana Blatte
January: Stephanie Chang
February: Sarah Lao
March: Alison Cao
April: Ottavia Paluch
May: Yvanna Vien Tica
June: Alex Manebur
We can't wait to see what they do next, so we caught up with them over email to learn more about their year with us, where they're headed next, and the roles they hope writing and writing communities will continue to play in their lives.
What are your plans for next year?
Charlotte: I'm planning on attending Yale University this fall, and this summer I'm working at a summer day camp for elementary & middle schoolers. Writing, watching movies, reading, hanging out are givens (lol).
Dohyun: I’m going to Stanford! Which also means I’m staying in California. This summer I took a lot of tutoring jobs here and there; I did it at first because I wanted some money to build a PC but I’m now realizing that I genuinely enjoy teaching.
What are you working on creatively right now?
Charlotte: I'm working on a long-form short story about a Florida camping trip that experiments with narrative structure (aka it's not a linear storyline) and I'm working on some shorter poems, trying to expand my language & give more brevity & vividness to description. Ideally, a novel is in my future, but not for a few years (or more).
Dohyun: I’m not going to lie this year hasn’t been very generative. Missing all of senior year was not lit. But I’m currently trying my hand at fiction! Specifically sci-fi that isn’t very scientific. The short story I’m currently working on is about finding a door on the cosmological horizon of our Local Group, kind of like the ending of The Truman Show.
What were some of your favorite moments or highlights from the last year working on Peach?
Charlotte: I loved meeting the Peach Mag staff. They're so supportive of your writing, period, no matter if it's published in Peach or a completely different magazine. This program took me out of my comfort zone, too—I hadn't organized any kind of reading before, online or in-person.
Dohyun: I’m really happy with everything we published this year, but I think my favorite was probably our first feature: “Whale Falls are the Hottest Restaurants of the Deep Sea.” Whale fall videos on YouTube are terrifying, but once you start watching you just can’t stop looking. The poem felt a little bit like that. The Peach Mag staff were incredible and always offered their support. It was also inspiring to see how much Peach hypes up their contributors, both when they are published in Peach Mag and in their endeavors afterwards. That’s the publishing practice I most want to remember from this experience.
What kind of role do you hope writing and writing communities will play in your future?
Charlotte: I hope that writing will be my future. I have no idea what the next 5-10 years will bring for me, but I've learned the most about myself, met my best friends, grown the most as a person through writing and through the writing communities I've been part of.
Dohyun: I’ve learned that writing is a priceless cultural artifact—a signifier of what the people of its respective era were worried about, the things they loved, and all the minute routines that constituted their lives. These next four years is quite a lot of time to decide what exactly I want to do with my life, but right now I'd like to keep writing because I feel purpose when I think of writing in this way. I also hope to continue participating in writing communities. Knowing that people out there are overthinking things just as much as you are is grounding. Also you just tend to learn a lot when you hang around writers. Oh, last thing I’m going to try and keep in mind as I write in the future. It’s ok to write cringe! Everybody has written cringe.
Thank you, Charlotte and Dohyun! Keep in touch!!!
The Peach Seed Apprenticeship for Emerging Editors is our annual editorial residency program for rising high school seniors. We mentor our resident Peach Seeds on developing their editorial and curatorial skills, working on an independent literary project, and building artistic community. Look out for news of next season's Peach Seed(s) sometime later this summer.
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