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"Origins of Spark" by Linden Hansen




I wrote this piece a while ago around October of 2023. I was applying to college and had no clue what to write my Common App personal statement on– which, any senior will tell you is a right of passage. I was pulling at strands of ideas that led nowhere when one day I thought, ‘Let me just write what I know’. And if I know two things well, it’s Persephone and SPARK. So here is that essay. SPARK has taught me so much, and I don’t know where I will be without it next year (or if I would even be there without it!). So long early Wednesday mornings with my friends, with Mrs. Hoelscher, and with an iced latte– whole milk.


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Each person entering Persephone holds multitudes. Multitudes united over one thing: a stark, brown bean—ground fine, pressed compact, pulled through steaming water, poured, and served. 

The seemingly mundane process has brought not only coffee into my life, but pure, raw, awe-inducing interaction. 


At Persephone Bakery, where I work at the register, coffee weaves a web of disparate lives over a single cup: two strangers chat productively over the latest headline as they wait; a grandmother shows her daughter’s daughter napkin sketching, passing art down through posterity. When Michael, a regular, reveals his links to a meditation school nesting in the northern hills of Thailand, I am transported back to my childhood racing through rainy Bangkok streets. And in the kitchen, a line chef, whose teenage daughter is finally moving to the United States from Mexico, orders a latté with 2% milk. I eagerly offer to show her around. 


Outside of Persephone’s walls, relationships are now a natural wonder to explore. I follow their paths through the rocky ravines of lacrosse-practice-leading, dip my feet in the cool pond of a new friend’s laugh, and stare in amazement at the constellation-strewn galaxy that is my family. A whole world above me and I had never cared to look up. My sisters shoot out new stars each day, the dust arranging in camouflaging shapes; I have a newfound anticipation for our drives to school each morning, when I catch the brazen joy on their changing faces—no longer plump with early youth—as we scream Taylor Swift lyrics for 25 minutes straight. Some mornings, we even stop by Persephone. We wait eagerly to order, and I ramble their tiny ears off about the regulars I recognize—Patty, whose days revolve around perfecting her golf swing; Greg, a big-time software manager taking mimosas in between work calls. 


And in this way, where I once wrote about the worlds I found in the people I met at Persephone, today I facilitate curiosity in others. My red moleskin journal still houses myriad fragments of raw human spirit, but so does a literary magazine called SPARK, produced from my vision as a space of communal expression. It is there that I mentor and lead a handful of writers like myself. Words have always been a part of my life: I penned the Cookie and Cookina series in second grade, I can tell you the plot of almost any children’s book, and to date, my Notes app holds 249 entries, snippets of ideas waiting to be gutted and studied through written form. But I wanted more—to encourage that ripple of consciousness to unfold in others. SPARK was a group-chat-mumbling turned real deal. I was fresh off a creative nonfiction writing course at Brown University, trodding back to the mountains with a head full of ideas and nowhere to put them. I reached out to my greatest resource, my best friends, texting, “Do you want to start a magazine?” 


As always, they were in. 


The road was slow and steady, but passion led the way. What started as five girls and a faithful English teacher snowballed into a polished collaboration amongst imaginative minds, finished with a sleek cover manifesting a different flare in each month’s issue. With the publication’s debut, lost writers from all realms came wandering into SPARK’s Wednesday morning meetings. Now, each week, over baked goods and Persephone coffee, witty satirists, investigative reporters, visionary artists, and existential philosophers dissect the plight of the human experience, brainstorming ways to put it on paper. All are biting at the opportunity for expression, and I have the pleasure of leading them. My heart is so full of hope for what the next edition may bring and what new mind I might meet, walking through the door for the first time this Wednesday, their stories hot and bursting at the seams, longing to be known and seen. 


It is a Persephone of my own.

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