Member Bios

Enjoy the following descriptions of our members; their biographies, their interests, their goals within the club, and snippets related to their topics.  

Josh Downer

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 Scholar. Gentleman. In some fantasies he is an Olympic gold medalist (freestyle wrestling), acclaimed film score composer, sculptor, troubadour, father of two, 6’4” with the rich baritone of Rhett Butler. In such fantasies, he is also fluent in foreign languages. Here and now he studies neuroscience at UC Davis. He spies on neurons to catalogue the secret songs they sing to each other. What language do they speak? What do they say, and why, and when? He hopes to tell you some day. 

Olivia Seay

Her great-grandmother was a gypsy and so she is of a nomadic heart. In search of all of the heartfelt feelings a heart can feel, she moves like blood in its pre-destined path of discovery through dark chambers and avenues of invigoration. The sound lub-dub lub-dub echoing in her chest chooses her directions. Faster, slower, left, right. Seismic waves of acceleration and deceleration, unearthly tremors guide her through the opening and closing of doors. Circulating through time and place, experience and other hearts, she gathers the oxygen she needs to breathe and feel alive, offering unwavering and eternal beats as collateral…

ELI HUSBY

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I am a biology student, particularly interested in fisheries management and conservation of sharks and other vulnerable (and oft-misunderstood) species. I also make comic books, write prose fiction and nonfiction, and do art in a variety of mediums, including oils, acrylics, decoupage, and watercolor pencil. I am currently working on a series of essays about people and the sea. I also think a lot, lately about the relationship (or perhaps lack thereof) between mathematical probability and humanistic self-determination. I am fascinated by randomness in the purest sense of the word. I am captivated by the ocean. I strive to live an independent life.  

Anne Cormia

It is not that I am a mind in control of a body. I am a body, which my mind is a part of and cannot operate without. Brain and body, in body, have evolved in tandem. I am living not on borrowed time, but borrowed matter. We are not born as blank slates. But if we were, how blank would we be? Pinker says, “the mind is not the brain but what the brain does, and not even everything it does.”

There is beauty in the oneness of our systems of being and the connection between all of the distinct pieces that make up a working human. I choose to hold onto beliefs that I can test and falsify, or find evidence for. I find peace in the idea that nothing can ever be proven "true". I find beauty in the way my muscles tense and send information to my brain, making me 'feel' before I consciously register the act of feeling. I find beauty in the information traveling between neurons, carrying energy and life throughout my body, allowing me to act, speak, and appreciate. Beauty and appreciation can be found wherever we choose to see it, and I choose to see it in science.

Molly McCobb

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We all have our own stories about what we have experienced and what we might imagine experiencing in the future.  Some of these stories have yet to be told in the narrative sense and may never be revealed in words

but in essence they still exist and are therefore being express in some form. 

I have been sensing and making sense of my life and life I interact with since the day I was born. 

My challenge has been to be explicit about ways in which I have been touched by the world. 

I anticipate hunters waiting in tall grasses to pierce my heart with each word uttered, and yet I know those hunters are a mere fantasy, still my heart remains shielded by the unexpressed poetry waiting

wailing it’s battle cry to forge ahead and write it lines across the contours of world.

Abra Schlotz

Hey there! I'm Abra. 

I fell in love with plants at an early age and then, in middle school, I discovered science. 

It was magical. Suddenly, I had all the knowledge that I had been missing about plants. How they work, how they grow, why they grow in such a glorious plethora of forms. I am continuously blown away by the amazing diversity and ingenuity of life on earth.

When my friend Kate started talking about a club which would combine the prose of poetry with the beauty of science I was super jazzed. 

I have never written poetry before, but I can share my love of plants and make all of what I know accessible to anyone who is interested. I hope that through this club, I can share how inspiring -the editor has had to censor the last three pages of this bio. It's for your own good. If you have any questions about plants feel free to ask Abra. But we don't have room on the blog for her joy surrounding plants. 

Kate M.

I know that I’ve already told this story a hundred times.  Jesus, I hope I don’t tell it a hundred more—and if I do, at the very least I hope that I can tell it a little differently each time, and each time with a closer approximation to what I actually mean to say through the telling of it.  After all, if one thing is to be made clear, it’s that I am converging on something, even if that something just so happens to be my limit.  

When I was little I would lie awake at night, sandwiched between the mattress and the wall and try and imagine nothing—I don’t mean that I would try not to imagine anything, or even that I was trying to eliminate everything from my mind—but only that I would try to imagine, what if there were nothing?  What if I weren’t here or what if I were nowhere and what’s the difference between those two things?  It was kind of like I was disappearing myself but I only knew how to do that if I disappeared everything else too.  Maybe that’s what I’m getting at—Maybe all I’m trying to say here is that this nightly childhood ritual marked the beginning of my preoccupation at attempting to locate or discern a difference and also a similarity-- A reckoning you might call it, an attempt to bridge a gap, the gap, the distance between you and everything else, from the only perspective possible, your own.   I would work this thought over and over in my mind until it exactly matched a feeling in my gut.  How strange.  I must have been 3ft tall… You must have had a similar thought at some point in time, no?