Garden of the Mind

In this beautifully crafted collection, writers engage with questions they seeded and grew during collaborative book writing and design sessions.

They courageously explore these and other queries:

What legacy do I want to leave after I die? What do I lose if I reject all social media? Is it a kind of divine madness, in the ancient Greek sense, to commit to a life of telling stories through writing and film?

The result is an elegant and unique garden of poetry, nonfiction and fiction, cross-fertilized with resilience, innovation, and connection.

Garden of the Mind asks what it means to be alive now.

Barnes and Noble

"When you give yourself time to be a human, in the real world that surrounds you every day, you will find connections in places you never dreamed of. Every single person is silently calling out to the world around them."

- Jesse Van Hooser
From "Human Connection: Wired and Wireless"

"There is meaning in the mundane. By merely existing, we have already left an irrevocable mark on the lives of those around us. Every person we interact with changes us in some way, however minute, and we change them in turn."

- Samantha Fujimoto
From "What We Leave Behind"

Writers and Contributors

Josie Kochendorfer (professor)

Cryptid Parke (teaching assistant, managing editor, copy editor)

Hayden Gatke

Jesse Van Hooser

Rose Everingham

Kaelyn Aispuro

Jacob Boyce

Kendall Gardenhire

Kiarah O’Hare-Pham

Kaitlyn Bailey

Marlo Olson

Angelina Dominguez

Ari Ghazzagh

Makenzy Purcella

Mamo Nite

Emiko Dyson

Cassidy O’Brien

Rachel Kaufman

Aspen Kinnun

Samantha Fujimoto

Keilyn Futter (copy editor)

Hunter Bordwell-Gray (marketing, copy-editor)

Foreword by Josie Kochendorfer and Cryptid Parke

Cover Design by Samantha Fujimoto

Interior Artwork by Aspen Kinnun

Layout by Keilyn Futter

Featured Writers

Author of "Human Connection: Wired & Wireless"

Jesse Van Hooser

"This is my favorite piece I have ever written. My original goal was to write about isolation, and after an exhausting 5:00 a.m. seventeen-mile walk, my dreams of that isolation piece were dead. Because no matter how hard I tried to be isolated, I could not escape the connection to those around me. This piece is dedicated to every person I met who ruined my goals of writing about being isolated."

Author of "What We Leave Behind"

Samantha Fujimoto

"When I first began writing this piece, I felt like a ghost. An ocean away from home for the first time in my life and consumed by my own melodrama, I must’ve rewritten the same draft a million times over. Each iteration felt wrong. It took a frenzied night of research and brainstorming, but eventually, I decided to return to what I knew—my family, friends, and fiction. In the process, I learned the value of finding meaning in the ordinary and what true legacies in the making look like. The resulting piece is what I’ve chosen to leave behind."

Supervising Professor

Josie Kochendorfer

is a writer and educator based in Portland, Oregon. She holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the Ohio State University and is a Ph.D. candidate in Literature and Criticism at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Josie is a Best of the Net nominee. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Hippocampus, The Account, Atticus Review, Barrelhouse, New Flash Fiction Review, and elsewhere.