“Writing is taking the reins of my life into my own hands”…Davia Schendel and Carolyn Zheng’s Life@GWN
“Writing is taking the reins of my life into my own hands”…Davia Schendel and Carolyn Zheng’s Life@GWN
Curiosity has always come naturally to Carolyn Zheng. A multi-talented writer, musician, and modern-day Renaissance girl, there is no subject that doesn’t spark her interest. With so much to explore, the trick can be staying the course. To Carolyn, writing has been a means to explore all aspects of her creativity, and her mentor, Davia Schendel, keeps the engine running.
In their second year together at Girls Write Now, Carolyn and Davia have braved the great unknown from poetry to songwriting. From two ends of the country, they come together to explore new forms, make new connections, and experiment. The foundation of their friendship? Staying curious and imaginative through all walks of life.
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Tell us about your Life@GWN…
Carolyn: I’m Carolyn Zheng,
I’m currently a freshman in college at Brown University, and I’ve been a mentee with Girls Write Now ever since ninth grade in high school. So it’s been quite a long time, and I’ve enjoyed every single bit of it,
even when my academic schedule was very hectic. I think my journey can truly be defined as an odyssey of curiosity. Whenever I delve into my creative side, I work like a pinball. I ricochet from one medium to another—fiction/prose, poetry, songwriting, comedy, and screenwriting. I’m so grateful that my time with my mentor Davia has allowed me to explore all these different methods of expressing myself and chart the map of these different nodes inside the field of writing. The amount of freedom I’ve been given is definitely liberating, because I’m unshackled from the weight of my perfectionist expectations. Davia and I meet over GoogleMeet since we live in two different time zones—I live in Massachusetts, and she lives in California. These meetings have allowed me to set a block of time to work on anything creative without guilt tied to it. Now that I’m in college, I hope to continue my journey and explore more with her.
Davia: My name is Davia Schendel, and I have been a mentor through Girls Write Now for two years running. My mentee, Carolyn, has surprised me, but more so, enlightened me over the years with how multi-talented she is, not just in the creative aspect, but also in life. She’s athletic and supremely intellectual and bright. She has a great global conscience, and she plays music. We started our mentorship with poetry, and over the years, we’ve worked with screenwriting and playwriting, visual art, and experimental art. She has this vast love for trying everything and it’s been wonderful to see how she’s engaged with all these different things.
I started working with her when she was a sophomore in high school. She is now a freshman at Brown University, studying writing, which couldn’t make me happier as somebody who championed her writing from an early stage. It was no surprise to me that she made it there. I truly look forward to seeing her grow as an artist and an individual. I know that everyone is going to benefit from her gift in this world. Having Carolyn as a mentee has reminded me of my own teen years, when I was writing poetry, and how creativity is so vital for self expression as we begin to define ourselves in that transitional moment from childhood to adulthood. I want to have kids, and working with Carolyn has reminded me that it is so essential to apply the same thing to your own children, make sure that they have the space and the opportunity to explore every creative thing that they can, to not deny them of that, because you never know what they’re going to discover. It’s just been amazing working with her and to remind myself of the same thing as an adult, as I continue to grow and experiment with new mediums. So it’s been a wonderful experience.
What’s your superpower? How does that inform your Girls Write Now experience?
Carolyn: Well, my go-to superpower is my curiosity, which I’ve already touched upon. So I’ll talk about my backup superpower. It might sound really weird, but I promise it makes sense. The power is hoarding. Imagine a dragon and a dragon’s hoard. I love reading and listening to stories, whether from books, videos, or the people I meet, and then I proceed to store these stories inside myself. My writing becomes a reflection of both me and the lives I’ve been connected to from the thinnest strand of acquaintanceship to the thickest root of family and friends. Truly, there is so much inspiration in snippets of work in progress, pieces in my notes, voice memos, photos, the 1,000 notes in my notes app, and 500 voice memos, a lot of them being fragments of melodies, or fragments of cool words just spoken into my phone’s microphone. With all this information, I really consider myself like the archivist and historian of my life. Inside me there’s a Library of Babel.
I also hoard a lot of my interests, which ties into my curiosity. I love taking bits and pieces from all the different subjects that make up my brain: music, art, math, gaming, dance, ornithology and connecting them together in my writing and also creating multimedia pieces with it. Genre-crossing is my favorite kind of experimentation to do. This means that I have a plethora of stories to tell. The only obstacle in my way is just truly sitting down and writing. Thankfully, I get to do that during my time with Davia as well. I enjoy playing games, and I think games just combine all of these different mediums all together in one single package. For example, playing games would both express the art, the writing, story writing, and also the music creation, and so I’ve also had a chance at trying to create a game.
Davia: I would like to think that my superpower is imagination. I’ve been making up stories and songs ever since I was a little girl, and it has truly kept me in a state of wonder and inspiration throughout my adulthood. As I continue to create, I think that it keeps me in a state of inspiration. Cultivating and cherishing that has been a big part of how I mentor as well through Girls Write Now.
The title of the 2025 Girls Write Now Anthology is Hope Lives in our Words. Do you have a mantra, phrase or quote that you turn to for hope & inspiration?
Carolyn: Currently, a quote that I’m taking with me the most is one from Audre Lorde: “Caring for myself is not self indulgence, it is self preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” A lot of times, whenever I do something that fulfills the creative side of me, or just perform an act of self care, I tend to have a lot of guilt also tied towards it, because I view it as taking away my time from pursuing my academic life. So this quote reminds me that doing those creative tasks, fulfilling that creative side of me, is not just self indulgence. It is a way for me to keep on going. It is me taking the reins of my life into my own hands and saying: “No, this is what I want to do. I will do this,” and fighting back against this capitalistic economy mindset that I have inside my brain.
Davia: Hope and inspiration for me are so vital. I think, if anything, it provides us light in darkness. It illuminates things for us and writing a new page of a script or writing a new verse of a song opens a doorway for us. It’s like seeing all these multiple possibilities unfold in front of you, and it’s allowing us to imagine a new future. So I truly think that so many opportunities flow through that one moment
of inspiration.
A good phrase, I think, that provides me an anchor whenever I’m feeling stuck, is that
you can create your opportunities. You do not have to wait to be summoned for them.
In fact, the opportunity is created right in that moment when you decide to begin. So another mantra, I suppose, that relates to that is starting is the first step of a creative act. Just opening your journal, putting pen to paper, is already affecting the timeline of how you will shape your dreams. I truly think it’s so simple, yet so profound, and contains multitudes. I think it also has to do with autonomy as a creative person, because you’re not waiting for someone else to tap you on the shoulder and say, All right, we’re ready for you. Now you’re saying, I’m ready for myself. I’m ready, I’m going to build the stage and build the opportunity for myself. And I think the more we develop our autonomy as creative people, we create more opportunities. Every chapter that has been the most exciting in my life, and will continue to be the most exciting for me, will I’m sure be due to that philosophy.
What is your favorite pop culture reference you have learned from one another?
Carolyn: I don’t know if any of this counts as pop culture, but right now, I listen to a lot of Brian Eno. So during our meetings, we like to have music playing as we write. Brian Eno is one of the artists that was introduced in this playlist. He creates ambient music, but it’s perfect for studying. I listen to him a lot, specifically his ambient albums Ambient I: Music for Airports, and Ambient II: The Plateau of Mirror. I was also introduced to the music of Caroline Polachek, specifically, the song, Spring is Coming with a Strawberry in the Mouth, and also the artist of Rina Sawayama. I’m very grateful to Davia for these banger music recommendations.
Davia: Carolyn has taught me a lot about music and films that she likes, and I have had the honor of hearing very interesting techno-pop and synth-pop from her. It’s a gift that keeps on giving. It’s nice to have her give me the cultural dossier to hear what is new, what is exciting, and what excites her as a musician and a writer. We get to have that kind of exchange here and there when we’re working.
What did you learn from your mentor/mentee?
Davia: Something that I wanted to try, because of Carolyn, is competitive rowing. She did crew in high school, and when I heard that, I was like, “Wow! That’s amazing.” It’s very intense. I’ve only gone canoeing and kayaking. That’s my limit. So I think it would be fun, at least once, to experience being in a competitive rowing environment. I’m sure it’s exhilarating. I will have to try it and report back to Carolyn at some point!
Carolyn: Before meeting Davia, I thought I already knew what kind of artist I wanted to be—a prose writer, just writing fiction stories—because that was all I consumed, all I read. But now, after all these years of exploration, I’ve realized that I also want to explore different mediums and incorporate them into the writing and the art that I create. I now really love songwriting and also writing poetry. I truly never thought I would be parsing any of these mediums. Honestly, I’d always scoff at poetry, mostly because I didn’t understand it. I still don’t understand it, but now I want to learn more about it, dive more into it, because it is so fascinating. A poem is so concentrated with emotion, with words. I want to be able to experience myself in that conciseness. I’m doing a lot of spoken word poetry right now, and from this, I have realized how much sound matters to me. I take this into songwriting and song production—I never thought I would produce songs, but now feeling behind the curtains of all the songs I listen to, I see the different layers that go into creating just one single song, and that resonates with me.
My time with Davia has allowed me to take a step away from my expectations, to see my writing as not just fulfilling a goal, but also fulfilling a part of me.
My writing can just be a part of me that I want to put down onto paper.
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