Author: Milton Magazine

On a cold, windy afternoon in late spring, Grace Lam ’05 crouches down to show off a patch of tulips still nestled in the ground in one of Fivefork Farms’ seven greenhouses. Grace and her brother Lyh-Hsin Lam ’03 have been up since 5 a.m., harvesting and selling their flowers at farmers’ markets around the Boston and Worcester areas. “Even if I picked something that looked like this,” she says, her palm cupping a tulip in full bloom, “I’m pretty sure it will last just as long, if not longer, than one picked green and tight. Since we don’t...

DJ Nash ’90 was working on the worst gig of his life when he got the push he needed to create the ABC drama A Million Little Things. “There was a story inside me that had to come out,” DJ says of that period. During his lunch breaks, he would go for walks to clear his head and try to psych himself up for the long afternoons of work, and one day he ran into an old friend. They made plans to have lunch the next week. The friend died by suicide before they saw each other again. “I...

It’s easy to see the connections between Jay Deshpande’s first passionate pursuit as a jazz musician to his success as a contemporary poet. Neither genre is easily defined; they play with rhythm and demand a certain attention from the listener or the reader. But Jay sometimes finds the label “poet” a bit hard to wear. “I’m more comfortable to say I’m a writer, because sometimes there is some grandiosity in the idea of being a poet,” says Jay, who is currently a Stegner Fellow in the creative writing program at Stanford University. “But the word poem comes from the...

If Harrison Blum ’98 is meditating near you, you might not know it. His practice of Buddhism and mindfulness meditation help him stay present with his thoughts and feelings, so any walk from one Amherst College building to another, or a quiet pause between meetings, is an opportunity for presence and deep reflection. Harrison is the director of religious and spiritual life at Amherst. He uses meditation as a way to attend to joyous and stressful feelings alike—confronting them in the moment instead of shelving them away. “It doesn’t always feel comfortable, and I think that’s a big misconception,”...