The Detour: The Constant In-Between

Join us on Sundays at 7:00 a.m. for episodes of The Detour, a show about people and ideas from Oregon Humanities. Listen live at 99.1 FM in the heart of Portland, or online anywhere at PRP.fm.

In this episode, we ask young people in Oregon about what they thought and felt when COVID landed—and what they think and feel now, a few years in. You’ll hear from Caroline Gao, a high school senior from Albany, and several students from Encore Academy in Warrenton.

Our guests for this episode are Cera Baker, Aubrey Bangs, Shaelyn Bangs, Alora Duggan, Mika Dyebar-Stinnett, Kaysi Ficker, Caroline Gao, Emma Humphries, Jacob Layson-Davis, Chantrell Lee, Lauren Mallett, Avery Martin, Teresa Middlemore, Josie Morinville, Lucy Palenski, Lily Peel, Liliana Patton, and Isabella Poe.

Caroline Gao is a teen writer, researcher, and organizer. As a writer, her work has been published by the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards and the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program. Her human-computer interaction research under Margaret Burnett has been recognized by the National Center for Women & Information Technology. She founded The World in Us, a cultural awareness nonprofit, and cofounded Aster Lit, an international youth literary magazine. She has interned with Next Up and the Asian Pacific American Network of Oregon. Gao lives in Albany, Oregon.

Gao’s essay “Unstable Connections” was published in the Winter 2021 issue of Oregon Humanities magazine.

In February 2022, she led a session of our So Much Together program titled “The Link Between Us: How Technology Can Create (and Impede) Opportunity.”

Lauren Mallett teaches at Warrenton High School, and formerly taught at Encore Academy. Her recent writing appears in Poetry Northwest, Puerto del Sol, The Seventh Wave, The Night Heron Barks, Sprung Formal, and other journals. She serves on the Oregon Poetry Association’s board of directors. Lauren is the student contest chair of Cascadia, an online anthology and contest for Oregon’s young poets.

Encore Academy is a private school in Warrenton, Oregon, focused on the performing arts. The students you hear in this episode submitted essays for the Summer 2022 issue of Oregon Humanities magazine, “Memory.” They also created visual pieces to accompany those essays, which you can see here.

For a full transcript of this episode as well as additional resources and further reading, visit the Oregon Humanities website.