Anna Van Dine

Anna Van Dine is a 21 year-old college student approaching her last year as a student at NYU Gallatin. She is interested in Ethnography and Classics and has been interning at Vermont Public Radio this past summer.

We begin by talking about Anna’s Childhood in Moretown, Vermont and how her parents raised her. She mentions that in the last few years she has come to see them less as parental figures and more as individual people. She touches upon how her stable early family life might have something to do with the fact that she has––on both sides of the family––double sets of grandparents due to divorce and that her parents perhaps were conscious of their own upbringing when raising her. She discusses growing up in the small town of Vermont in a house on the side of a mountain and mentioned her father’s many side projects. She talks at length about her high school Latin teacher, with whom she is still in contact. She reflects upon forming close friendships with adults in her community more often than with peers her own age. She discusses her relationship with her sister and her current relationship with her boyfriend, with whom she had gone to school as a child. They reconnected during a road trip to Tennessee to see the solar eclipse two years ago. She discussed their brief break-up because another person indicated his interest and her curiosity about this other person. After this interlude relationship fell apart, and in order to reflect on what had happened, Anna gathered articles and effects of her current boyfriend that remained in her space––journal entries, clothing and other ephemera––and tried, from this collection, to gain new insight into the relationship through these objects and writings.

This may be of interest in the development of a person’s relationship with their parents and other adults in a small community, creative or unconventional ways of processing one’s past, and the effect of previous generations on generations after.