They are powerful and personal stories. They are capturing moments of a time no one could have imagined. They are essays from the heart, for the heart — for and by young people confronting their suddenly restricted lives. They are The Quaranteen Collection.

The Quaranteen Collection is a project created by college students Jenny Wadhwa of Newtown, Garrett Marino of Sandy Hook, Lauren Davis of Sandy Hook, and Ella Garnett and Alaire Kanes of New York, “to share the voices and experiences of young adults living through the COVID-19 crisis,” according to its website thequaranteencollection.com.

The original idea was that of Jenny Wadhwa’s, according to Marino, who serves as the site’s editor. The Quaranteen Collection came to life because the founders — who all know each other through connected friendships — felt the youthful voice was underrepresented at this time in the media, and to “create a space where people can have their feelings validated,” Marino explained. “Jenny texted everyone and asked, ‘Are you interested?’ And we all were on it,” he added, noting that it seemed a niche not tapped into.

Marino, a student at Skidmore College; Wadhwa, a Bowdoin College student, as is Garnett; Kanes, studying at UCLA; and Davis, a Brandeis University student, all were feeling the frustration of dealing with aborted school years and social distancing, said Marino. Yet they were not completely comfortable voicing those concerns when all around them adults were losing jobs, parents were taking on added roles, and businesses were shutting down. They were pretty sure they were not the only young people feeling this way.

“Even when you turn to a friend,” Marino said in a recent telephone interview with The Newtown Bee, “they are also struggling. So what we’re really trying to do is create a community,” in order to remind other young people that how they feel is valid.

“Your voice matters — especially when you’re not talking to anyone,” he said.

A Voice For This Generation

“I noticed that in media, there just was not a teenager voice represented, no real voices telling how the pandemic was affecting students,” Wadhwa said, from high school through college age. The Quarenteen Collection, she believed, would open up a means for people her age to offer reflection, and also allow adults and parents “a broader view of how coronavirus is affecting our generation.”

She has been moved by some of the submissions, finding that reading them offers a sense of solidarity. Reading others’ essays has helped her to think more about how the coronavirus pandemic has affected her, “and that is exactly what this site is meant to be,” she said, “to establish a community about feelings.”

What the team has tried to do, Wadhwa said, is to support insightful reflections. “We try to encourage writers to stay away from the complaining route,” she said, and focus instead on “nuanced emotions.”

A member of the Jr Newtown Action Alliance while a student at Newtown High School, Wadhwa said that involvement had helped her learn about human kindness. The experience, so far, with The Quaranteen Collection, she said, has “been allowing me to see human kindness again; that the world is still good and we’ll turn this around.”

While the current collection is about the stresses around coronavirus and social distancing, Wadhwa sees the site as being valuable post-quarantine.

“There will be obvious implications going forward” for her generation, she surmises.

Finding Inspiration

Lauren Davis also found that the emotional toll of having the last weeks of her freshman year at college abbreviated to be stressful.

“The very frustrating part of coming home from college and seeing so many people having bad things happen,” she said, left her at odds with her own feelings. Despite being a regular news reader, Davis said she could not find “anything to validate my feelings.” When she heard about the idea of creating an online community for others around her age, she was happy to take part.

Davis was one of the first contributors to the site, along with the other founders. Just as they had talked about the possibility of writing being a cathartic experience, she found it rang true for her as she put her feelings into words.

“It made me think about the situation we’re all in,” she said, and reading others’ writing has helped her realize the breadth of experience people are having. “It’s valuable to read other people’s stories; really inspiring to me and hopefully to others reading them,” Davis said, as well as serving as a reminder that social distancing “won’t last forever and we will get back to normal. And hopefully, people will come out of this having learned something about themselves.”

Marino stressed that there is no hard age limit on who can contribute to the online project, though they prefer to keep it to high school or college-aged writers.

Submissions to the site are vetted, but, “We want to help people adequately communicate their message, not exclude people,” he said, so the focus of the submissions is on content, not necessarily the quality of the writing. “We might suggest things, like making an article longer, that kind of thing,” Marino said.

Those who choose to submit are also encouraged to share photographs, if they so choose, viewed by the founders as another expressive medium; those submitting can opt in or opt out on providing any personal information for publication of the pieces, suggested to be between 500 and 750 words. Complete submission guidelines are found at the website.

“We believe writing is a cathartic medium, and are hoping [the writers] get more out of this experience than we do,” Marino said, and that it provides comfort to the writer as well as the reader.

A number of the founders are concerned with mental health, he noted; he is a trained member of students at Skidmore who help peers. Along with other interests and studies, Garnett studies psychology; Wadhwa studies neuroscience and religion; Kanes is a member of UCLA’s intersectional feminist publication, FEM; and Davis, the community outreach organizer for The Quaranteen Collection, is an advocate for gun violence prevention and genocide education.

Because they anticipate some “troublesome” stories could be submitted, Marino said the group is working to create a list of useful resources to add to the website page.

Davis concurs with Marino on the importance of creating a page for resources at thequaranteencollection.com. She is buoyed by e-mails attached and sent after writers have submitted, stating that they were happy to have found an outlet for their emotions.

“We have had correspondence saying they have found relief. It’s encouraging to us to see [the website] working like that,” she said. “There are ways to seek help.”

Since its May 1 launch, The Quaranteen Collection has received approximately 20 submissions, including those that correspondents are still revising, he said, and they look forward to having a solid foundation as they go forward. The founders hope to reach as many people as they can to share experiences they believe are unique to teenagers and young adults.

“This project is especially important to me. Everyone should have somewhere where you can just vent,” Davis said. Going forward, she would like to see the project continue to help as many people as possible.

They anticipate the project going “at least to the end of summer,” Marino said. “This is sort of a short term project; but it’s impossible to predict how long the quarantine impact will last. I can’t see myself,” he said, “viewing the world the same after this.”