A2H #17 | Following Butterflies and Chasing Your Dreams with Rachel Livinal

Art 2 Heart

Rachel Livinal is a recent graduate at Cal State Long Beach with a BA in Journalism. She just started her position as a higher education radio reporter for KVPR (Valley Public Radio) at the end of this month.

Rachel has also been a poet since she was 16, and she is 21 now. It started with sonnets, but quickly developed into this odd freeverse that consists of near rhymes and very loose patterns of rhyme. She grew up in a writing family and was deeply influenced by her grandpa, who still writes poetry today. She uses poetry to free her mind of anxiety and it also is how she works out the problems she can't understand in her head.

This interview was recorded in September 2022, when Rachel was starting her senior year at CSU Long Beach where she was studying and working to become an audio journalist. She had just wrapped up a one month series based on the Long Beach elderly community’s experience during COVID, called When Physical Canes Become Mental Chains.

In this episode, you’ll hear Rachel mention that it would be a dream of hers to work for NPR one day. Since then, she absolutely did do a project for them!

• We talk about the impact that poetry and therapy have had had on Rachel’s reflection, healing, and personal transformation.
• We talk about Rachel’s experience living with her grandparents as her grandma was developing Alzeihmers
• We talk about her muse of monarch butterflies and how they’re linked to a teacher that passed away when she was young, and the unbelievable things that happened when she released Monarchs outside her classroom as a tribute.
• Rachel shares two poems in this episode, one is about her relationship to monarch butterflies and assimilating to living in Long Beach, and the other is a gut wrenching poem about the struggles of being a young renter desperate to keeping a home while being at the mercy of a landlord.

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Watch my interview with Rachel

https://www.instagram.com/reel/ChGKeEJFkNx/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==

Rachel’s project with NPR Next Gen Radio

https://usc2023.nextgenradio.org/california-homelessness-veterans-mental-illness-ptsd-volunteering-long-beach/

Connect with Rachel

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rachel.livinal/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rachel.livinal

LinkedIn: Rachel Livinal
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Follow the Pod

Instagram: @art2heart.podcast

Website: art2heart.life

Podcast artwork by Holly Pelletier Clark

Instagram: @themoonstorybook
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