Tag archives: Dear Montecito
When I challenge myself to start a donation pile, I lament over how many items I can’t imagine parting with; but really, it takes me five minutes to separate out my true valuables. My olive-green electric guitar, a bank box of 20 journals dating back to 2012, and enough clothes to stave me over for […]
“It was a happy accident,” Oliver Welch recalls. It was June of 2022, his first summer out of college on the gloomy east coast; he’s on Maui to surf, dive, throw pottery, and hopefully find a farming gig to support the whole thing before going home to Santa Barbara. “I’m at dinner with my dad’s […]
Get up and out of your bunk at 4 am. Make coffee and a bagel… it’s burnt. Equip your waders, boots, headlamp, backpack, and lots of surveying equipment. Wade in the river and hike the woods for 12 hours, being cautious not to run into the man who lives in the shack made of bones. […]
Ariel Leira is a multidisciplinary visual artist and writer who grew up amongst the trees of Montecito, documenting her TRAVELS through glowing, abstract photography and heartfelt poetry. She was a lifer at Crane Country Day School – where we met in fifth grade – and graduated from Santa Barbara High School. Leira’s artistic proclivities began […]
I met Kiara Lin in the place many Santa Barbara natives eventually meet–Los Angeles. She grew up in Santa Barbara, attending Montessori Center School and Santa Barbara Junior High. Even in her youth, Kiara’s dedication to film was unmistakable. After three years enrolled at Santa Barbara High School, she moved to Michigan to complete her […]
My name may be familiar to you, reader. Maybe you recognize it from the fading memory of your child’s school theater production playbill, or perhaps from reading Stella Haffner’s interviews with me in this very column. Thanks to Stella and the Montecito Journal, you’ll be seeing my name on a much more regular basis as […]
Dear Montecito, Four years later and here we are. This column started during the first COVID-19 lockdown, when I found out that half of my exams were being canceled. “Hey Gwyn… mind if I start a column?” And, well, you know the rest of the story! One hundred hours of phone calls, emails, and interviews […]
This week I spoke to Mason Lender, the 23-year-old founder of an alternative investing company powered by artificial intelligence. Mason grew up here in Santa Barbara, attending Crane Country Day School and Santa Barbara High School before packing his bags to start as an undergraduate in Statistics & Data Science and Global Affairs at Yale […]
Have you guys read The Giving List? If not, you should go check it out. Lots of great nonprofits featured in there. And I should know – I covered some of those stories. Three years ago, I was given the opportunity to interview the team at the National Disaster Search Dog Foundation. Fascinating! Of course, […]
This week I met up with Emily Stone, an MUS alumna and current graduate student at the University of Oxford. After earning her bachelor’s degree at Barnard College, Columbia University studying Environment Sustainability and Human Rights, Emily made the move to the U.K. to pursue her passion for conservation science. In our conversation, Emily introduced […]
Dear Montecito, I am writing you from a London Heathrow flight bound to John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York. From there I will transfer to Dallas Fort Worth before finally touching down in Santa Barbara where I haven’t been for 13 months. Stay off the roads tonight, people – I’m going straight to […]
Who doesn’t love a full circle moment? Today we have yet another wonderful featuree who is an alumna of the Mission Scholars program. Inspired by her time in the program and her upbringing here in Santa Barbara, Kristine Carrillo is a current senior at Brown University where she studies International and Public Affairs and Education […]
New schedule, new workload, new classes and more. Moving from the end of high school to the beginning of freshman year is one of the biggest transitions a student will experience, even when they are as college-ready as Annika Wagner. Last year Annika graduated from Dos Pueblos High School with a 4.85 GPA, 34 college […]
Today’s topic: future physicians and an enviable education. Santa Barbara’s tourists dream about moving here for the great food, beaches, and shops. But as locals we know that one of the best things about living in Santa Barbara is the education available to our children. From world-class extracurriculars at our elementary schools to a country-topping […]
December is a festive season. A month of family. A month of moderate weight gain. But for many featurees of the Dear Montecito column, December is first and foremost the end of the semester. To reflect on the end of term, we are reading a piece by Osiel Ocampo. Osiel was born and raised in […]
You know what keeps me awake at night? My stream of consciousness! Ba dum tss! If you’re not laughing, just know that a joke like that would kill at a cognitive psychology conference. But don’t worry, you’re not missing out because this week I am bringing the psychology conference to us with a little help […]
About a year ago I published a top 10 list: The Do’s and Don’ts of College According to Santa Barbara Alumni. The advice I received above and beyond anything else? If you have the chance to study abroad, do it. As I close my fifth and final year in Scotland, the place I moved to […]
What does it mean to retain innocence in the age of information? This week, 22-year-old Daian Martinez answers this question for us. Daian is a talented young writer whose recent work as a Raab Writing Fellow at UCSB explored the big and little things that affect today’s youngest generation. After seeing her zine “In the […]
In the Dear Montecito column, we have hosted writers, musicians, and filmmakers. This week, we are branching into a new medium with Lauryn Rousseau, a 2021 graduate of UCSB and the owner of Kawaii Klaws, a boutique nail art studio. Q. How did you get interested in nail art? A. My cousin was really into […]
Dear Montecito, Welcome to the 99th edition of Dear Montecito! Even though this column was started three years ago, I have been looking forward to our 100th edition practically since Day 1. It is not unpopular to say 100 is a very nice number. It is round and also somehow circular in that it encourages […]
