Getting to Know the Creators!

Alex Lane by Jenny Schreer:

Living in the extremely touristy town of Salem, Mass. is never boring for Alex Lane.

“It’s so much fun all of the time. You get to see tourists see the town through their own eyes.”

Salem is a mostly urban town about 20 miles from Boston. The population is around 40,000 people but near the peak season during Halloween, it sky rockets to 100,000 visitors. These tourists come to seek information mainly on the Salem Witch Trials. Even when Lane was in elementary school, she was assigned a specific witch trial instead of covering history.

She has seen pretty much all there is to the spooky town. “I’ve gone to all the museums,” Lane said, “Once you’ve done one of them, you’ve done them all.”

She also describes Nathaniel Hawthorne’s house, the writer of the classic, “The Scarlet Letter”. He wrote the first page of the book while looking at the back of the Salem Jail, which has now been modernized and converted into condos. “It’s cool to pull out things from academics that relate to your hometown,” Lane said.

And of course Halloween is the most anticipated event of the year for everyone including Lane herself. “People get really legit on Halloween,” Lane said, “People spend a full year creating their Halloween costume.”

But coming to UMass was an adjustment for Lane due to the size of the town. “Coming here is so different because Amherst is so small,” Lane said, “The energy that Amherst has is so different than what Salem has.”

 

Jenny Schreer by Alex Lane:

 

Spending the weekdays with her mom and two older sisters in her small-town home of Westwood, New Jersey, and weekends with her dad in New York City; Jenny Schreer grew up knowing the best of both worlds.

Westwood, which is located about 20 minutes outside of New York, has a population of only about 4,000 people, and has a commercial downtown area.

Schreer experienced both the positives and negatives of growing up in a small town where everyone knows a lot about you. She graduated from a regional high school with a relatively small class of only 150 students. Even still, Schreer always felt “New York City was [her] home away from home.”

“I like the idea of New York” Jenny said, but at the same time it is “weird being bombarded with people everywhere.”

Regardless of the appeal that a larger city has, and all the time that Schreer has spent in the city throughout her youth, she still considers Westwood her home.

Being at school at UMass Amherst, the “town of Amherst reminds me of home,” Schreer said. She decided on UMass because she liked the atmosphere and all that the school had to offer. Schreer’s older sister also attended UMass and “had a good time here and enjoyed it. She definitely encouraged me.” said Schreer.

As for the future, Jenny has many plans, but wants to continue embracing both her worlds, saying “after graduation [from college], I want to be home, but I do definitely want to live in the city.”