Touch Grass 🌱
Plus: Elina Osborne shares a poem from the brink
blog.eighty-one // Part of publishing a quarterly magazine is that you always have one eye looking backward, while the other gazes ahead.
What do I mean by this?
Well, for starters, we released Issue Six: “WHERE DID YOU GO?” two weeks ago. The new magazine featured fifty-six pages of original stories, photography, and artwork—as well as a sixty-seven-clue crossword puzzle.*
One of those stories: an essay and poem by guest contributor Elina Osborne. Elina is a filmmaker who shared breathtaking words and photos with us from the Hayduke Trail, an eight-hundred-mile backpacking route across southern Utah and northern Arizona. Scroll down to read (and see) more about the life-changing adventure through Elina’s pen.
While Issue Six is still hot off the press (and we’ll continue to share stories from our recent slate) we’re also actively accepting guest submissions for Issue 7: “TOUCH GRASS,” which will release this fall.
Interested in publishing a piece in the print edition of Creator Mag—and holding your writing in your hands? You have one more week to pitch us!
Some examples of stories we’re interested in…
If you are a creator, how have you found yourself getting outside—or out of your comfort zone? What about your audience?
A photo story highlighting your favorite community third space and your relationship with it.
With the rise of AI in daily workflows, are creators conscious of the cost of digital convenience on our climate and environment?
If any of these prompts spur an idea in your cranium, pitch us here. It’s been fun reading all the submissions so far—you all have truly taken the theme and run with it.
— NGL
P.S. We’re hosting an afternoon co-working session at our studio this Thursday! It’s free to attend—RSVP here.
P.P.S. Last blog, we reviewed an Instagram page that graduated from crass memes to developing a TV show witb Danny McBride. You can read it here.
Natalie Goldberg says that “writing is ninety percent listening.” When writing a personal narrative, who you are in the present largely shapes how you perceive your past. After walking over five thousand miles across three long-distance trails, I’ve learned that we don’t move through landscapes unchanged. Everything is speaking. Everything is guiding.
I spent the first part of 2025 writing a forty-two-page script for a personal narrative-driven feature documentary. I had hiked with three others for seventy days on an eight-hundred-mile route known as the Hayduke—and we filmed it all.
I felt that I needed to be removed from my “regular life” to write this project. I obtained a visa, packed up everything, and moved from New Zealand to Japan. Some may say I was a little dramatic; I’ve since coined it my “hermit era.” The small coastal town an hour south of Tokyo not only gave me solitude, but after the passing of my mother, it gave me space to reconnect with my Japanese heritage. It gave me space to heal—a new space from which to write.
When you or a loved one is faced with mortality, it changes something in your wiring. To worry about what others think of your dreams is to waste the limited window of time we’re each given.
In 2019, my mum’s blood cancer diagnosis—alongside a bad breakup, and career stagnation—created the perfect storm. The kind that pulls you out your door into the unknown, into reflection and reinvention. For me, it looked a little like a dirt path. One that was two thousand, six hundred and fifty-three miles, snaking its way from Mexico to Canada. One known as the Pacific Crest Trail.
I’ve always been intrigued by the different ways people lead their lives. After leaving an insular world of my own, a religious cult where my parents were married as strangers in a mass wedding, the path I once believed I would follow fell away, and with that, the compass to guide my journey. So I found a new one.
It’s never been about the hiking. The hike provides the context—the sandbox from which to play. It Is The People. It’s what continues to draw me to telling stories, and was also the title of the Pacific Crest Trail short film I posted to YouTube. It reached more people than I could have dreamed of, but more importantly, it helped me to find my voice.
The Hayduke film I’m finishing now only came about because my co-director, Andy Laub, saw my Pacific Crest Trail film on YouTube. He’d made one seven years prior, and my version spoke to him. Then he reached out.
We’re hoping to submit the feature documentary film to BANFF—a film festival dedicated to outdoor sports and culture—this year. I hope it gets in. I hope, like with any project, it propels me to the next. Through my YouTube channel, I’ve planted seeds—stories with threads left intentionally untied, reserved for a medium with the nuance of the woven word.
I describe the piece below as a poem response to Mary Oliver's line in "The Summer," where she asks, "Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” It was my last day on the Hayduke Trail, a day when I thought it might be my last. We’d heard news of an imminent flash flood. I remember thinking, “They’ll say she died doing something she loved,” and the rest of the piece evolved from there.
Though our eyes are drawn from the glow of the setting sun to one from the neon gods we’ve made, the democratized wonder of YouTube helped me—a half-Kiwi, half-Japanese woman who grew up in a Korean-American cult with no film school and no trust fund—to have the chance to create and share art.
After living in Japan for nine months now, I’ve learned that we don’t move through landscapes unchanged. If we’re listening, if we’re attuned to our surroundings, we begin to see: We are not shaped by a singular tale, but by the journeys in which we choose to take.
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” - Mary Oliver
They’ll say “She was doing something she loved.” Those words, I see them written now. But all I can think at this moment in time is “I don’t want to die.” I still have so much left to do— What is it I plan, you ask?
Well. There are cookies to be baked.
See, Arthur and Evelyn are waiting— How will my sister tell them? Their adventurous aunt wandered freely, This time— a little too far.
Before I left, he warned me. As older brothers always do— Don’t be like Icarus, you know? Just don’t fly too close to that sun.
Burnt legs now with scratchings, Handwritten by canyon walls, They’ll say she ended where life began, Down deep by water rushing—
They’ll say you’ll feel her everywhere, In trees, The warm breeze, In cats who say hello. And you know that one beach, Her favourite bay? She’ll be there, Where she was born, you know?
Waves break the momentary spell, Have you been holding your breath long You look, I look, We both smile with knowing, This orange glow now marks the end.
Are you still there, holding your breath? Can we laugh about this now? It’s today. You’re alive, It’s today, Not tomorrow, It’s today, my love, Wild and precious.
Elina Osborne was born and raised in a multi-ethnic household in the corner of the globe (Aotearoa, New Zealand), and she’s always been intrigued by the world “out there.”
She’s working with co-director Andy Laub on the feature-length documentary film from the Hayduke hike—Elina as lead writer, Andy as lead editor. Tag along for the ride on YouTube and Instagram @ElinaOsborne.
Thanks for reading! Shoot us a reply, comment, or DM if anything resonated with you in particular—we respond to them all.
* Has anyone completed the Issue Six crossword yet? Send us a picture if you have!
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