Hi, I'm Elizabeth Djajalie, a writer from Juneau, Alaska.

My cousin called me a "chatterbox" when I was just five or six years old. At that age, how much can you really say anyway? I'm not quite sure. For all I know, I might've been marveling over yesterday's ice cream or that kid at school who stuffed his face with snow. I just remember always having a constant, never-ending stream of words coming from my mouth-- words, before I could even put them to paper, have always been a part of me.

The wonder of words to me is that they are a part of me that I can share. If I am a pen, words are my ink; if I am a river, words are my water. If I am a chatterbox, then words are my way of expressing and making sense of the hodgepodge of ideas in my head.

And if words are all that, then writing is words made permanent. Talk can be fleeting, but when words are written into writing, they are indelible. I might not mean that literally. After all, paper can go missing (or get eaten by dogs), and google docs can get lost- but writing to me is the solidifying of words and therefore the solidifying of thoughts.

Since I scribbled my first whims in crayon on a blank sheet of paper and Scotch-taped it to the wall for all to read, my approach to writing has always been to not only make sense of, but also to create something beautiful- and if not beautiful then something meaningful- out of the ideas in my head.

As I'm writing this now, I'm happy to say that my writing methods and mediums have improved since I was marking pink squiggles onto my papers, but my approach and reason for writing has remained the same as it was then: I write to use words to express something that will be meaningful not only to myself but to those around me as well- whether they be my family, my school, my hometown, or strangers somewhere in the world around all of us.