After graduation, many University students follow similar paths, pursuing careers in consulting, becoming investment bankers or going to graduate school.
But in a journey financed by the Martin A. Dale Fellowship, Lillith Wood '00 will follow a different route, traveling the coastlines of America to write a book about women who fish for a living.
"I'm going to start in Alaska this summer, travel down the west coast, across the gulf coast to Florida and up the east coast to Maine, taking about a year," Wood said in an interview yesterday. "I will stop in selected fishing towns, talk to women who fish commercially for a living, take their stories and create a modest book-length piece of creative non-fiction."
The Dale fellowship provides $20,000 each year for a student to pursue an independent project for a year following graduation. Wood said the idea for her project was inspired by her upbringing in a small Alaskan fishing community.
"I grew up in a fishing town in southeast Alaska," Wood said. "Fishing has been a big part of my life. I grew up in the middle of a culture that was very involved with fish."
Wood's hometown of Petersburg is on Mitkof Island, a small island "about half way between Juneau and Ketchikan."
"It's pretty small," she said. "It has 3,000 people. For the area, that's a good-sized town."
Wood said she has worked in canneries every summer since she was 16.
"I feel like it grounds me," she said of her summer job. "I feel emotionally invested in the southeast Alaskan salmon season. It's my culture."
"I don't choose to have it be so defining," she added. "But I guess when you come from such an isolated, small town in such a beautiful place, it's bound to define you. I guess it's a pretty nice way to be defined."
Wood said the idea to write about just female fishers was prompted by the death of a friend. "In November, a girl I grew up with was fishing and the boat she was on capsized and she drowned," Wood said. "I just got this gut feeling that I wanted to just talk to women."
The central figure of Wood's book will be an 80-year old family friend.
"I knew her as a child," Wood said. "She grew up in Wyoming. She moved up to Alaska as a young bride. She went from not having seen the sea to fishing by herself in a small boat out on the water, being good at it and making money that way."
Wood said she plans to intertwine her story with the stories of "about seven to ten" younger female fishers from across the United States.
Wood says she has long thought of becoming a writer.
"I've wanted to be a writer since grade school," she said. "Once I got to Princeton, I took Professor McPhee's class. He made me think it was possible to be a writer. He helped motivate me to try to make it happen."
Ferris Professor of Journalism John McPhee said he is delighted Wood won the fellowship.
"She's very much in love with her subject," McPhee said. "She's a very intuitive writer and she does impressive work."
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