Sarah Sarwar

"Some of the most wonderful people don't fit in boxes." So says songster Tori Amos. The words hold special meaning for Sarah Sarwar, a freshman majoring in graphic design. She refuses to be boxed in. She's shaping her own life, like Gatsby, lured by some green light toward a future that she's inventing each day.

Sarah grew up in Nowhere, "a nameless place, in the middle of a cornfield"; near Poplar Grove, by Candlewick Lake, south of Rockford. There were only 19 in her graduating class at Keith Country Day School, a college-prep kind of place that offered a liberal, safe, "in-a-box education." But if you ask Sarah, she'll tell you she's a city girl, born in Miami. She wound up in Nowhere by a corporate accident, a relocation gone wrong after a retailing merger. Now she's in Chicago--definitely Somewhere.

Maybe she inherited her ability to reinvent herself from her Bengali father, a corporate purchasing executive who morphed into a seller of flowers, importing roses and carnations to the midwestern corn country. Maybe she inherited her optimism from her American mother, a free-spirited DCFS caseworker, whose day job is tilting at the windmills of bureaucracy, making the world a better place for one child at a time.

From early on, Sarah refused to be boxed in. As an eight-year-old cubist, she used Paintbrush tools on her parents' Gateway 2000 to transform boxed shapes into landscapes on the computer monitor. Like millions of other little girls, she took ballet lessons. But, even as a child, it was not the costumes or music that attracted her, but "the form of the bodies, the ways that bodies morphed and shaped themselves." Today, she says, her "best creative work springs from [her] ?free writing,'" unstructured, associational words that allow her to "penetrate the soul to find out what's there." She transmutes what she discovers into her visual art. She draws in new experiences just as some children take in stray puppies.

Ideas resonate with her. In a Liberal Education course at the college, she discovered Clarissa Pinkola Estes's book, Women Who Run with Wolves. Estes argues that "though the gifts of the wildish nature come to us at birth, society's attempt to "civilize' us into rigid roles has plundered this treasure, and muffled the deep, life-giving messages of our own souls. "We become over-domesticated, fearful, uncreative, trapped."

Sarah refuses to be trapped, refuses to "just let things happen." She's in nobody's box. And she's not in Nowhere anymore.