spirit: Woolf

BENJY WALL-FENG

Dunster’s building manager, pokes his head in. Woolf and Mendoza talk for a little bit, and he lights up when she tells him what I’m interviewing her for.

“I can see why,” he tells me. “She’s awesome. She’s awesome.”

Woolf’s contributions to Dunster extend beyond IMs. Woolf helped write, direct, and starred in Dunster’s Housing Day video last semester, and she acquired Starbuck, the horse who appears in the video wearing fake antlers.

Orchestrating the Housing Day video aligned with Woolf’s academic interests — an English concentration with a Psychology secondary. “I want to write for the rest of my life,” she says.

Woolf just submitted her senior thesis, a screenplay that is in part a “ghost romance” and in part about loss, trauma, and family. “I want to believe in ghosts,” she says. “I like the idea of objects and places having memories. Maybe they’re not human ghosts.” (You could call them house spirits.)

This spring, Woolf was selected as a finalist for ScreenCraft, an international screenwriting competition, and some time afterward, a producer reached out to her to begin developing her entry. Like her thesis, this script maps its exploration of family onto a winkingly fantastical backdrop — in this case, exploring a father-daughter relationship and the death-by-asteroid extinction of the dinosaurs.

After this project, Woolf wants to keep screenwriting, and maybe act or direct as well. “House spirit” does not at all translate to these post-college plans, but to Woolf that’s maybe the point.

“I think a lot of us spend a ton of time preparing to live,” she says.

“At the end of the day,” she says, “you might be participating in all these other extracurriculars and your classes and your really busy schedule that you’re trying to build up for your career. And the things that you really remember are, at least for me, sitting in a dining hall with your housemates and just talking.”

We’re outside in the Dunster courtyard. Deep into autumn, golden hour starts early, maybe 3:30 p.m. — but when we try to capture the light for the photo, the sun ducks back behind a cloud. That’s fine, anyway: Some things you have to be there for.