My full name really is Shanan Mango Wolfe.  

 

I have always been the most happy when I am moving my body, and when I am outside.

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I grew up in a small town in the mountains of New Mexico. Backpacking in the Gila Wilderness was the standard family weekend activity, until my dad bought a small sailboat in the Sea of Cortez. Sailing and snorkeling with sea lions became the new vacation pastime for my teenage years, while back home I continued to dance, do theater and backpack my way through highschool. ​

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At seventeen, equipped with a 4.0 GPO but no good ideas of what I wanted to be doing next, I ended up at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, OR. My plans to study something "employable" like "economics" faded by November of freshman year like the sunshine, and I spent the next four years studying theater. I graduated in 2014 with a BA in theater, after also spending a semester each studying theater in NYC and at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center in CT. While in NYC in 2012, I fell in love for the first time, in a chance encounter on the banks of the Hudson while Hurricane Sandy raged around us and savaged the city. It was short lived, but set the standard for my romanticism and cemented my firm belief that one should never stay indoors when a storm is raging.  

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In the months after graduating college, I traveled, mainly in the US and without a plan. I hitchhiked in semi trucks, got taken in by strangers from all walks of life, learned to slackline, and got my first paying theater job by holding wildly extended and unprovoked eye contact with a stranger who turned out to be a playwright. I fell in love again, had more life-altering conversations with strangers in cars, and ended up as unpaid crew on a 50' sailboat going through the NW Passage in the Arctic. I had been looking for a sailboat ride to the South Pacific because I love the sun and hate the cold, but hey. When we finally arrived in Kodiak, AK it was in time for my 23rd birthday, and I celebrated life by streaking down the dock naked with my newfound sailing friends, who had baked me a sloppy cake in the tiny boat oven. 

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In my mid twenties I gave up on the theater dream for a while and jumped on sailboats full time. I had learned that you could, in fact, be paid to work on sailboats. It was a life altering realization. I started on tall ships, moved quickly to gaff rigged schooner yachts, and from there my sailing career and love of sailing took off in a hundred different directions. Read more about that on my SAILING page. 

 

My highschool boyfriend had given me a journal for highschool graduation, and since then I have journaled extensively. Short stories, bits of plays and blog-type writings have peppered my travels (see my FREEWRITES page), and in the last few years I have written articles for sailing magazines. Blending the adventurousness and professionalism of my sailing world with my writing creativity and being paid and published for it has been an exciting new direction.  Read those stories on my PUBLISHED writing page. 

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​It is impossible to encompass oneself in a few paragraphs, but this is my attempt. I am always excited for the next adventure. I grin at strangers, and I like to be the wildest dancer on the dance floor as much now as I did at seventeen. I love to sail, and I love the smell of rain in the high mountain desert. ​

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Thanks for reading

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