Mamie Rijks
The world was not expecting Mamie Rijks when she was born in the spring of 1980, in fact, Mamie herself was quite surprised when she arrived upon the scene. Her mother proudly recounts that Mamie impressed the doctors with the grand feat of putting two fingers in her mouth at the same time mere moments after she was born. She has yet to top this grand display of coordination as she has spent the rest of her life being quite clumsy.
Once born, Mamie entered what is known as the European childhood phase of her existence. She was schooled in Germany and spent many holidays in Belgium with her paternal grandmother. This time was filled with Grimm’s Fairytales and an understanding of what people are like after they have survived a great deal of war. Both of these, of course, being filled with dark and unsettling stories. This led to an intense childhood fear of lava of all things.
When the wall came down and there was an influx of foreigners into Germany and the local mentality became “We don’t like foreigners but you’re okay because you’re a good foreigner,” Mamie’s parents decided to relocate the family, Mamie included, to a small town in Colorado.
This small town is where Mamie attended high school in what was an abandoned church her freshman year and upgraded to an abandoned motel when she was a sophomore. High school was an experiment in survival due to the chaotic administration of every single aspect of this school. Some of the highlights include students being abandoned in Arches National Park, Mamie’s class being asked to leave Mexico not once but twice during her senior trip, and a brief but terrifying car chase with her chemistry teacher.
After high school, Mamie was ill prepared for university where classes are held in classrooms and important exams weren’t administered in the post office of an unfamiliar desert town. Yet, somehow she survived and succeeded, returning to those classic Grimm’s Fairytales not once but twice, receiving a degree in Writing and Literature as well as an MFA in Writing with a thesis focused on fairytales.
Once Mamie finished her studies, she took the next logical step in life and moved to Korea, a country she knew nothing about. This time was spent with all the chaos you would expect when an entirely unprepared person moves to a foreign country. There was a lot of time spent hanging out on a Joseon Dynasty Era turtleship. There was less time spent being chased down by a man in a kilt, being involved in a border incident, and crying over the first cockroach she had ever seen. In Mamie’s defense, she wasn’t offended by the cockroach’s existence, simply terrified that when she covered it with a small paper cup, the cockroach was large enough to wander off with said cup on its back.
After a year of adventure and, at times, hard life lessons in Korea, Mamie decided to do the whole thing over again and moved to Japan. There she lasted one year in the third largest city the island nation has to offer. During this year, Mamie worked at a school that was run by a man who claimed to never have heard of the Grinch and promptly wrote that very same story but with three little pigs and a wolf instead of the Whos and the Grinch and his wife who may or may not have had a lot of ties to the criminal underground of the city.
It was a bizarre year, even for Mamie, and she left that situation after her employers broke into her apartment in the hopes of finding out what Mamie was up to which was, at the time, nothing of interest to anyone but herself.
Instead of picking another random country to move to, Mamie stayed in Japan, but switched islands. She ended up in the countryside which suited her much better. It was in the Japanese countryside where Mamie accidentally joined a cult amongst other adventures.
When her time in Japan came to an end, Mamie returned to Germany where she didn’t know what to do with herself, so she got a degree in Early Years Development. During this time she also traveled and had many adventures which included being briefly kidnapped in Pompeii by a group of elderly French tourists, being cornered and trapped by a large group of tiny crabs in Thailand, and going into the woods to dig up unmarked graves in Vermont.
Mamie has since returned to the small town in Colorado to be closer to family and will continue her adventures from there. Her fear of lava continues.
