7 Ways Alpha Delta Pi Sorority Shaped Me Into the Author, Director, and Producer I Am Today
Next year I turn forty.
If you’d told CSUSB student nineteen-year-old me, wearing Alpha Delta Pi letters for the first time at Eta Kappa, that this is where the road would lead, I’m not sure she would have believed you.
Wife. Mother. Author. Screenwriter. Director. Producer. A film festival heading into its ninth year. A trilogy of novels on the shelf. More stories unfolding every day.
But lately, I’ve found myself wearing my lavalier more often. Maybe it’s nostalgia. Maybe it’s the strange clarity that comes with slowly approaching a milestone birthday. Whatever the reason, I’ve been sitting with the realization that so much of the woman I am today was silently built inside a sisterhood I joined nearly two decades ago.
My Bid Day! June, 2007
At the time, I didn’t know chapter meetings were teaching me how to lead a film set. I was studying for my B.A. in English, with an emphasis in Creative Writing. (Shocker, right?) I had no idea that Adpi was secretly preparing me to produce alongside my mother. The sisters beside me shaped how I would someday build my own creative teams.
So I wanted to write this down, both for myself and for anyone else wondering whether this collegiate-to-lifelong sisterhood is worth a look, or whether the things which formed us long ago are still influencing us today.
1. Poise Under Pressure
Chapter meetings taught me things I didn’t know I was learning then: like how to sit with attention, how to speak when it genuinely mattered, and how to hold myself steady even when I felt unsteady inside.
I remember during Fall Recruitment, I was asked to play guitar and sing in front of every woman that came through. If you know anything about me, I tried the whole singer path, and it is so not my cup of tea. Don’t get me wrong, I love to sing, but I discovered that day how terrified I was to sing in front of live audiences.
Years later, that same steadiness gets me through a filming day that’s gone sideways, a scene that isn’t landing, or a schedule that’s fallen apart an hour before call time.
Poise isn’t something you’re simply born with. It’s something you practice. Something you learn through all those tiny moments when you’re asked to rise to an occasion.
I feel fortunate to have learned it early.
2. Leading a Room Without Losing Yourself
I also briefly served as Music Chair while I was an active member. It seemed like a small role in the grand scheme of a chapter, but it asked me to take responsibility for a group while finding and keeping myself inside it.
That’s a balance I recognize constantly in my life now, whether I’m writing a new scene, working with a cast and crew, or co-producing alongside my mother.
Eta Kappa’s Fall Recruitment, 2007
Leadership doesn’t have to mean standing apart from everyone else. Sometimes it means being deeply in the thing while also helping guide it forward.
It turns out that skill doesn’t disappear after graduation.
It just finds a new room.
3. Sisterhood as Casting Philosophy
For years, I was surrounded by women who lifted one another up simply because that was the culture we were building together. Not just in Alpha Delta Pi, but in my mother’s dance studio as well. I grew up watching strong, creative women support and guide my peers through choreography and training, building their confidence and strength.
I don’t think I grasped how intensely that molded my instincts until I found myself, decades later, deliberately hiring women into key roles on the productions I touch.
There’s something exceptionally powerful about looking around a set and seeing women creating, leading, solving problems, making decisions, and taking up space in an industry where that hasn’t always been a given.
Sisterhood isn’t simply something I remember fondly.
It’s something I still practice… in the room, behind the camera, in my daily life, and in the choices I make about who gets invited to help tell the story.
Eta Kappa Jewel Degree, Spring 2014
4. Showing Up Even When It's Hard
I’ve tried to stay connected to our sisterhood everywhere I’ve lived: through alumnae associations in California and Colorado, and even through an attempt to build one here in the White Mountains that ultimately didn’t take root.
Then, in 2025, my home chapter, Eta Kappa, closed its doors.
It affected me more than I expected. I wanted to attend their final hurrah, but I couldn't go. Scheduling didn’t work out, and so I had to say goodbye in my own way at home in Arizona.
Saying goodbye to something that helped make you… well, you, SUCKS. Sitting with that feeling sucks. But…Sometimes the best way to honor what matters most is carrying what it gave you forward, even if it looks totally different than before.
Showing up, being connected, grieving what is lost, and choosing to keep building anyway… that’s the magick. It’s the same magick I use when I finish something that feels akin to slaying a dragon. A difficult chapter, walking 4 miles in the mornings, wrapping a shoot… all of them dragons!
Not everything we build lasts in the form we imagined.
What it teaches us can.
5. The Discipline of Ritual and Structure
ADPi asks so much of its members for a reason: standards, bylaws, ritual, procedure, responsibility, structure. At the time, it can feel like a lot. I know it did for me. Honestly, I flourish with these sacred boundaries today in both my personal and business life. My morning routine… is essential to my day. It helps cover so many areas of my life, including structure, ritual, and personal responsibility.
Friendship Chair — Pikes Peak Alumnae Association, 2019
Every production (both film and festival) has its own version of bylaws: call sheets, schedules, contracts, shot lists, chain of command. Every book has its rituals, too: drafting, revising, cutting, rewriting, trying again.
Creativity might feel like magick, but bringing that magick into the world requires structure like Roll for You. I don’t think this project would have come to fruition without creating a structure that helps me thrive.
I learned that lesson in a chapter room long before I ever learned it on a film set.
6. Mentorship Goes Both Ways
The women who came before me in ADPi poured into me without expecting anything in return.
That’s something you just don’t forget.
It’s part of why I feel drawn toward mentoring collegiate women now, and why one of my favorite parts of producing the Show Low Film Festival is curating our industry workshops and watching emerging filmmakers begin to establish their footing.
There’s something beautiful about realizing you’ve crossed an unseen boundary. One day you’re the person looking toward someone else for guidance. Then, somehow, enough years pass that you look beside you and realize someone might be looking toward you.
Mentorship had been modeled for me long before I ever had the opportunity to offer it to someone else.
And maybe that’s the point.
We keep passing it down.
2014 Walk for Kids, my son was so little!
7. Storytelling as an Act of Service
Above everything else, ADPi taught me that community and giving back aren’t separate from a meaningful life. They’re at the center of it. That conviction is threaded through every story I tell.
I don’t write and direct merely to entertain people. I write because I believe stories can help us heal. They can remind us to hold on. They can make someone feel less alone. They can help us see ourselves—and one another—a little more clearly.
They can help us love each other a little better. They can give us hope.
That belief didn’t begin with my first published novel or my first screenplay.
Its roots reach further back, into chapter rooms and philanthropy events and years spent surrounded by women who taught me, through their actions, that showing up for other people is its own kind of art.
The Letters Still Fit
Turning forty next year feels like a threshold and yet… I find myself walking toward it with my letters back on.
Not because I’m trying to become twenty-year-old me again. I wouldn’t want to. She still had so much to learn, so many stories to write, so many sets to stand on, so many versions of herself left to meet. But I wish I could sit next to her on that June day in 2007, whisper in her ear, and tell her something.
Pay attention. You’re learning more than you think you are.
Nearly twenty years later, I can finally see the invisible web connecting that young woman to this one: from chapter meetings to film sets, from sisterhood to storytelling, from learning how to belong to learning how to build places where other people can belong, too. So if you’re one of my sisters reading this, thank you.
Letters on in Breckenridge, CO 2015
Thank you to the women who came before me, the women who stood with me, and the women carrying these letters forward now. You helped craft a life none of us could have seen coming.
And if you’re not an Alpha Delta Pi sister, I hope there’s something here for you, too. Look backward for a moment. Think about the communities, teachers, traditions, friendships, and strange little experiences you assumed you’d outgrown. You might discover you didn’t leave them behind at all. Some of them became part of the way you stand. The way you lead. The way you create.
The way you love.
The things that shaped us early have a funny way of continuing to hold us up… faithfully, exactly when we need them most. And sometimes, almost twenty years later, we finally understand what they were teaching us all along.
