Before NE student Chloe Sisk became a published poet, she needed to make a drastic change to save her life.

“I didn’t care about school,” Sisk said. “I didn’t care about my health. I didn’t care about anything. The only thing I cared about was that day and surviving. And surviving wasn’t living.”

Her life went by with days upon days in bed and frequent panicking, sometimes resembling a heart attack. Fighting against layered mental and physical health issues, she was unsure how much longer she would be able to live in her state.

“Living becomes a dangerous game when emptiness becomes fulfilling,” Sisk writes in a poem titled “Delicious Soft Voices.”

She found a way out through a friend in Arizona who was looking for a roommate. With no substantial travel experience, she suddenly found herself putting all her stuff into a U-Haul and heading to completely unfamiliar territory.

Sisk was living in Prescott but spent time in other cities like Sedona, Phoenix and Jerome.

“I mean all those places are beautiful,” she said. “They were like nothing I’ve ever seen before, and it just made me realize that there’s so much more to the world that I want to see and so much more than I want to experience. It just gave me a more positive outlook on everything.”

She was on a drive when she was struck by the intricate connections between every part of the environment, seeing the way the gravel in the parking lot was the same kind of rock in the mountains.

“I kind of realized nature is the most consistent thing, and nature will always prevail no matter what we do,” she said. “The earth is bigger than we are, and nature is also around us, and I think that’s the root of life and inspiration for everybody.”

Sisk has had a connection to nature since she was young. Her cousin pointed out how many stars were visible when she visited 10-year-old Sisk, who hadn’t thought about it before.

“I remember standing in my driveway just looking up and it felt like I saw the night sky for the first time,” she said. “Even though I’d always seen it every single day, somebody else pointing it out to me, that’s when I really took in the stars and the moon and just the beauty and the privilege of seeing where I lived. And it made me value what I saw every single day more.”

She said she knew she would only be in Arizona for the time she needed to be before she moved back to Texas. After so much time hiding, she was able to embrace the world outside her bedroom and became inspired to write.

She had wanted to be a writer full-time, but didn’t see it as a possibility. In 2024, Sisk published “Tales of the Moon,” a book of poems exploring growing pains that she experienced as she went through her adolescence.

“It’s physical evidence that I lived through something,” she said. Zoann Boller, a long-time friend of Sisk’s, said she loved her book and was happy to support Sisk. “I think it gave very good insight of being a young woman and how to deal with certain emotions, like happiness, grief, sadness,” she said.

She lost her father when she was 10 and developed a fear of death later in her life, after graduating from high school. She wrote the poem “Death’s Coach” which became her saving grace in overcoming her fear. In the poem, she personifies Death into something she could make sense of.

“It was just suddenly no longer a scary thing,” she said. “I hadn’t even realized how much better I had gotten mentally until I’d written that poem.”

A long-time friend, Daniela Cantu, was impressed by the way Sisk pulled herself out of a tough situation and used her creativity to publish her book.

“She had the momentum for her to become something larger than herself,” Cantu said. “And to pursue her dreams of being an author.”

Sisk said her younger self was convinced that her life would continue to be tragic, and she would stay stuck where she was.

“If I told her that I lived out of state, and I’ve seen all these places, and I published a book, she’d be shocked,” she said. “But she would also be amazed and hopeful and astounded.”