About BOTH/AND
BOTH/AND is an online journal and publishing platform for third culture kids, students who find themselves living, or about to live, in a country that doesn’t match the one stamped on their passport. Here, middle schoolers, high schoolers, and college students in their first or second year share writing, art, drawings, photographs, and video. Each piece comes from someone who knows that the question 'where are you from?' is never just a box to check, but a story that keeps unfolding.
Why this exists
Ask a third culture kid where they're from, and you might see them pause, eyes flickering as they count up the places: birthplace, passport country, the city where their accent shifts, the place where they feel most themselves. There’s rarely a single answer that fits. Most spaces for young writers and artists seem to expect one home, one origin story, one neat line to trace back. BOTH/AND is not that kind of place.
What "both/and" means
The easy story about growing up between cultures is that you're torn, caught between two worlds, never quite at home in either. But that’s not the story we’re interested in, and it’s not the one most of us actually live. The truth is messier and richer: both cultures, more than one language, a handful of instincts about how to greet someone or how to grieve, all held together at once. That doubleness isn't a deficit to explain away. It's the raw material of the work we want to publish: the jokes that only work in two or more languages at once, the homesickness for a place you can't fully claim, the strange calm of knowing how to become a stranger and then, somehow, to unbecome one. unbecome one. Again and again.
Who this is for
This is a space for third culture kids in every sense — children of diplomats, missionaries, military families, international businesspeople, immigrants, and anyone else whose life has crossed borders their parents' didn't originally cross. . Maybe you’re in middle or high school in a country that wasn’t your first home. Maybe you’re still packing, deep in applications, test prep, language lessons, or late-night research, already living in the in-between before you ever board a plane. If you’ve had to explain your own story more than once this year, or you know you will soon, you belong here. We're built for middle school and high school students, and for college freshmen and sophomores still close enough to that transition to write about it with the dust still on it.