'You're not alone:' A teen podcaster sends message to kids with incarcerated parents

Eden Alonso-Rivera told herself, I have nothing to lose.

The 16-year-old junior at Grandville High School in Grandville, Mich., opened her bedside drawer and pulled out something precious: A bundle of letters and sketches her father had sent from jail. The two are no longer in touch. For Eden, these letters aren't just from her father; they are her father.

She took the small bundle to school — itself a remarkable act, since she'd kept the letters secret from all but her mother — and then did something even more remarkable:

She made a podcast about letting go of the father she barely knows.

"Going into it, I thought, 'You know what? I'm going to do it. If I submit it and it doesn't work out, then at least I made something beautiful out of my story,'" Eden tells NPR.

And it worked out. Eden not only submitted her podcast for NPR's Student Podcast Challenge, she beat out nearly 2,000 other entries, taking this year's grand prize.

NPR visited Eden at home, and at school, to hear the story behind her winning entry, A Relationship Behind Bars.

'I love you very much. I've just been away for so long'

Eden's podcast begins with a male voice, a classmate, reading aloud from one of the letters Eden received from her father a few years ago, while she was in middle school.

"I hope you're doing well in school," her father wrote. "I started writing this letter last week, but unfortunately had no envelope to send it to you. Please don't be mad."

For much of Eden's childhood, her father was in and out of jail and, as a result, in and out of her life.

"Sometimes it's best for me to stay away 'cause I am not happy," the letter continues, "and all I’m gonna do is keep you and your mom from having a good day."

"Dear Dad, I've changed so much since the last time you saw me," Eden wrote back. "My hair isn't past my stomach anymore. It curls to my shoulders. My favorite color is blue now instead of pink."

The older she got, Eden says, the more she struggled to keep her heart open to a father who was missing so much.

In her replies, Eden didn't try to hide the deep sense of loss she was feeling as a young teen:

"Sometimes I wish you were there to take me to my daddy-daughter dance at school. Or show up to my dance recitals, my school conferences. Sometimes I wish that I could even just talk to you when I'm having a bad day. I try not to think about those wishes too hard, because it makes me want to cry."

That's the bitter part of Eden's bittersweet story – now, the sweet.

'I did my crying'

Eden may be small in stature, with long blonde hair and jeans torn at the knees, but she is self-possessed and strong. And part of that strength comes from her father's absence.

"You can't change someone," Eden says, sitting at home on the couch with her mom, Audrey Alonso, and their fluffy gray and orange cat, Mamacita. "I'm not going to get anywhere in life if I just sit here and cry about it."

Eden found a way to hold onto what she has of her father, the letters, without still feeling overwhelmed by what she doesn't. She lights up, showing off the incredible sketches her father included with the letters: A baby dinosaur, an idyllic beach scene, a technicolor Tinkerbell.

"I loved Tinkerbell when I was little," she says. "I had my homecoming last night, and I wore a Tinkerbell dress!"

While Eden has kept these letters, she's had to let go of her father.

"The older I got, the more I realized, you know what? I can't keep feeding you and allowing you to come in and out of my life whenever you want to. When you're starving me."

Her mom played the role of two parents

While the first half of Eden's podcast belongs to her father and his letters, the second half belongs to her mother, Audrey, whom Eden credits with helping her navigate such a complicated childhood.

"Yeah, it's my story, but it all wouldn't happen without the strength of my mother. And I think that that's the underlying beauty of [the podcast]," says Eden.

The two are very close, and, as part of the project, Eden interviewed her mom about her life as a single parent.

"It was just very chaotic," Audrey tells Eden in the podcast. "For you to go from having a two-parent household to not having a two-parent household. Us moving constantly. At some points you were too young to understand what jail was. Right? So if you're 2, 3, sometimes I'd be like, 'Daddy's gone for work.'"

The resilience Eden built up over these years now manifests as a kind of optimism — or faith in a higher power that, she says, wouldn't subject her to a challenge she couldn't handle.

If her father hadn’t been absent, she says, "Then I wouldn't be where I'm at now. And I wouldn't have made this amazing podcast."

Piecing her story together in A/V class

That amazing podcast also wouldn't have happened were it not for teacher Mike Cox, who taught Eden as a sophomore in his introductory A/V class at Grandville High.

She made her first-ever podcast episode for a class assignment, and Mr. Cox encouraged Eden to tell her story and submit it to the NPR contest. He shared the opportunity with the entire class, but Eden was the only student to enter.

"I knew she had a story to tell," he tells NPR. So he helped Eden inventory the details of her story — from her father's letters and sketches to her close relationship with her mother — and capture them in audio.

"Teenagers are a lot more resilient than they're often given credit for," Mr. Cox says. "And that's been such a cool part of [teaching podcasting] is to just hear someone like Eden talk about some really heavy, difficult issues and be able to come out on the other side of it and say, 'I'm a better person for it.'"

Eden's message, and her podcast, have also had an impact on her peers. After hearing it, a fellow student reached out and shared that they were going through something similar at home. "You're not alone," Eden responded.

While she says she wouldn't wish her journey on anyone, "I would never be the Eden sitting in this chair, talking in this microphone right now, if all of that didn't happen, and I'm very proud of myself and I will always keep my chin up and my shoulders back."

Edited by Steve Drummond
Audio story produced by Janet Woojeong Lee
Visual design and development by LA Johnson