Jenna Bean Veatch tells a few different origin stories of how she came up with the idea for The Not-Creepy Gathering for People Who Are Single and Want to Fall in Love. In one, she’s walking around a lake when the idea hits. In another, a friend’s roommate comes home from a date, freshly infatuated, and reminds Veatch such a feeling is possible.
Her third digression about the idea speaks to Veatch’s background in performing arts. “I was in grad school, working on my MFA in interdisciplinary arts,” Veatch says. “I was doing a dance show about the desire for human connection and I was attempting to create connection by having the audience participate. I realized that, if my goal was to facilitate human connection, there were more impactful ways [to go about it] than me dancing about it.”