Karen Lundquist has spent much of her life discovering that the most interesting place to be is somewhere outside the boxes people try to put us in.

A creative marketing strategist, musician and storyteller, Karen has built a career around finding meaningful ways to connect people and ideas. With a background in music and a master's degree in communication, she's equally comfortable crafting a story with words or finding connection through a song. These days, music has become one of her favorite ways to get to know the people in her small-town community.

But Karen's perspective has been shaped by more than her professional life. As a gay woman who has often felt like an outsider, she's learned that belonging doesn't necessarily mean fitting in. Sometimes it means becoming comfortable enough with yourself that fitting in no longer matters.

Adopted as a child, Karen has also spent time exploring the complicated connections between identity, family and belonging. At 40, she reconnected with her birth mother, an experience she describes as profound in ways that were sometimes easier to feel than to put into words. It's another chapter in a life that has taught her that understanding who we are isn't always a straightforward journey.

Having spent more than 20 years working with people experiencing limb loss, Karen has developed a particular curiosity about identity, assumptions and the labels we place on ourselves and one another. She believes we have far more in common than we realize, and that a little more listening and a few more questions could go a long way toward helping us understand each other.

At The Porch, Karen hopes to explore how identity evolves, how we find connection across differences and why the LGBTQ+ community is far too interesting and wonderfully diverse to be defined by any single experience. Although she no longer lives in Minnesota, it's where much of her own coming-out story unfolded, and it remains what she calls her heart's home.

Pull up a chair with Karen and the conversation could go just about anywhere, from 1980s hair bands and incredible guitarists to zinnias, love and the beautiful complexity of being human. And chances are, by the time you get up, you'll feel like you've known each other for years.