About the Editors

Dave Kyu is a socially engaged artist and writer. Born in Seoul, South Korea, and raised in the United States, he explores the creative tensions of identity, community, and public space in his work. He has managed public arts projects for Asian Arts Initiative, Mural Arts, and the City of Philadelphia. His own creative projects have found him commissioning skywriting planes to write messages 10,000 feet above Philadelphia and doing everything Facebook told him to do for a month.

Ilyssa Kyu is the founder of Amble, a sabbatical program for creative professionals to take time away with purpose in support of nature conservancies. She is a design researcher and strategist with a degree in industrial design and previously worked at boutique and global design studios. She is currently using her design consulting experience to support nature nonprofits through All Hands, a creative collective, as well as continually dreaming up ways to integrate her love for storytelling and the outdoors.

Together, we live outside of Philly with our two daughters and pup.

The scoop

We started Campfire Stories because we didn’t know stories to tell around the campfire.

Neither of us grew up camping, and had newly discovered a love for the outdoors as our own love grew. We found ourselves wanting to learn more about the places we were traveling to as we sat by the fire after long days of exploring 🏕️✨

When Ilyssa looked to buy Dave an existing cute book of campfire stories, all she could find were spooky ghost stories 👻 We decided to just make the book we wanted instead—a book that would give an authentic and diverse perspective into the landscape, flora, fauna, history and community of each region while igniting our imagination about the wild 🏔️🫎🌲

What we didn’t anticipate was how much these places and the stories told about them would give us perspective on our own lives.

We’re still pinching ourselves that we get to share stories from these incredible places and that anybody agreed to let us make books. We hope you enjoy them—happy trails! 📖

—Dave and Ilyssa