While many know Patty Hartshorn as Goshen College’s  director of health and wellness and Title IX coordinator, there is a side to her that not many have met at GC. Mermaid Periwinkle regularly hosts library children’s visits, attends MerPod gatherings and occasionally partakes in mermaid modeling.

Hartshorn’s fascination for mermaids and water has been prevalent since childhood, when she would play pretend to be a mermaid at swimming lessons in the pool. Hartshorn explained that she would pretend that her legs were stuck together as she dove into the pool. Her favorite mermaid film was ‘Splash’ because the mermaids appeared “ethereal.” Hartshorn would also dress up as a mermaid for Halloween, but her first true mermaid experience happened when she was in college.

Over a winter term, similar to GC’s current May term, Hartshorn and her friends made her first tail. One night, they snuck into their campus swimming pool after it was closed and, with their waterproof Kodak camera, they took the first pictures of Mermaid Periwinkle swimming.

Hartshorn felt that college was the perfect time to embark on this adventure, as it allows individuals to persue their “wacky” passions.

Her affiliation with the merfolk community began during the birth of the modern internet, which gave her the ability to connect with others  who have these same interests. Following the COVID-19 pandemic, Hartshorn joined various Facebook groups, also known as “pods” amongst the merfolk community, for individuals with similar interests to connect. Hartshorn is part of a pod titled “The Society of Fat Mermaids,” which helps to promote body positivity within the merfolk community and foster connection between individuals.

Hartshorn describes having a “mersona” as a form of artistic expression.  After her 40th birthday, Hartshorn acknowledged that we only have one life to live, and that this may be her only chance to follow this dream. This realization ignited her to start wearing her fins more openly, “whether or not people around me were going to be comfortable with the idea that I was doing [it], because what I was doing was not destructive.” Hartshorn also received her certification as a Professional Association of Diving Instructors certified mermaid.

According to Hartshorn, the merfolk community is based on inclusivity and diversity. “It is just a wide world of beautiful people and beautiful color and caring for one another around shared interests,” she said. Some common interests in the community are love of the water, body-positivity, water conservation and water safety, but can range largely depending on the individual. Hartshorn noted that being a mermaid can be empowering for certain populations and communities that have been “heavily discouraged from having access to or knowledge of how to safely swim.”

In Hartshorn’s case, she finds being a mermaid to be a powerful form of body inclusivity. “There is a lot of impression that mermaids need to be a certain shape, certain size, certain type of attractiveness. When people start to prescribe what a mermaid is by their shape, you lose representation,” she added. As a child, Hartshorn did not have body positive figures, and so she decided to be brave and “be willing to risk somebody not only saying, ‘you’re a crazy person in a tail,’ but ‘you are a plus size crazy person in a tail,’” to give children a representative role model. Hartshorn added that it’s an important message to children to “be comfortable in my skin and choosing to be comfortable in my fin.” 

Hartshorn won Ms. Minnesota Mermaid for 2022 and 2023 and was part of the Mermaid Festival in North Webster in 2025. She regularly makes appearances at the Goshen Public Library to read children’s books and swims at Bemidji State Park Lake in the warmer summer months.