Gender & Self
|
This webpage, created for a class during my senior year of high school (January-April 2019), explores the intersections of gender, media, and technology in the modern world. The pages include several pieces of creative writing, a videogame I designed, and a photo essay on the rise of the tech industry and gentrification in Austin, Texas.
|
One Million Shards of Light
"As far as I can recall, this is around the time he started painting. In the beginning, he would snap paintbrushes with his boldest strokes and tear gashes in the canvases while signing his name. Still, the colors never changed: blushing marigolds, mints and roses, frosted daffodils—all dashed intermittently with pewters, ambers, olives, charcoals, and gunpowders. He has never painted monsters, which has always come as a surprise to me, just like he has never painted heroes. He lives somewhere in between, I guess, giving form to whatever kind of character he sees in those around him. Giving face to something nameless, some internal being previously stripped bare."
| One Million Shards of Light |
In the Dirt Beneath the Marigolds
"In the sidewalk cracks beneath the swingset, a single dandelion grows, shrouded by unkempt grass and dusted with gravel. There I sit, crouched on my tippy-toes in a pink floral sundress, watching a honeybee work. As she collects pollen, she hums, just like my mother does whenever she is thinking..."
| In the Dirt Beneath the Marigolds |
A Coffee Shop Open on Sundays
"During July in the Salt Lake Valley, girdled by the backsides of the Rocky Mountains, the fireworks last for weeks. Pioneer Day brings out a sort of ultra-nationalistic pride in Utahans, and gunpowder dashes red, white, and blue across a seven-thousand-year-old sky. The city rests along the Wasatch fault line, said to be formed a faultless God, and the doorsteps are worn by the soles of dress shoes and the souls of men forcibly saved..."
| A Coffee Shop Open on Sundays |
Q&A
"Listen. The last thing I would ever want for you is to die gladly. I do not want you to look at Nothing's gnashing teeth, its smooth sweet charm, its dripping deceit, and hold out your hands..."
The Opposite of Withering
"Today, the air is full with flowers / and I remember why I came - / to this world, I mean, / and to my senses..."
| The Opposite of Withering |
November's Poetry
Some poems on snow, my dog, and how to best live life (2017).
|
| ||||
Disorganized Religion: Three Poems
June/July 2016: Through my journey that has taken me from beautiful Colorado to Wisconsin to Utah and back, I have wandered back and forth between varying degrees of spiritual connection and identity. These three poems, all written during a time of great hope and upheaval in my life, touch upon this often-controversial subject.
Big and Small and God
|
"I am small and new. / I know I don’t understand God / like I could never understand how many stars there are / or how many moments there’ve been, / how many cells make up an aphid / or how many lives I’ve lived..."
| ||
Confession
|
"Forgive me, / for I don’t know shit about believing. / I don’t know how to say that I believe in anything I can’t / memorize without sounding like a blog post or a Hallmark greeting card / or a teenage girl who tries way too hard to write something deeper / than the holes she dug in her backyard when she was six years old / and desperate to find more than dirt...."
| ||
Sunflowers
|
"They say sunflowers turn their golden-curious faces / to follow the sun as it moves across the sky – / say we could do that too, if we really tried. / I’d like to believe them, but at this point, / I’m still learning to chase time like it’s something worth having...."
| ||
Here and Now, Sky Gray or Blue
September 2014 - This work is a short personal essay, perhaps better defined as a vignette. With this piece, I worked to express a hope and light that so many of my pieces are lacking.
"In summer, my days are made up of words and too much coffee, of long sweat-soaked walks and writing amongst the trees. My nights are built from bleary-eyed novels, from staring out the window at the stars or the darkness that covers them, from conversations in the starlight more precious than sleep. My summers are running barefoot, chasing thunderstorms, making friends with mosquitoes that swarm near the lake. They are dandelion-crowns, they are laughter, they are rain...."
"In summer, my days are made up of words and too much coffee, of long sweat-soaked walks and writing amongst the trees. My nights are built from bleary-eyed novels, from staring out the window at the stars or the darkness that covers them, from conversations in the starlight more precious than sleep. My summers are running barefoot, chasing thunderstorms, making friends with mosquitoes that swarm near the lake. They are dandelion-crowns, they are laughter, they are rain...."
| Here and Now, Sky Gray or Blue |
HOME
|
CONTACT
|
WRITING
|
RESUME
|
|