American Wallpaper: Misrepresentations Through the Decades

American Wallpaper: Misrepresentations Through the Decades

Being an adopted Korean in the late 1990s and early 2000s in the peak of boy bands and sparkly pop princesses was, for a lack of a better word, hard.  Sometimes, I would cheer for the white brunette just to feel relevant. While all my friends drooled over Justin...
Disability Representation Across Literature: What Can You Do?

Disability Representation Across Literature: What Can You Do?

I have very weak hands, and I mean that quite literally. For one, I didn’t learn how to tie my shoes until the ripe age of twelve. Even as a college student, I’m dropping things left and right and frantically trying to cool off my fingers when they swell from holding...
Short Stories: The Bane of the Novelist

Short Stories: The Bane of the Novelist

If you’re a long-form writer like myself, you know the struggle of reigning in your desire to provide every detail of your character’s life, or else risk your work becoming a massive info dump. You may also suspect that trying to start your career as a novelist with...
Superheroes: the Patron Saints of Infinite Suffering

Superheroes: the Patron Saints of Infinite Suffering

Batman lost his parents at gunpoint at age nine. At the same age, I lost my mother to breast cancer. Ever since, feeling like half an orphan, I’ve always felt a special kinship with Batman and people that have felt the devastation of losing others. Since 2020, we all...
The Language of Flowers: How to Use Emotional Metaphor

The Language of Flowers: How to Use Emotional Metaphor

“Yes, flowers have their language. Theirs is an oratory that speaks in perfumed silence, and there is tenderness, and passion, and even the light-heartedness of mirth, in the variegated beauty of their vocabulary. To the poetical mind, they are not mute to each other;...
Sculptors, and Painters, and Writers, Oh My!

Sculptors, and Painters, and Writers, Oh My!

For many writers, gaining experience and knowledge are major parts of the writing process. Barbara Kingsolver, the author of the creative nonfiction book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle spent a year focusing on eating locally in order to write a book about her experience....