Creative Writing Samples
Here's some of my more creative work, enjoy!
Bardo
(A Golden Shovel Poem)
I wrote this poem a few years ago for a high school English class. We had just read "Golden Shovel" by Terrance Hayes, which created a new poetry form by taking a line from another poem (Gwendolyn Brooks's "We So Cool") and ending each line with the next word of that sentence. Following that structure, "Bardo" takes a few lines from Anne Sexton's "The Truth the Dead Know": "when we touch we enter touch entirely./ No one’s alone./ Men kill for this, or for as much./ And what of the dead?" My poem takes inspiration from George Saunders's Lincoln in the Bardo, one of my favorite novels.
Rowena
(A Poem after Hamnet)
Written for the same class as "Bardo," this poem went along with our reading of Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell. The novel, a reimagining of the life of William Shakespeare, centers on William's wife Agnes Hathaway. Agnes's mother, Rowan, is described in the story as a wild woman who lived in the forest before a farmer meets and marries her. She begins living an ordinary life in her husband's village but remains an outcast, perceived by the other villagers as a witch due to her unconventional passion for nature. I had a lot of fun creating my own spin on this character.
Back to the Old House
This short story was written as the final project for a course on creative revising that I took at Cambridge University a couple summers ago. It's based on "Cemetry Gates" by The Smiths and takes its title from another of The Smiths' songs. It was the first short story I had written in a while, and I enjoyed revisiting that genre with such a clear vision of the story I wanted to tell.
Becoming Artificially Intelligent
I wrote this as my creative counterstory in a science-centered writing class at U of M (Honors 242, "Humanizing Science"). Throughout the semester, we each studied a hidden scientist whose contributions were obscured due to one or multiple marginalized identities, then we each wrote a "counterstory" about our scientists to highlight them in particular. I chose Timnit Gebru as my scientist, a successful AI ethics researcher who was terminated by Google in retaliation for speaking out against mistreatment experienced there by female employees and employees of color. My counterstory took the form of an almost sci-fi short story, written from the perspective of artificial intelligence.
בית קלפים
למשך הקיץ שעבר, עשיתי כמה קורסים בעברית בבית הספר לעברית במידלברי קולג'. באחד מהקורסים, הצטרכתי לכתוב סיפור קצר על משבר במשפחה. בשביל הפרויקט שיכתבתי סיפור שכבר כתבתי באנגלית, שלוקח את שמו משיר של רדיוהד. זה ממש עניין אותי שהיה לי יותר קשה לתרגל משהו לעברית מאשר לכתוב משהו מחדש.