When it comes to writing, I’ve tried my hand at just about every genre there is.
I have yet to be officially published, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t done a lot of writing. Below are a collection of snippets and short pieces that I’ve written for various classes, projects, jobs, or just plain fun.
FICTION
“If you were to ask the villagers who lived in the small, bustling village of Mellohi about the forest that lay at the edge of their town, most would turn pale. Some would simply warn to not step foot inside, or even lay eyes on the trees, if you could help it. Others would give you a story or two, if you pried - perhaps some old tale of a deal gone wrong, or go into more recent horrors regarding children being whisked away. Still others would scowl, muttering about the wicked forces that hid within, stepping out only to inflict misery on the town for the fun of it.
Regardless of which result, the end message would always be the same: Enderlon Forest and the fae that lived inside were dangerous, and never to be trusted.
The people of Enderlon all knew this as basic fact. It was every child’s first lesson, seared into the very forefront of their minds from the moment they could understand words. They passed childhood with red berries in their pockets and daisy chains around their necks, and grew into adults that carried iron knives at their sides, hung primrose above their door frames and planted St. John’s wort in their window boxes. The villagers lived with the knowledge of the beasts that lived just beyond their doorstep, and did everything in their power to keep the monsters at bay.
But the Corvidae family was different.
From a passing glance, there was nothing strange about them, truly. Philip and his two children, Wren and Aelia, seemed no different from any other family in Mellohi. Wren and Aelia went to school with all the other children, and Philip worked as the local blacksmith, forging everything from horseshoes to kitchen utensils. Everything he created was beautifully and carefully constructed, but his finest work was always found in his weapons. No one in town could forge a blade or craft a hunting bow as impeccably as Philip Corvidae, and everyone knew it. The two children lived with him in a perfectly normal two-story building close to the town market that served as both their home and Philip’s shop, and lived perfectly normal lives.
Perfectly normal, that is, until you looked closer and noticed that neither Wren nor Aelia were ever seen with the trinkets that most families would have never dared allow their children out of the house without. They carried no red berries, wore no daisy chains around their necks, had no iron nails sewn into the hem of their clothing. When asked, they would always find some strange allergy for each ward – red berries of any sort would give Wren hives for a week, especially holly, and St. John’s wort would make little Aelia’s nose run and eyes itch in seconds. Aelia in particular had one allergy that was the most suspicious of all, as touching iron left her hands with a burning rash.
Things only got more concerning when you asked after the children’s mother…”
-from the prologue of my in progress, untitled novel
“…Justin has already asked for the windows to be rolled down, up, down, up, down, and up again since they left his house. Chances are, he’ll ask Ryan to roll them down again in ten minutes, but Ryan rolls the windows up anyway. Might as well. Justin throws his free hand up against the window as it goes up, and Ryan takes his finger off the button, narrowly missing catching Justin’s fingers.
“Come on, don’t do that,” Ryan says. Justin laughs in response, but he lets his hand drop, and Ryan finishes rolling the window up. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
“Me? I’m... I’m great,” Justin says. “We’re goin’ down a back road at a million miles an hour, and I am doing great. Don’t take your eyes off the road.”
Ryan checks the speedometer. He’s going thirty-five.
“Alright, well...just let me know if you need to puke or something,” Ryan says, and Justin gives him a lazy thumbs-up.
Ryan turns his eyes back to the road, and wonders, once again, if he’s doing the right thing. He’s been wondering that from the very moment Justin showed up at his door an hour ago with a six-pack that he likely snatched from his mother’s stash, and demanded to go for a drive. He’d said he felt more ready than he had for the past year. Ryan had definitely had more than his fair share of doubts.
But Justin is, well, he’s Justin. That’s the only way Ryan knows how to put it anymore. He’d looked at Ryan with an odd kind of brokenness behind his eyes, and yes, Ryan had seen Justin at his lowest this past year, but this was something different.
It’s a year today. Justin had said.
Yeah, I know, Ryan had said. That’s why it’s a bad idea--
Today’s the whole...it’s...I don’t know. If I can be in a car at night now, I feel like I’d be able to do it at any time. Ever. Please.
And the beer? Ryan had asked. The whole point of these little “therapy sessions”, as Justin insisted on calling them, had been to get him comfortable in a car at night again without thinking of the accident. Being drunk only seemed like a way to yank those memories back to the surface even faster.
Justin had shifted uncomfortably where he stood.
Look, I’m just gonna focus on one thing at a time. Doesn’t matter if I’m sober or not at this point, I just wanna be able to get in that stupid car without losing my shit.
...fine. But only if you’re absolutely sure…”
-from Self Imposed Therapy, a short story
NONFICTION
“I have yet to see the fourth floor of 20 West Washington Street empty, and I cannot seem to picture it properly.
The muddled gray-green carpet will still be there, with dark swirls tangled up in it. The eggshell-white walls will still be appropriately cracked in places, the doors will still groan as you try to close them, the whole place will smell oddly of pretzels, wafting up from Pizza & Pretzel Creations on the ground floor.
But I cannot picture it without the wilting purple and zebra-print beanbags strewn across the floor. Not without Mrs. Anderson’s framed photos of poets reimagined as puns -- the glass on the frame for Sylvia Plathypus shattered sometime in my junior year, and she spent senior year propped up on the overflowing bookshelf instead. Edgar Allan Crow stayed by the coffee station, tucked behind a bright red Keurig and countless, mostly dirty mugs that were left behind by students too lost in Times New Roman to remember their earl gray and cappuccino. I cannot picture it without the soft click-clack of keyboards forever fading into the background, a constant hum underneath our voices that tested out how typed words sounded in the open air.
We packed ourselves and our stories into that minuscule classroom, shoved up against the English department, alongside the books we so desperately craved to write. We hid behind holiday-themed window stickers, tangled chargers, and stacks upon stacks of textbooks that were never correctly organized. We found a home in a collection of plush owls on top of a filing cabinet, in dying markers and lost pens found under the table. We lay our bookbags in haphazard piles, opened tablets, scribbled in margins, and said here. Here is where we become writers.
I wonder if I would still be able to hear a phantom hum of keyboards.”
-Mrs. Anderson’s Classroom
“I am walking toward the forest in the middle of a chilly November night. Gravel crunches underneath my foot, completely unseen, and the path ahead is lit only by the small flashlight my phone provides. The light lets me catch a glimpse of the rundown white barn I’m passing, one that is hopefully empty, and I am beginning to wonder if having the flashlight on is worse.
Here’s the thing about me—I have a lot of bad ideas, and most of the time, I’m stubborn enough to go through with them.
Having a creative mind does that to you, I think, especially when given a prompt. Mine was simple: go to a location, take that location in, and write about it. Then, go to the same location when something was different (time, weather, amount of people there, etc.) and write about it from that new perspective.
That prompt and a few rejected ideas later led me to now, walking out towards Fairview Mountain past midnight, armed with nothing more than a flashlight, a journal, and a pen to jot down any notes. A terrible idea? Yes. Obviously. Anyone who’s seen more than 30 seconds of a horror movie could tell you that much, but I’d already been up on one of the mountain’s hiking trails earlier that week with the very same notebook and pen in hand, and as the sun shone above me, I’d felt more relaxed than I had since I headed off to the figurative mountain of work college laid out before me. How much different could the experience be at night, especially if I was bringing along a light source of my own?
Very.
The path continues past the barn, gravel and pavement giving way to packed dirt and grass that was just tall enough to need to be mowed again. I am relatively safe for the moment, with most of the forest still a fair distance away as I make my way through the meadow that sits next to a fishing lake. Claustrophobia has yet to set in, but I can still hear the chirping of nearby, unseen crickets, and a faint buzzing noise that reminds me of cicadas, but it’s far past their season. When I came here during the day, the tweeting of birds and buzzing of insects was a reminder of life, of how much this forest sustained. Now, it only sends a chill through my bones as I am reminded of just how many creatures are around that are beyond my sight.
But I am determined to continue. It is one of the few times my stubbornness has outweighed my anxiety—though, I suppose, my anxiety had a hand in keeping me moving forward. This writing prompt is one for a creative nonfiction class, one taught by my favorite professor, a man we all call Ben. The first time I was in his class, he told me he was impressed by my work. I don’t want to let him down…”
-from Fifteen Seconds in the Woods, posted to the Yellow Arrow Publishing blog on November 8th, 2022
POETRY
I feel her
drifting out of reach
and I am no longer sure
if I should try and stop her.
She used to fit me
snugly, lovingly, proudly,
and while I have kept the pride
she has become three sizes
too small
or perhaps they are taking up more space than before.
I can remember her,
when she was truly her
before life took its toll and stole her away –
when she had cloth fairy wings strapped on her back
and still believed she could fly through the backyard
even as dewy grass left her socks damp.
Perhaps now, if I let them, they could
stretch out a new pair of wings
that match the skeleton
they have since grown,
but to fly would mean to leave her
and she has done nothing wrong.
So again,
I reach out a calloused palm
and feel baby-soft skin against mine.
Her hand is so much smaller than theirs.
I try not to think about the difference.
-she/they
Here you are in my dream again,
only this time, you’re sitting on the floor,
back pressed against an empty couch,
gangly legs pulled up to your chest,
and for a moment I forget this is a dream
because it feels so unequivocally normal.
I scoot across the floor to have my side
meet yours, and know that here, in this strange
limbo, we have been inseparable since diapers.
Here, I chased you to the bus stop
on early autumn mornings. You
constantly borrowed and subsequently lost
all my good pens. We spent countless afternoons
blasting indie music no one’s heard of but us,
screamed lyrics off-key and swore that no,
you definitely sound worse than me.
Eventually, inevitably, unavoidably,
I must return to the world in which
we do not know each other’s smile.
For now, though, you nudge my shoulder –
you know I could tell you were just pretending
to be asleep earlier, right –
and because here you are the closest friend I have
I believe you.
-Parasocial
SCREENPLAY
(Images used to better showcase formatting.)
-from The Bachelor, a short film
-from Cyberpunks, a sci-fi action feature-length film
REVIEW
“It has, admittedly, been a while since I decided to sit down and read a collection of poetry for reasons other than needing a good grade on a class assignment. Poetry is one of the realms of writing that often eludes my grasp—not because I don’t want to seek it out, but because fiction and nonfiction pieces usually end up getting there first. When it comes to Natalie Wee’s collection Beast at Every Threshold (2022), however, I immediately knew upon beginning that this was a book that would stick with me as clearly as any beloved fiction adventure from my childhood.
Beast at Every Threshold is best described as a careful balancing act between hope and despair as Wee wades through both her past and present while considering her potential future. Within her poems, she openly acknowledges and explores the tragedies of life and loss, such as her grandmother’s Alzheimer’s and abuse she herself has suffered. She does not attempt to fool her audience into believing that every problem in life can be solved through having hope, but as she looks into the more depressing aspects of life, she still brings hope into the equation along with a strong sense of reclaiming power, as she does in the poem “Wei Yang Tells Me About Resurrection.” In the poem, she describes the pain that is necessary for resurrection but turns it on its head into using that pain to transform your own life and bring it under control: “Choose a hell / of your own making over the hell that unmakes you.” Her sense of hope also comes to a head in her poem “In My Next Life as a Fruit Tree,” where she muses on her potential next life and what she will become, and while she could choose anything, all she wishes to do is to provide love and care for those who come after her, and to simply exist peacefully: “but I’ll flower one crop each day for as long / as the palm reaching upwards needs something to adore / it.” It’s a beautiful message that takes the idea of existence and works it into something that we do not have to prove we deserve, but something that we can simply enjoy. Within this collection, Wee is no stranger to depression and pain, but is not interested in painting a grim, hopeless vision of the world around her. Wee sees both hope and despair that exists within the world, and because of that, I was left feeling as though I was seeing real, unbridled truth on the pages before me.
Just as Wee is a master of finding hope within despair, she also works within her poetry to find beauty within the unconventional. This is a theme that comes in right away in the first poem of the collection, “In Defense of My Roommate’s Dog,” which turns the somewhat embarrassing act of a dog humping a stuffed animal in front of guests into a breathtaking exploration of sexual longing and asks the reader why they find shame in masturbation when it is rooted in a longing for love and the need to survive: “Maybe the trade-off for resurrection is / shame vast enough to kill / us.” Wee has turned this small, everyday act, which most of us would feel awkward about witnessing, into a radical questioning of our values, and why it is that we are so ashamed of basic human nature…”
-from Beast at Every Threshold: An Exploration of the Balance Between Hope and Despair, posted to the Yellow Arrow Publishing blog on January 31, 2023
“Tucked away just beside the back entrance to Hawkins Hall, Au Bon Pain can be difficult to find and is almost always difficult to enter. Around the lunch rush, the space can be packed so tightly with hungry college students that there’s hardly room to move. While the space can be crammed, however, it gets that way for a reason – the food they offer includes solid yet simple lunch options that work both for students on the go and students wishing to relax for a moment.
Typically open from 7:30 AM to 5:00 PM on weekdays, Au Bon Pain features a menu of soups, sandwiches, wraps, salads, and simple baked goods like muffins and bagels. The sandwiches, wraps, and salads are all made to order and arrive fresh in your hands seconds after they’re finished, with some sandwiches so hot that the cheese glues the two sandwich halves together. A row of eight different soup kettles offer up classics like creamy mac and cheese and hearty chicken noodle soup, but also go further with a rotating set of options such as baked stuffed potato soup. The croissants, if you can get your hands on them before they’ve all been snatched up, are surprisingly filling for their size with combinations like ham and cheese or spinach and cheese. A Towson student can very easily leave with either a sandwich or a combination of soup and croissant for slightly over a single meal swipe.
While you may struggle to find an open seat in the dining room during lunch hour, Au Bon Pain is a simple yet delicious option for lunch on Towson’s campus.”
-a review of Au Bon Pan on Towson University’s campus
