I know, I know. It’s been a LONG while since I last published anything here. I could blame it on grad school, but I stopped adding things to this blog before I dove deep into research, essays, and WAY too much coffee. I could make excuses, but in the end, it comes down to too …
I love love walking simulators. Five years ago, that statement would have had a lot of gamers looking at me funny and opening myself up to a scathing debate, but it feels like for the most part, this little genre of pressing “w” has come into it’s own and has been accepted into the video …
“No, not that one, that one!” Standing in your local pet store you command a teenager, who works there for part-time minimum wage and is armed with a small green net towards one specific goldfish with your finger because you like the look of her long, flowy tail. You’re standing on the sterile white tiles …
Moving to a Bigger Pond: One Poet’s Swim Ever Onward Read More »
Ugh, I know. This was the part of English class that was always the most frustrating and annoying. You’re reading a novel you were forced to read and aren’t connecting with, and a well-meaning teacher asks you to the dissect a moment within it. It’s a quiet moment away from the action of the story, …
Nature as Symbol: When a Tree is More Than a Tree Read More »
I’ve talked loosely on the advantages and disadvantages to using personification while trying to relate to nature while writing. To iterate, describing plants, animals, and places through a human frame makes them instantly relatable and understandable to readers. If we can imagine a solitary black bear on the hunt for berries in the woods, we …
Personifying Nature: Should You or Shouldn’t You? Read More »
Sure, before when I’ve talked about poetry, I touched on figurative language and imagery, but what if you’re experiencing a plant or animal for the first time? Maybe you don’t have a huge reference book to gloss through to pinpoint the name of a specific tree you pass or don’t have enough time to take …
The term “nature writing” is a pretty nebulous one. As we saw here, we can barely give a concise definition to what nature itself is, let alone how we go writing about it. Barry Lopez acknowledges the difficulty to refine a definition, but suggests that its most significant traits are threefold: “1) an assumption that …
I don’t believe performance to be my strong suit, but below are things I’ve learned from my time in the spoken word scene and I will be forever grateful for the vast improvements I achieved in my poetry and (dare I say) in my confidence from working with members of the spoken word community, even …
Ways to Change up or Improve Your Poetry Performance Read More »
Prose, poetry, and experimental writing are not simply genres or writing, but feel like entirely different mediums and constructs. While you may go about writing a space opera differently from a harlequin romance, just as you use different aspects of poetry depending on if you’re writing lyrical poetry or spoken word, they all hold the …
Hopping Genres: My Personal Experiences Writing Prose, Poetry, and Experimental Writing Read More »
While the following passage may seem like a lot to include, I think it’s important to make my point: My basic research shelves consist of around one hundred books, which represents 3 percent of my total collection, took me years to put together. These are the books I have within easy reach of my computer …