Bonus Content: An Award-Winning Personal Essay from 2005
A look inside my teenaged brain and my early writing. I both recognize and cringe at myself.
I promised paid subscribers would get a sneak peak at my upcoming fiction projects. I thought I would start by going backwards instead of forwards. In high school, I won four Scholastic Writing Awards: three gold keys and one silver. I will be posting all four of them here at some point. I did a little bit of creative writing in college, but then largely took a very long gap from 2007 until 2012—when in the fall of 2012, a poem I wrote, The Death of Penthesileia, which had sat unfinished for eight years, suddenly unfurled beneath my hands during pre-deployment leave. I wrote a lot during that deployment, and most of it is absolute garbage, but writing garbage still exercises the writing muscles so you can write well.
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