Welcome to my writing portfolio. I focus on travel memoir, reflective pieces, and critical essays. Enjoy!
He was on his feet in seconds, running back up the hill. He could hear Daniel close behind him, his uneven breaths fading into a chorus of whimpers.
He took the shard in his left hand and with his right hand he launched a smooth stone toward the strange animal. With a thud, the stone found its target, causing the thing to cry out before laying still again.
His name caught in my throat. The air had shifted, transformed. There was a buoyancy that seemed to pull me upwards, out of my body, out of the diner. I was meant for more than Medford, more than waitressing. I wouldn’t struggle like my Mother had. This meeting was sure to change things. Everything, in fact.
By the end of the review, I wasn’t sure whether the meeting had assuaged my parents’ fears or heightened them. Still, I couldn’t dredge up an appropriate amount of self-concern. I itched to be released, to discover and to explore.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, a German philosopher and poet, once famously said, “Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you”. We risk transforming into the very darkness we try to overcome.
I’m quiet for a moment. If I speak too soon, the floodgates will open, and he will become even more worried. I can’t imagine that any father wants to hear this story.
Pressed against the window, journal in hand, I had decided that once we arrived in Lagos, I would eat suya first, followed by fresh plantain. I would ask Mommy to buy local fabrics and I would dress like a native.
Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” pulls us into this world of confusion, uncertainty, and bloodshed as a group of grunts trek through the dense forests of central Vietnam, bracing themselves for the onslaught of an unseen enemy.
She arranged her lips into a pout. She waited, looking at me like a child pleading for ice cream. This was all becoming too much. I had a right to say no. I had a right to be tired of the whole thing.
My mouth opens and then closes again. I know my friend. It will come out soon enough. She shares bits about her week; She tells me a story about her co-workers. I chime in with words of affirmation, waiting patiently.
The house sits at the end of a tiny, half-concealed road in Rio de Janeiro’s Cosme Velho neighborhood. Daddy knocks on the door. We are greeted by a smiling middle-aged woman.
You can tell by the set of his jaw that he is a serious man. His tie hangs loose around his neck; his laptop bag sits patiently on the floor. The familiar trill of jazz notes climbs up and down the walls. The man enjoys the way his wife moves about the kitchen, not yet noticing him.
My friend informs me, without much preamble, that Germans don't laugh. We pause in front of our dorm’s entrance. Just as I begin telling him how silly he sounds, my thoughts turn to the gentle, quick-witted boy a few doors down from me.
In the end, Claudette’s desire to belong wins out, as she consistently abandons the true self at ever higher levels. Russell steadily moves the reader through the telling by carefully manipulating the character development, behavioral interactions, and pacing to emphasize that you risk losing yourself on the road to that ever-elusive feeling of belonging.
