Photo Courtesy of Ted Burhans

“I am studying English, creative writing and writing studies. I have always just really loved writing, ever since I was a kid. It’s been something that I was told I’m good at, and it was really the only thing I wanted to do as a career. I think it has to start with the characters first for me. Like, I have to get an idea for a person that I want to write about, and sort of the story and the plot forms around them and their motives. My favorite story that I’ve written … [is] one that I wrote a couple years ago for a creative writing class. We had to write a short story at the end of the semester. Everybody had to do one, and it could be about anything you wanted,  so I decided to write about these two characters. One of them was just starting out in school, and he was super anxious because his best friend of many years had gone off to college, so he was basically stuck at high school by himself. He didn’t know anybody else there; he wasn’t super comfortable. And so then he ended up befriending this other boy, and it [the story] was about the two of them coming together through this mutual friend that they had, and finding each other at a time when they both felt really alone. So it was more of an exploration of those two characters and their relationship together. And the plot kind of formed around that. My favorite story that I’ve read would be “The Alchemaster’s Apprentice” by Walter Moers. He is a German writer who started out as a cartoonist. He actually illustrates all of his novels, so he comes up with these stories that are really out there. He basically [creates] his own world where there [is] a lost continent, and it [has] all of these animals that don’t actually exist on it. And this story is centered around this cat that has two livers and can talk. And this cat is on the streets dying, and ends up getting taken in by this man, the Alchemaster, who essentially just wants to use the cat for his liver. But he basically says, ‘I’m going to kill you at the end of the thirty days, but for these thirty days I’m going to feed you and pamper you.’ And this cat is literally starving so he says, ‘That sounds like a pretty sweet deal.’ And so it’s kind of like his adventures with this Alchemaster, learning about all of the processes, but knowing that this guy is going to end up killing him. I loved how bizarre [the story] was. I loved just seeing a writer who had done something that I had never seen done before, and just taking things out of his imagination and really making a world of his own.”