I was thinking about the film The Substance, and how, despite her phenomenal performance, Demi Moore did not win the award, while her younger co-star, Margaret Qualley, did. Many of the comments online pointed out how the film’s message was being proven in real time — and that’s when the first lines came to me.
The visual came to me, along with the blended poetic–prose form, as a way to represent parts of me that have broken off, changed, and warped.
This poem is my unfiltered look at the cycle of binge eating and self loathing. It begins with immediate guilt, descends into the deep-seated hatred that follows, and ends with the exhausting performance of trying to fix yourself until you feel completely erased. It reflects the painful gap between who you are and who you feel pressured to be.
This poem explores the difficulty of articulating and explaining yourself to other people. It is about loneliness, identity, and the struggle to find a language that can accurately express your experiences and emotions. It was born from a lifetime of trying to forge friendships and connect with others in a way that felt authentically true to myself, while still maintaining the illusion that any one person can be understood or summed up with the right combination of words.
True to its title, this poem was inspired by a particularly horrible nightmare and the experience of coming back to consciousness from it. I wanted to capture the way nightmares can feel as though they are physically haunting your body, even after you’ve woken up to find none of it was real.
This poem explores the abstract and multifaceted feelings that accompany the discovery of self-identity and coming to terms with the many contradictions of the human experience.
A prose poem I wrote after a break-up and wanted to connect with my 'witchy’ side. It explores feelings of loneliness, spiraling madness and the negative side of being too independent.
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I was inspired by this story whilst at work, so when I went for my break I typed it up quickly. Obviously, this is about my love for books and the unique transportive magic they hold.
The idea for this piece struck me whilst I was cleaning away a spider sac. No offence to the mother, but I didn’t want hundreds of creepy-crawlies showering with me. It made me think about pregnancy, fertility, birth, and about those who are unable to go through this process. For some, that’s devastating. I wanted to write a weird piece from the perspective of someone who couldn’t, but who would do anything to try—even swallowing other mothers’ babies.
I was curled up with my cat under a fuzzy blanket on a blustery Autumn evening when I came up with the idea for this flash. I've always loved stories written from the perspective of animal companions (especially feline ones!) and felt inspired to try it myself here. This is an ode to the travesties inflicted upon ‘witchy’ women of the past, and of the enduring love between them and their ever-faithful ‘familiars.’
I saw the line “the vast, ruthless sea” in a book, and it struck me as a powerful opening for a short story. I wanted to explore the idea of a large body of water and phobias, paired with the psychological unease that arises from the dynamics between certain archetypes of men and women.
I came up with the idea as I was falling asleep. The light of my phone screen was just dimming, and this striking image of a face being THERE right in front of my face wouldn’t leave my head. Unlike the narrator, I opened my eyes and typed the idea into my phone.
A historical fiction piece about a young woman balancing family duty, a new job, and the quiet spark of an unexpected connection. It’s a story of sacrifice, hope, and finding yourself when life pulls you in every direction.
This piece was inspired by three items I saw around my room: a necklace, a model typewriter, and a picture of a dollhouse from an album cover, which I then incorporated into a story.
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