Short Fiction
Short fiction is a first love but one that I often neglect as I write for clients, school, or even myself. My brain defaults to the novel but it is not because I find short fiction to be inferior. In fact, I find that it to be a challenge, capturing a whole world in only a few pages. It is something that I plan to spend more time doing as a writer—writing short stories about the giant worlds trapped within my writer's brain.
Academic Papers
Winner of the Marguerite R. Dow Canadian Heritage Award 2024.
The River is a short fiction of a young girl fishing with an Indigenous family on the shores of the powerful Fraser River in British Columbia. The river is a symbol of the violence she experiences at home but further explores the tensions between her homelife and struggling to find one's place and identity in the world.
It was inspired by my teen years in Hope, BC where the Fraser River is a wild and violent torrent of white water that cuts through the dense forests around the town. It is explores themes of grief, depression, domestic violence and the hope that everyone can find a place within the world.
This story was born from my love of mythology, which I discovered as a child. It doesn't stick with one pantheon of mythology, despite the narrator/main character being from the Greek pantheon, and is a work that I feel could be expanded into a larger piece.
It ties into the story of life that is believed to be written down the moment a person is breathed into creation; however, there is a little bit of a twist that hints at strife always being an addition by some other entity rewriting parts of one's life's story.
One day, I am sure I will delve deeper into this world and see where it takes me.
The complicated relationships between mothers and daughters is explored in this short story of a woman attending her mother's funeral. As she navigates through her grief and the funeral, her mind shifts to the relationship and her mother's expectations that she never believed she could meet. Even on the day of her funeral, she is reminded of her failings through in her thoughts and while the short story does end with a reminder that she is more than a single trait, it leaves the reader to contemplate how the narrator will move forward.