For the 2024 AHS Capstone year, I decided to create a new medium for storytelling. A story told through short stories, songs, poems, and flash fiction. By combining all of these elements, I'm hoping to capture much more emotion in the story than what could be gained from any of the mediums standalone. The project is designed so that each piece works as a standalone piece and when read together provides a bigger picture to a much deeper story.

The final finished short form writing pieces for my AHS capstone. There is a sci-fi short story, a fantasy short story, and a poetry zine (in pictures and text only form). My goal was to explore a wide variety of short form writing. There is also a 'story builder' guide that was used for an interactive activity during the exhibit.

More about my initial goals and form: I aimed to write multiple pieces of short form writing (fiction stories & poetry), specifically to explore genre blending and unusual forms of writing. I’m inspired by writers who have transitioned narrators in the middle of paragraphs, have poetic descriptions with cadence in the middle of science fiction, and other unique forms. I want to take time to explore having a personal writing style/trademark while feeling more comfortable in the writing basics.

I produced a portfolio of various stories and poems I wrote during the semester. I also listed the works I was inspired by at the end of each piece. I was successful in my goal to create 8 short form writing pieces for the semester, as I wrote 2 short stories and 9 poems. This was not for my final submission, but I additionally wrote at least something every day in a physical notebook - poetry, thoughts on what I’m reading, or story ideas. This inspired my writing and served as a free brainstorming space. Since I was more comfortable with poems, I wanted to share these in a coherent theme and I compiled them into a zine. This was combined with matching pictures drawn by another student (Dylan Merzenich). The short stories I wanted to be more exploratory and aimed to get more breadth in topic and style. A stretch goal was to make a guide for how to create short stories or generate ideas, which I ended up completing as an interactive activity for exhibit.

Zine collection of Poetry, Prose, and Artwork by Olin College students

Poetry has been an ideal medium for me in exploring this type of environmental writing. My goal was to use relatively simple, accessible language in order to address complicated questions. I think of each poem as a compact package containing many layers of content. For the most part, I used the poems to describe individual experiences or events that happened to me, and use them to ask broader questions about how we interact with nature. This method seems to mirror how I believe sustainability issues should be tackled: by everyone applying their individual skills and experiences to work towards solutions. No "silver bullet" will solve all the large conundrums we face, of course. However, many smaller-scale solutions will eventually add up, and at the very least will create a paradigm shift and cause us to approach sustainability issues in new ways.

We created a spoken word poetry club for Olin students to freely and comfortably express themselves through words and performance. There was not a venue for this kind of expression at the time of club creation. At the end of the semester, we hosted an open mic and all club members performed poems with additional performances from other students.

I wrote the first rough sketches of each of these roughly fourteen-and-a-half-and-a-half poems over a span ranging from the fall of 2008 (my first semester at Olin) to the spring of 2012 (my final semester at Olin). I wrote them for fun; to see if I could; to fill writing portfolios; and in one case, for a girl I had a crush on at the time. (It didn’t work out; c’est la vie.) In my last semester, I come back to each of these poems to review, revise, and rewrite, to polish and edit and make them as good as it was in my power to make them at the time. With the help of Professor Alison Hickey at Wellesley College, I have sought to unite this final (insofar as any collection that will doubtless undergo countless future revisions can be said to be final) chapbook around themes of dreams and doubts, love and sorrow, good and evil, story and adventure.