Writing | Portfolio

Writing Samples

My passion for creativity began in writing. I loved reading, and once I saw that great stories and dreams were written in books, I sought to bring the same joy to others as written stories brought me. The writing samples below are a mixture of papers and articles I've written, some creatively and some for hard reporting. Many of them appeared in student publications while I was in school at St. Michael's College.

Egelloc

This paper I wrote for a travel writing course I took in my senior year of college. See if you can identify the tribe.

In my time as one of the Egelloc people, I saw and experienced many rituals and ceremonies that are staples of their culture. Last week, I got to experience a cultural celebration for the first time. The Pyad celebration is a purification ritual that takes place before the commencement of the spring equinox. It is a celebration of a successful survival of the cold months of autumn and winter, and of moving on to a new future.....

A Different Kind of Shoujo

This is a long-form paper I wrote for a film class while I was in Japan. It's a gendered analysis of the animated work of the great Hayao Miyazaki.

The female characters in his films are always unique, complex, and have an equally balanced relationship with their male counterparts. Instead of pre-teen high school love dramas, Miyazaki’s films depict other types of love that gives the characters both a mature and an innocent feel. In this paper I will use Miyazaki’s Spirted Away and Howl’s Moving Castle to explore these elements that separate Miyazaki’s characters from the rest of the shojo category...

Everyone is Irish

This was a column I wrote as editor for the St. Michael's student publication, The Defender.

If you pull out an old St. Michael's yearbook or flip through old issues of the campus newspaper, you'll find dozens of pictures of students dressed in green and waving shamrocks for a St. Patrick's day celebration that is now largely lost. Since 2004, spring break has been scheduled to fall on the week containing St. Patrick's Day, preventing students from spending the holiday on campus...

Stalker Dodging in Japan

Yet another travel writing gem I wrote for class. I was blessed enough in my third year of college to study abroad for three months in the Kansai region of Osaka, Japan.

Kimonos, cool cell phones, ninja swords…these are all things I expected to see and acquire while I was in Japan. A member of the host family I was living with gave me a kimono. My lifeline was my cell phone, or “keitai,” that came standard with satellite television. I didn’t actually buy a ninja sword on the grounds that it would be a nightmare to get through customs, but I met an actual ninja on one of my excursions to a Japanese castle, so I guess that’s close enough. The last thing I expected to acquire, however, was a stalker...

Keeping Faith

Another column I wrote as editor for the St. Michael's student publication, The Defender. It was quoted by one of the priests the following Sunday at Mass.

It has been said that Catholics go to church three times during their lifetimes: when they are hatched, matched, and dispatched. With Ash Wednesday just behind us, we saw from the number of people walking around with ashen crosses on their foreheads that this isn’t necessarily true. However, it is a troubling overstatement of a very real trend.