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Am I Homesick or Lonely?
Sometimes I lay awake at night and wonder if I’m not doing enough, pressuring myself for not fitting to the historical timeline for a woman my age (where’s my husband? my child? why am I penniless and renting?). Even when I decide I am content where I am, the demons return. Telling me I would…
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Because I’ll Hold Your Hand
The path was dangerous, as the man had said. He showed her the way and left quickly. Where are you going, she asked. Back to my path. She wondered why he didnât walk this one with her.
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Keats’ Astonishing and Poignant Imagery: Discover the Deep Emotional Impact
On his death bed, in a letter to his brother, John Keats wrote âI think I shall be among the English Poets after my deathâ (Keats, 1818). Keats only sold roughly 200 copies of his poetry books throughout his lifetime (Motion, 2010), and fellow poets even attributed his death to the large number of negative…
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The Moment (of a Woman)
While looking up at the stars one night in February, Jane had the moment. The moment of clarity a woman has only once in her life, where she realises she is small and weak and insignificant. It hit her hard on the head and was heavy like a man.
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Figurative Language in Wordsworthâs âI wanderâd lonely as a cloudâ
Mason (2010) describes William Wordsworth as, above all, someone who listens and watched his world (p. ix). In 1804, fellow poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1895) wrote that Wordsworth was happy not because it was his natural disposition to be so, but because he âknows the intrinsic value of the different objects of human pursuit. .…
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Unnatural Order: Men Are Actually Equal To Mice
A central theme to Rousseauâs philosophy was to restore freedom to humans in a way that would reconcile who we truly are and how we live together within nature
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Dialogue in “A Lovely and Terrible Thing” by Chris Womersley
Womersley cleverly uses action, rather than speech tags, to accompany dialogue in âA Lovely and Terrible Thingâ, implying the delivery of lines without explicitly telling a reader
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Hate Your Characters: ‘Mouthful of Birds’ and Distanced Readers
Samanta Schweblinâs decision to use first-person point of view of a disconnected father figure in âMouthful of birdsâ builds a story wherein Sara is alienated from the reader at the beginning, even without her eating of birds. This alienation, through clever use of character, narrator, and point of view choice, is the kernel that the…
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Self-Adjusting and Self-Correcting: Narrative Structure in ‘The Last Question’
âThe last questionâ is a short story by Isaac Asimov (1974) that explores humanity throughout time and space as they advance a technology called Multivac, a âself-adjusting and self-correctingâ computer who develops AI over time (p. 157). This mini-essay fits Freytagâs dramatic arc to and explores the narrative structure of âThe last questionâ.
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Murder, Madness and Horror: Poe’s ‘The tell-tale heart’
Poeâs âThe tell-tale heartâ cleverly uses tone and language to indicate at the speakerâs desireâto convince the reader of his sanityâand his decline into madness as his actions weigh on his mentality.
B.K. Olivia
thoughts no one asked for
Hi, I’m B.K. Olivia
Writer (wannabe).
Australian living in Japan (life crisis).
Three years until thirty (character development).
Exhale the thoughts
that trapped you there.
Blow away the dust,
carry yourself into the air.
– B.K. Olivia
An exploration of living, loving, existing
(and the impending doom of ageing)
There’ll be articles, essays, stories about life when you’re too old for twenty but too young for thirty; about when you’re a woman before a person; about the struggle between purpose and meaning; about what it is to live and be happy.
