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. 

  • Text Received From Mars

    Jade. How have you been? Are you happy? Have you been eating well? Sleeping? I’m sorry I put you through this. I know you said you never wanted to hear from me again, but I figured it’s been so long now you might not be mad anymore…what was I thinking? Of course, you’re still mad.…

  • 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…

  • 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 didn’t walk this one with her.

  • Keats’ Astonishing and Poignant Imagery: Discover the Deep Emotional Impact

    On his death bed, in a letter to his brother, John Keats wrote “I think I shall be among the English Poets after my death” (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…

  • 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.

  • Figurative Language in Wordsworth’s ‘I wander’d lonely as a cloud’

    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 “knows the intrinsic value of the different objects of human pursuit. .…

  • Unnatural Order: Men Are Actually Equal To Mice

    A central theme to Rousseau’s philosophy was to restore freedom to humans in a way that would reconcile who we truly are and how we live together within nature

  • Dialogue in “A Lovely and Terrible Thing” by Chris Womersley

    Womersley cleverly uses action, rather than speech tags, to accompany dialogue in ‘A Lovely and Terrible Thing’, implying the delivery of lines without explicitly telling a reader

  • Hate Your Characters: ‘Mouthful of Birds’ and Distanced Readers

    Samanta Schweblin’s decision to use first-person point of view of a disconnected father figure in ‘Mouthful of birds’ 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…

  • Self-Adjusting and Self-Correcting: Narrative Structure in ‘The Last Question’

    ‘The last question’ is a short story by Isaac Asimov (1974) that explores humanity throughout time and space as they advance a technology called Multivac, a “self-adjusting and self-correcting” computer who develops AI over time (p. 157). This mini-essay fits Freytag’s dramatic arc to and explores the narrative structure of ‘The last question’.