I’ve been a poet and a writer all my life. Growing up I wrote poems in journals, on post-it notes, in thank-you cards and letters. Words sprawled across pages, some of them unbearably cheesy, corny, angsty, particularly as I got to high school. For years I have been honing my craft, and I continue to […]
When I was younger, I was incredibly shy about how much I loved fanfiction. Ashamed even. Reading and writing fanfiction were solitary activities, and I hid anything having to do with them from all but my closest friends. I became more open about my love of fanfiction and began to blend my identity as a […]
I have decided that I am going to take the time to recenter, refocus, and clarify my life. I am taking the steps I need to focus on the things that are most important for me and my mental health going forward. The first step I decided on was that I lowered my reading goal […]
Work continues to be overwhelming in the extreme, so I took another dip into my archives and pulled out some material from one of the other periods in my life when I was incredibly overwhelmed; grad school. Here are a few musings from November 2018 about why I write things down, with a side of […]
In this endless game of choose-your-own-apocalypse, its easy to forget that the world was a struggle before 2020. As I was wading through the waters of my Google Drive I found these notes from October 2019, and was reminded. I’ve decided to share them, both as an opportunity to explore this as a time capsule […]
Moving is exhausting. Both mentally and physically. I read somewhere once that moving is in the top five most stressful things that a person can experience in their life. Over the course of the past month and a half, as we have been settling into the apartment I took a hiatus from writing on this […]
The aesthetic of the young writer sitting in a windowsill, looking down at the ever-busy city of New York and dreaming of the stories they’ll pen someday is well established. Right now I’m trying to be that writer, but the unfortunate reality is that I forgot to open the blinds, this angle hurts my back, […]
[Meta Note] I don’t usually do content warnings because I don’t tend to have particularly heavy content, but fyi the main topic of this post is death including discussion of old age, cancer, and violence. Specific mention is made of the Stoneman Douglas High School Shooting. This post also contains frank discussion of mental health […]
I’ve written about reading before, and while doing so I did touch a tad on the subject of re-reading — in particular, how I feel that in order to get the true measure of a book one needs to read it more than once. I stand by that, and right now I’d like to expand […]
It has been a little over six months since I posted my first book review on this website, I and in that time I have written about fiction, nonfiction, poetry, books I’ve read for fun, books I’ve read for class, and books that fall in between. There have also been several books that I’ve read […]
The great thing about an independent study is that I get to focus on what most interests me about a given topic, and time and time again it seems that I am finding myself drawn to Harry Potter. I’ve often joked that given six degrees I can connect anything to the series thematically, and my […]
Greetings to all of the lovely readers of Word-for-Sense and Other Stories. I hope that you have enjoyed your exploration of the content here so far (if the stats are anything to go by, people sure like book reviews and linguistics memes) and here we are with a quick update. With only five weeks left […]
“Lady, my one regret / is that we don’t have appetite enough / to make you break every damned plate inside this room.” As a person of color, I am undeniably drawn to works that discuss race in a way that does not skim over the harsh realities that we face every day. As someone […]