Category: Film

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47 Rejections Until One Acceptance Leads to a Sundress Best of the Net Nomination

At the beginning of 2023, I wrote a short essay that was so very near and dear to my heart and submitted this little essay to 47 different literary reviews and mags, after which the rejections kept streaming through my inbox. A year later, the piece finally found a home. I’m so very grateful to Write or Die Magazine, not just for believing in these words that became “Tribute to a Lost Star”, but for nominating this work for the Sundress Best of the Net Anthology.

The piece is about literary and cinematic influences that strike us in our adolescence only to shape our sense of self and the world around us as we evolve. I hope to write more pieces like this.

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Tracking my “Infinity of Traces” with a short personal essay featured in Write or Die Magazine

This time last year, I was surprised to find myself grieving over the loss of a movie star. During some of the most catastrophic atmospheric rivers to hit California in recorded history, one of my teenage idols was lost in the mountains in Southern California. Julian Sands went missing in January 2023, and I found myself obsessively following the news for updates.

Antonio Gramsci illuminates the idea of how we’re influenced by an infinite number of people, places, events, and artifacts, urging us to track the “infinity of traces” that make us who we are. In the days, weeks, and then months that followed when Julian Sands was first reported missing, I began to trace the infinity of traces sparked when I accidentally came across the film A Room with a View as an adolescent. That happenstance evening has made me the writer I am today.

Please check out this short and very personal essay so near and dear to my heart (and soul) about cinematic crushes recently featured in Write or Die Magazine. Click link here.