Drawing Our Stories: When Words Aren’t the Whole Picture
Sometimes words just aren’t enough. Whether it’s a graphic novel, hand drawings, visual poem, or digital drawing to accompany another piece of writing, visual art can add layers of meaning like no other medium.
This is an excerpt from our Cinderella-inspired YA fantasy novel. In this scene, the two protagonists meet for the first time but they each have different motivations for their meeting.
Inspired by Rilke’s Letters To A Young Poet, Letters To A Young Poetess is the feminized and updated homage by Kiki Tom and Gabriella Calabia. Beginning a written correspondence upon being paired as mentor and mentee, the two delve into sharing thoughts, questions and feelings about writing and what it takes to share one’s voice.
The poem speaks to our shared history as Asian-American women, emphasizing a colonial past in China and India, our liberation, and the formation of new rituals between generations all through the lens of tea.
Teenagers oftentimes don’t know themselves and are not well aware of their identity. This is a poem where I am exploring the different sides of my identity.
I was inspired by the illusions in my head as if there was a hamster in a wheel and it kept spinning. I felt that the only way to get the wheel to stop was to write my thoughts out on paper.
The themes in this poem sparked from an adventure in Lake Placid when I was visiting with my family. We went on a frozen nature walk and saw these gigantic ice cliffs.
A list of problems that increase in scale as we progress throughout the week. In a sense, they all reflect the world growing heavier to bear, an incessant drowning of some sort.