This short story was written in the fall of 2020 for an Advanced Fiction Writing course taken with Professor Joanna Ruocco. I had previously taken an independent study on writing romance novels and chose to continue exploring my interest in genre fiction by writing a detective story, loosely drawing on Edwardian tropes though it has a modern setting. I drew, too from films such as Knives Out, but I decided to satirize some of the genre expectations commonly held for detective novels by making the protagonist of this story an inept bumbler of an investigator who is quickly proven to be incapable to solving the case of Mr. Bartleby Worth’s murder. Tone was an important part of writing this piece as I wanted to preserve something of a Poirot-esque narratorial voice while still conveying the protagonist’s ineptitude to the reader.
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This essay was written for the Art of the Essay course taught by Professor Elisabeth Whitehead, which I took in the fall of 2018. The prompt for this assignment asked that I write a memoir in the style of those that had been read in class. I chose to write my memoir on my inability to bake and the gendered expectations that go along with women in the kitchen. This essay attempts to engage with the community of creative nonfiction essayists and memoirists. I employed various techniques in an effort to perform membership to the community of creative nonfiction essayists, such as writing in the first person, including dialogue, a meandering structure, and descriptive, imagistic language. One tendency within this genre that I attempted to emulate was adopting an informal tone; in an effort to achieve this tone, I employed strategies such as using sentence fragments and vernacular language, which I had seen used by other memoirists. By writing in the first person and through the purposeful inclusion of nonessential details, I was able to achieve a somewhat distinctive narratorial voice in this piece. This enabled me to make my memoir more personable as well as personal, and contributed to the ethos of my piece, fulfilling one disciplinary expectation within this community.
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