Writing Portfolio
Writing Portfolio
‘House Call’ in issue 1 of Twisted Ink
A surrealist short story that explores emotional inheritance and family tensions.
“I’ve been imagining her as someone else for a while now, a cookie-cutter mother with soft cheeks, a floral nightie, and one of those tight, white eighty-year-old perms, an image stolen from a movie I watched last week with a girl who left for good after using the rest of my milk to make a bitter cappuccino. ”
‘Eighth Night’ in The Sheffield Review
Issue theme: obsession and perception
“You only see one of them. Its veiled grey gives way to pupil and reflection. You don’t see her at all. You see your face, but it is not yours anymore. It rakes up moulded memories, like when you once leant in to kiss someone with your eyes open just to try it and then you weren’t kissing so much as leaning into yourself…”
I was inspired by Poe’s Tell-Tale Heart to write about the destructive nature of obsession and how it can obscure the truth. I presented the work in a mock ‘video game’ format to heighten this sense of blurred reality.
‘Ode to a Conker Picked Up Outside Sheffield Cathedral’
in Hive’s 2023 Anthology: After Hours
“Is that what it’s called? A decision? Such a sharp word for the incision created by a planted seed.”
I wrote my first ever ode about a conker that I took with me everywhere, using it to manage my anxiety over living in a new city.
Past competitions:
I was the Wales Regional Winner of Pearson’s 2021 My Twist on a Tale: Our Tomorrow with ‘Audire’, a short piece of speculative fiction that explores the defamiliarising loneliness of environmental disaster.
“I can set up the fire now the static
is calming down. If I focus on
slowly pulling out one of the few
remaining matches from my coat,
I can almost make it blend in with
the sound of the sea, the sound of
smashing glass. I can fix it. ”
I was highly commended in the 16-19 age category for the 2020 Young Sir Walter Scott Prize for my short WWII story ‘To Dust We Shall Return’.
Illustration created for ‘To Dust We Shall Return’ by Tom Morgan Jones.
“They stayed there, intertwined, for what felt like several lives over”