01

2020: Points in Case: Lady Macbeth’s Hand washing Guide

This piece was inspired by the CDC guidelines in the epoch of the pandemic marked by the simultaneous toilet-paper and the sanitizer shortage. The draft was hastily cobbled together during my last week of Elissa Bassist’s comedy class, and I wanted to challenge myself by forcing a language constraint (Shakespearean) on the jokes.

2020: Points in Case: Five Pieces for Styling Middle-to-Low Income Looks on a Million Dollar Budget

I fail to understand why people have to purchase outfits that cost more than rents in order to emulate an aesthetic that simulates poverty. PiC did not publish with the piece with the actual outfit images in question, but I have this version here if you ever want to actually feast your eyes upon this.

2019: Little Old Lady Comedy: Tips for Applying to the Bachelorette

My debut comedy writing piece was inspired by the casting form for the Bachelorette on ABC Casting. My roommates and I looked it up in between rose transactions, and unfortunately the jokes wrote themselves.

02

2022: Cerasus Magazine (Issue 7): The T-Rex’s Guide to Kissing Boys

The prompt for Cerasus Magazine was “submit whatever you have in your back drawer, we’ll read it” which felt like an appropriate characterization of the genre of the story. The title of the story is not a metaphor and the content is literal. This story was inspired by a cartoon strip in which a man tries to approach a dinosaur by calling her a “good girl”.

2021: Plates Journal (Issue 4: Craft): Seamstress

Plates accepts submissions based on a themed prompt. This particular issue focused on the theme of craft and workmanship. My piece was inspired in part from watching too many forensic documentaries on stitching up bodies, watching my mother mend some clothing and banking on a vast repository of myths to connect the stories of the afterlife, death and closure.

2021: Self-published: Fingerprints [1200 words]

This story was inspired by reading and watching the Netflix adaptation of Maurice Le Blanc’s anti-hero Arsène Lupin. I try to capture the protagonist of an all-girls’ high school who struggles to be a part of everyone’s life while clinging to her invisibility. This piece was submitted to three journals, all of which rejected it. I’m self-publishing it here so that it can remain as a writing sample.

03

2023: The Dodge Summer Issue: Death is a Name Spelled in Stripes

The Dodge is a journal that publishes writing on the environment, relationships between humans and their environment and the reflection of human stories through other forms of life. In November 2022, I spent a week in the largest mangrove forests of the world, which span the Ganges delta, an international border and at least 26 rivers merging together to meet the Bay of Bengal. The habitat is home to the Royal Bengal Tiger and this submission captures the day-to-day life in the forests as humans navigate their precarious relationship with a dangerous endangered species.

2022 onwards: Peels Pls on Substack

This free newsletter, which is probably the third iteration of its attempt, is a collection of the pre-published chapters of my autobiography. Specifically, this is my platform to practice creative non-fiction writing and is not exactly a public diary. Most of my themes center around time, contemporaneous events, geological and ecological forces, or some media that has influenced me at that time.

04

A Linguistics Paper: OtjiHimba: The Language of the Himba People

Writing this paper for a linguistics class reminded me of everything that I love about languages, their own organic pseudo-biological ways of propagation and how they too are closely bound to the expression of cognitive faculties. This paper was written in covers how the Himba people are particularly sensitive to varying shades of light green, and touches on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (that language can affect cognition) as a possible explanation for this sensitivity.