Writing Submission: AU (Spring Quarter Edition, "Portals")
AU is a speculative fiction journal at the University of Washington. They sent out a message to all the English Majors asking for submissions to be included in their "Portals" themed edition for Spring Quarter. It wasn't too long ago that I was thinking to myself "Wow, as an English Major, I really don't do a whole lot of writing". I've met a lot of people who talk about how they write all the time, possessed by a burning passion, knocking out entire novels. It made me begin to doubt whether I was a true English Major at all. I've always cited being too busy in the past, but with my lighter course load, I figured it was time I tried my hand at something outside of class and prove that I was an English Major in spirit as much as on paper.
I spent a couple of weeks without writing anything, instead just thinking about what to write. I wanted to do something unconventional. At first I was going to write about a guy whose closet is a portal and so all these magical creatures come into this life, kind of turning Chronicles of Narnia around. Then I was thinking of doing a college themed story, where there's a Portals 101 class. I couldn't really flesh out either of those, but the idea I clung to which was inherent in both of them was the idea of doing a portal story that didn't involve going through the portal. Almost all portal stories are about going through it and going somewhere else, and so I began to think of ways to tell a story about avoiding the "escape" that portals provide. I took that theme, drew some allusive inspiration from Dante's "Inferno" which I had just finished, and created the short story "Portal to Purgatory" which I was thrilled to have been notified had been selected to be published by AU.
I spent a couple of weeks without writing anything, instead just thinking about what to write. I wanted to do something unconventional. At first I was going to write about a guy whose closet is a portal and so all these magical creatures come into this life, kind of turning Chronicles of Narnia around. Then I was thinking of doing a college themed story, where there's a Portals 101 class. I couldn't really flesh out either of those, but the idea I clung to which was inherent in both of them was the idea of doing a portal story that didn't involve going through the portal. Almost all portal stories are about going through it and going somewhere else, and so I began to think of ways to tell a story about avoiding the "escape" that portals provide. I took that theme, drew some allusive inspiration from Dante's "Inferno" which I had just finished, and created the short story "Portal to Purgatory" which I was thrilled to have been notified had been selected to be published by AU.