This piece is a short story I wrote for a Short Story Workshop course. This course required each student to compose three short stories throughout the semester, all of which would undergo a 45-minute group workshop session with the class. Homework, readings, and in-class activities were all centered around practicing the art of short story writing. Students in the class came from a great diversity of writing backgrounds; some boasted publications and others tried their hand for the very first time. Professor Brian Conn allowed a great deal of freedom with these assignments in requiring only that no story exceed twenty-five pages. This led to my review of stories ranging from flash fiction on Cthulhu to novel chapters about medieval princes, an exposure for which I am forever grateful.

This story pulls from real life happenings in the late 2000s in my hometown. The Little League park at which I spent many a Saturday once became a crime scene for what turned out to be the self-immolation of a local mother. This story spread fast around the school halls and filled my young imagination with ponderings about the motives for such an action. I decided to use a short story to flesh out one of these fantasies. To this day, I am very happy with what I produced. I think that this story is a decent representation of my writing style and quirks. The introductory paragraph still manages to zap me back to memories of the hill I was trying to describe. However, I am unsatisfied with how the story ends. Unintentionally, all of my stories for this course ended with death, mostly by suicide. Martha, our main character, takes her own life at her son’s grave. This trend is likely related to my writing style; I tend to write in binges and without much planning. I recall the specific binge that produced much of this story as starting on the morning of Super Bowl Sunday 2018. By nightfall, I had grown weary-eyed and had managed to complete about eighty percent of my vision. My binge tendencies pushed me to write a quick ending rather than struggle to emulate that same creative energy at a later time. Reflecting on this piece reiterates an observation with which I have become familiar in my writing endeavors. Everyone suffers and succeeds at the hands of their own writing style; no one is without trouble.