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When I was first introduced to the magical realism genre, I thought it was strange and knew right away that I wouldn’t like it. However, after studying it for a few weeks in my creative writing class, and eventually writing my own story within the genre’s definition, it became one of my favorite things to write about. I love the idea of being able to take a cliché topic and make it original in its own world. At first I only expected the genre to be about magical occurrences and unusual reactions. However, with the first story I read in my class, “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” by Gabriel García Márquez, I knew that this genre wasn’t what I thought it was going to turn out to be. This story does more than just show a moment in which a community is blessed by the presence of an angel, but branches off into many deeper meanings. For instance, the story shows greed and the lust for power that leads a family to treat a dying man (or angel) as though he is an object to be profited off of. After I read that story, I began to research and read more because of how interested I was. I don’t know exactly what it was that changed my mind on how much I enjoy writing this genre, but something clicked my interest and hasn’t let go. When I was assigned my first magical realism story, I racked my brain trying to think of a unique idea that I could make interesting. I ended up writing a short story about a man grieving over the loss of his wife after she dies in a car accident. On his way home from visiting her grave one evening, she appears as a “ghost”, following and speaking to him because she thinks he can’t head her. She talks to him throughout the course of the night until eventually deciding it’s unhealthy for her to stick around and ramble on when he can’t even hear her. Before she has the chance to leave, he pulls her into his arms and embraces her, without questioning how she’s alive they continue to live their life together as if her accident had never happened. After revising this one, I came up with ideas for more stories that I could possibly write in the future. It’s been a while, now, since I’ve sat down to write a magical realism story. However, the ideas and techniques are still heavily present in the other things that I write, whether it be unusual events and warped senses of time, or just that I’ve morphed some of my ideas into other genres too. Someday soon, I hope that I can find the time to sit down and write a new magical realism story, whether it’s an idea I’ve already thought of, a completely new idea, or even just a revision of an older story. -Kinley Dozier, Web Editor

It’s more than a little painful to read my old work, and by old, I mean both the stuff I wrote four years ago and what I wrote four days ago. It’s a constant process of asking, “What in God’s name was I thinking?” and having no response. And while this process does cause me to cringe, it also allows me to see how much I’ve moved forward in my work, how far I’ve come and how much further I can go. The general style of my writing has actually remained the same; I have always stayed simplistic in diction, but gotten caught up in the images of what I describe, almost like I’m writing poetry into my fiction. I think the stagnancy behind this is because that’s just the way that I write. I can alter this style after I bust out a first draft, but, to me, a story always starts out bare, aside from its visual aspects. I will admit that a great shift within my writing is that I have gained the ability to shed excessive images that mean nothing in terms of intention, though I still catch myself slipping up sometimes. Probably the most significant change that I’ve found within my writing is that, in the midst of last year, I decided to start writing weird things. People tell you to write what you know because otherwise you’re stuck with conjecture. From my experience, that advice is total crap. I took familiar subjects and shoved them into strange situations: a girl stranded with her recently introduced half-brother in a desert, a boy stumbling across a body on a golf course, a how-to guide on communication with lost loved ones. One of my major influences in writing all this partial-nonsense comes from the book Stories You Can’t Unread by Chuck Palahniuk, the author of Fight Club. The former is a collection of short stories that are completely submerged in the strange and surreal, and within these weird circumstances, I found that I was entirely interested in what the speakers had to say. I wanted to translate this interest to my own writing, so I started the process of delving into the wild, stuff that I plain hadn’t seen written before. For example, everyone has read a story about a failing marriage, but what about a failing marriage following an accident in which the wife was struck by lightning? Through this type of exploration, I found myself more intrigued and interested in what each story has to offer; once I was hooked in writing the story and had a healthy interest in its direction, the readers also tended to gain more of an interest. I realized that I had to care about what I wrote in order for anyone else to care. So, my ultimate advice for that story that is lurking in a file somewhere, beaten down to the bones, is to make yourself interested in it again. Introduce a sick dog into the mix. Throw some aliens in. Have fun! -Logan Monds, Social Media Editor

Unlike many of my peers in the Creative Writing department, I have only been at Douglas Anderson for two years. Also unlike many of my peers, I didn’t attend Lavilla before applying to DA. However, I did write, and it was something that I held very dear to my heart. I hadn’t seriously written anything creative for years when I started building my audition portfolio. The last time I sat down to write was probably fifth grade, and it was almost certainly a poem about some boy I liked, or something inspired by Edgar Allen Poe - long story short, it was crappy and weird and immature. But there’s value in those pieces, a small tinge of brightness amongst the darkness of the fifth grade psyche, I guess you could say. However, fifth grade wasn’t my earliest writing; instead, it was sort of a middle ground. I grew up living with my grandparents and it wasn’t the greatest of arrangements. I had intense depression and anger issues and so I often found solace in colorful $5 journals that could be bought at Wal-Mart or Target. That was where I let myself go - I wrote hateful, yet situationally appropriate notes to my grandparents, sad little musings about missing my mother, video game cheats, little daily scorecards that I could go back and laugh at later. No matter what I wrote, it helped me get a decent way toward catharsis, and no matter the small steps I had taken, at least I had walked some on those days. From here, I gained an intense interest in reading - fantasies like Harry Potter and Dragon Rider, books about dogs and princesses - basically anything I could get my hands on. And from this love of reading, a love of escaping real life, writing came around. In fifth grade I started reading Poe and writing those angst-ridden fifth grade poems, and then middle school hit, soon enough, and in seventh grade, the trajectory of my writing life changed. Our teacher signed us up to do an essay contest on Korean folktales. I ended up being chosen as one of 10 or so people to be submitted as finalists from our class. And while I didn’t win, I still remember thinking that, hey, maybe this is something I’m good at. Maybe I even like it a little bit. Maybe. While these writings were often superficial, or too blunt to be read by someone else without the solid suggestion of therapy, they all were stepping stones in my road to DA. When I got to the writing program, I was still stuck in that stiff, “make yourself look good” mode of writing, especially in Junior Fiction - I had never really written fiction before, and I was no Christopher Paolini, so I was lost in a world of trying to fake it. But I didn’t make it until I started writing about my family again, writing about things that mattered. This growth happened hugely in Junior Poetry, where I began to be okay, once again, with being blunt and emotional. And so all of my writing since has been for me, which may be selfish, but as Laurie Ann Guerrero said, “I’m working through my [crap].” -Mackenzie Steele, Co-Art Editor

The earliest thing I remember writing and feeling distinctly attached to was a haiku I had written in the third grade about a panda that knits. Our class was learning about Japanese culture and each day of the week was revolving around some different aspect of the culture (food, kanji, etc). This was the first time I thoughtfully created a piece. I mean, I was in the first grade, and the subject matter wasn’t of course complex or earth shattering but I remember feeling good fitting into the syllable count, clapping out the sounds, and digging into my brain for the right words. In elementary school I recall writing a lot about animals. I wrote poems about tigers and even a research paper about them in the second grade. I was compelled nature which makes sense as back then, watching Animal Planet and any documentary on the Discovery Channel was something I’d spent many weekends doing with my granddaddy. This carried into middle school, but I started also writing about things like race, and interpersonal relationships. I find it interesting now, as I’ve noticed that who I am as a writer, revolved a lot around images that pull from nature. Last year, one of the more angry and intense poems I created was a political commentary on the state of the environment. When I write about race, I find myself gravitating towards earthy, strong, rich images as for the African American community, we are connected to the roots of the country, through blood and through innovation. In a recent poem I’ve written about in an effort for self-exploration, I remember I created a scene with a wedding and images of butterflies and the jungle were the things I flushed out. I never thought about it, but it’s interesting that I’ve been using the natural world so long for inspiration. I will say, in nature pandas aren’t exactly keen on knitting, but I think my point is made. I also in my writing, use a lot of colors to imply what I want to say. I notice that I use greens, blue, and yellows a lot. Colors that you immediately think of foliage, water, and light. I think the reason I’ve always been attracted to nature in my writing, is because it always felt so much bigger than me and endless. Watching Meerkat Manor, and penguins migrate across the frozen worlds I know nothing of felt more out of this world to me than fairy tales or whatever. I notice that I subconsciously revert back to these tendencies even if I don’t mean it. Of course, the way I weave in nature inspired metaphors and images are more meaningful and are way less literal than reports on tigers or the poems I created in third grade about the beach. It’s more like in my poems about recalling childhood, the imagery of the sky and the metaphors of mountains always somehow come back to emphasizing a moment, and how small yet significant I felt in them or about the humanity and morality that is present in all of us. -Kiara Ivey, Layout and Design Editor

Just thinking about my earliest writing elicits cringes and pained contortions from secondhand embarrassment. I remember being so proud of my audition portfolio, thought I was the next writer with God-given talent discovered at a young age. Perhaps immediate scoffs when reading my earliest writing isn’t the best reaction because that embarrassment and shame I feel when reading my clumsy prose and cliché poetry lets me know that I have evolved as a writer. Early in my writing career, I believed fiction was completely divorced from the writer and poetry was always angry spoken word or dramatic Edgar Allen Poe rhyme. I didn’t understand that my personal truth could come into play with either of these genres because creative nonfiction itself was a genre and that’s only where I could let the reader know about my life. The result of trying to keep my prose and poetry sterile, free of personal information, was something safe and cliché, showing technical promise but no real depth. It was only after taking a speech/oral interpretation class I realized that one’s personality and experiences can come into play with poetry and by extension, fiction. That class gave me permission to take a published poem and make it my own with stylistic choices and intonation and most of all, relate to it, live inside the piece, let it live inside me for a while. With this revelation and newfound confidence under my belt, my writing began improving. I began writing more consciously about things I was passionate about. My fiction held more clues to my personal life and my poetry became distinguished from usual teen poetry as I learned to become more comfortable in my skin. Oral interpretation broke my shell, and an advanced poetry class during my junior year gave me permission to ooze out. Junior poetry class forced me to be naked in front of my peers in a way normal critique groups didn’t- I now had to write from very personal places without the guise of fiction protecting me. My peers had to read the details about my life I couldn’t even previously utter, and then critique it, tell me what wasn’t working, but also, what was working, what they were interested in. Having this renewed confidence and nakedness oral interpretation class gave me, I’m now learning how to make my fiction as personal as my poetry. I’m writing thematically about things I never would’ve even given the time of day before and my voice as a writer has become infinitely stronger because of this. Diction and syntax that is unique to me has emerged. Fictionalizing my personal truth, my heart beating and bleeding on the page, is a process I’m still learning to create fiction that is still uniquely my own but easier to write about. Once I got a taste of personal truth permission, it was all I could write about, so much so my prose would veer into creative nonfiction, my poetry a diary, so now I’m reeling it back in and being more selective with my personal truth. My earliest writing was good for my age, but now it has improved in strides I’d never believed to be possible, and it’s still improving. -Gabriella Christenson, Poetry Editor

I started writing in first grade because it was fun. I can recall several times where my teacher would push back the beginning of Writers’ Workshop because the class preferred free time. I’d be the only one reminding her that writing time should’ve already started, and whoever was close enough to hear my nagging would groan and spread the news. The earliest pieces I wrote were memoirs because I didn’t know how to do anything else. For most of first grade, I wrote about the trip to the Philippines I had the summer before. In a way that parallels youth, I see these pieces as untainted. Although my first work focused on eating at a Filipino McDonald’s (and enjoying spaghetti and chicken with rice) while a beggar stared from the other side of my family’s window seat, I didn’t know much to poverty. Instead my memoir focused on the uncomfortable experienced of being watched by a filthy man, and my mother’s decision to give him some money. As I write this, I’m actually remembering his appearance again, and how heavy his eyes were. The skin around them swelled—muscle and crust layered with dumi. Spots decorated his wrinkles, and what shocked me most then and now is that his eyes were blue. Beneath the ragged hair and stained, tattered cloths, he was mestizo. Mixed people were especially desirable in the Philippines (not unlike other Asian countries), yet here he was, desperate enough to stare without shame. It’s this type of disconnect and grotesque imagery that I feel carries my fiction today. Both fiction pieces I’ve written so far this year play with distance and disgust. The latest, “Dinuguan,” focuses on a woman with heart cancer, who—in increasing desperation—buys pork blood, spills it, and licks it off the sidewalk. That’s the gist of it. Trust me when I say it’s a lot deeper. In particular, this piece uses heavy description of the pork blood (the main ingredient of the Filipino delicacy the piece is named after) to convey the hopelessness the woman refuses to accept. For example—“Cold slips through her lips—a coagulated mass sinks between teeth and spreads bitter, salty pangs over her tongue. Its grittiness sinks into her throat. She coughs ragged, old and fresh blood foaming together.” I’ve noticed that both my first and most recent piece focus on my heritage, which is interesting. In all honesty, after the memoirs of elementary school, I didn’t revisit my heritage until my ninth grade personal essays. And even then, I didn’t utilize it again until this year. It’s actually my mission to use more personal details in my pieces this year. I’ve got a good grasp on emoting through imagery and diction, and that extra layer of vulnerability will leave a bigger emotional punch from writer to reader. -Seth Gozar, Fiction Editor

When trying to learn about the earliest civilizations, archeologists look to cave paintings as clues to what humans used to be like and how we have evolved. If you think about it, all of the writing in the world creates an entire body of work that represents our society’s evolution of thoughts, feelings, inventions, politics, culture, etc. I think a writer’s work from the time they are a child often does the same. The earliest poem I have a memory of goes like this, “I love whales painting there nails. They look so nice in there long tails. They are so younge they don’t like mails. And they love good sales.” Note the spelling of “there”, younge”, and “mails”. The second memory I have of writing was a narrative story in fourth grade about my dog Keiser that died when I was four. It was a very vivid moment for a young girl and it made its way into my writing a lot. There are obvious advancements in my writing like spelling, phrasing, diction, syntax, and imagery, but aside from that I don’t think the topics of my writing have changed a whole lot. In my fiction, my pieces stem from my own life and personal truths that I need to explore through fiction in order to process and make sense of on my own. I still really enjoy writing things like creative non-fiction, so my piece about my dog Keiser isn’t that far off from something I would write now. It would be a lot more subtly tied to my life and it would of course be more descriptive and have more of an emotional arc and message, but the root would still be that it’s a story about my life that changed me in some way that I needed to express through my love of words. Death is something I often explore in my work. Religion and dealing with death and how those connect are something I struggle with processing and making sense of and writing it out through other characters is sometimes the easiest way to deal with it. I recently wrote a fiction piece loosely tied to my extended family and all the issues we seem to have with each other. When first writing out the piece, I remained angry at that side of my family that was causing all this drama and didn’t feel the need to work to forgive them, but through the course of revising the piece, I grew to understand the characters I created as individual human beings that had made mistakes and were worthy of small acts of forgiveness. I didn’t have to let them in completely, but I could open myself up in slight amounts. My poetry is also almost always rooted in my personal experiences. While I have no encounters with whales that I can truthfully write about, nature is something I often incorporate into my poetry. One of my favorite pieces I’ve written was a coming of age poem centered on how my family and I used to spend our free time going to the beach and hunting for sharks' teeth. If you were to line up all of my work from the time I was a child, you would see an illustration of my life up to this point. You would see my initial love of nature, particularly whales, then my first encounters with death, dealing with family issues, coming of age, and they will continue to follow my life from the big moments, like grieving, to the small moments, like just finding beauty in a creature. As a senior, I am moving towards college and deciding my future. I want to be a pediatric physical therapist and I only hope my writing will be able to follow me and illustrate the next stages of my life. -Madison Dorsey, Community Engagement

The first poem I ever wrote still hangs on my grandmother’s wall. I found it there a few weekends ago, while staying in her guestroom. “Tiger Eye Sun” is the title, printed in a special font on computer paper. I wrote it in a public library workshop when I was six. I remember the adults clapping when I finished reading it out loud. I loved twisting the images of rocks, and playing with personification, to describe something to simple and routine as the sun. I was able to take something I thought was familiar, and show it in a different way. This made me want to be a writer. The poem is, of course, full of the things expected of six year old writers. It doesn’t have images, so much as mentions, and the intent, if I ever had one, is quite clouded. But that doesn’t matter. If writing this piece made me want to stick with the craft, then it means something, in all its kindergarten glory. Writing stayed my favorite subject in school, including many short stories, poems, and a few “novels” comprised of about thirty pages each. Still, I had no way of knowing if what I tried was any good--as good as an elementary school writer can be--until the seventh grade. That Christmas, I entered and won a Christmas story competition for the local newspaper. My piece was printed that holiday for the city to read. I was elated, and decided to keep on writing. Now, I write every day, I’m in classes, learning the mechanics of line breaks and character development. Looking back on my old writing makes me cringe. But, like something really horrific on television, I can’t help but look. What’s interesting isn’t so much the ways I’ve failed at communicating a story, it’s the ways I’ve succeeded without realizing it. Until high school, I didn’t think to make a distinction between summary and scene. They were all parts of a story to me. And still, that Christmas story, has managed to establish a backstory, then lift the character into a scene, then jump back again to transition or give context. I wondered, at first, if there was something intuitive to writing. But now, I don’t think so. If writing could be based purely on intuition, then there would be no need for teaching it. Instead, I was reminded of what my teachers, and the professional writers I’ve seen, have all said: read, read, read. My whole life has been partially consumed by books. My mother and father read to me at night. I checked out audio cassettes of the Harry Potter series and Beverly Clearly. I buzzed through the books at school. I learned how to write the basics of a story because I read. So, if I could learn so much by reading, why is it that studying creative writing is still so important? Studying creative writing is not a “learning how to write”. A person can write without instruction. My teachers, instead, have showed me why choices are made, and what choices. Just reading only shows you the final product. A poetry class calls to attention everything that was put in, and everything that isn’t said. My teachers could take the words, which I might have appreciated on my own, and turn them into a whole working structure. Since high school, I’ve started to learn how to make choices, what counts. I can look at writing not just through my emotional response, but by the subtle pointers driving that emotion. My early writings had no choices. I didn’t think when I wrote, I just saw something in my mind and recorded it. Like a kid who sees the prettiness of a flower. Now, I come across an idea, and I see it for the Fibonacci-driven fractal that it is: infinite, up to me to realize what should be shown, and what should influence the reader from the inside. -Ana Shaw, Junior Editor in Chief #TigerEyeSun #intent #Craft #patterns #hidden #scene #poems #summary

When I first came to Douglas Anderson I swore I would never write poetry. How could I?  Poetry was constructed of line breaks, and choices. Like fiction these choices were made with intention, but with poetry the intention was a hard technique to learn, a hard technique to master. When I look back and think of what scared me most, was how raw poetry allowed one to be. Every word gave away a personal detail. It feared me to know that in a few stanzas people could know aspects of myself I never shared with anyone other than myself. My junior year I wrote my first real poem, what deemed it real is I had to share it with others, yet I didn’t hide my emotion, the emotion I was always scared of sharing. Of course it was the cliché poem about the death of my grandmother. Later that year I had to recite a poem of my choice, and I chose Naomi Shihab Nye. A poet crafted in detail, and symbolism. Metaphors that brought me to the sands of the Middle East, every word counted.  What brought me to Nye was how she respectfully wrote about her heritage half American, half middle eastern. I always had a hard time writing about my half Albanian heritage. I felt as if I didn’t have a right to those topics, because it was only half of my identity.  The poem I recited my junior year was titled Blood, a commentary on war, and a narrative about how it affected her father, symbolism for how it affects us all. “Years before, a girl knocked, wanted to see the Arab. I said we didn’t have one. After that, my father told me who he was, “Shihab”—“shooting star”— a good name, borrowed from the sky. Once I said, “When we die, we give it back?” He said that’s what a true Arab would say.” Yet Nye  wrote about this in the perspective of herself  an American, who is so torn by what is happening, torn because even though she is an American they are still her people. Nye is the reason I can write about my own father, about my own heritage, and also why I can write about being an American. Because what does the word American really mean? Who gets to fit that description? Nye has made me consider how every detail counts, how a title can convey much more than it seems, and that displaying a picture in someone’s head is a gift that not many can master. Nye is the reason I have never felt that when it came to my heritage I had to choose. -Mary Feimi, Co-Editor in Chief

The first thing I was taught when I started writing was how to correctly use both diction and syntax to further the emotional response evoked from the reader. Emotion is something I really focus on when writing and I think it also gives me new ideas when I want to convey raw feelings. An author that I studied who is exceptional at this technique is Tim O’Brien, the author of The Things They Carried. His use of masterful language and various sentence structures puts the reader in the mind of a soldier in Vietnam who watches others battle with the mental and physical struggles of the war. A single word in a sentence can make the reader go off into a completely different direction of what the story was depicting, so it's important to pay attention to these details. Tim O’Brien understands both his characters and plot, so his use of this particular style works in favor of the writing. If he were to be talking about WWII instead of Vietnam, then everything would change. The characters, the setting, the time period, and the pressure. But most importantly he would need to change the style in which these characters talked, walked, even just stood there. The words in how he first described the characters would change. The reader can get different themes when reading a story, and a lot of the time those themes come from the idea of particular word choice or sentence variance that conjures up emotions that lead to a recurring symbol or idea. This is another example of how you need to pay attention to your styles. If Tim O’Brien took out his theme loss of innocence and the corruption of war the story would not be the same. It would be about how this war was like every other war and things were hard, but good. This is not Vietnam nor the story Tim O’Brien wrote. All these things are so important to the piece of work, so it’s fascinated me how these things can change one small detail and shift the entire writing into a different direction. I admire his writing style and hope to one day incorporate what he uses in his work into my own. As I read multiple style types my writing increases in emotion. I evolve and learn all I can about a specific style of writing to help arouse rawer emotions just from small detail choices. Both my peers and teachers also help me by critiquing my work and pointing out specific instances where something doesn’t feel right or a detail is saying something it’s not supposed to. It's always good to have someone else look at my writing because it's not their darling and they can rip it to shreds without second thought. Once I can catch on how to see those choices (how to kill your darlings) and how to quickly change them, I’ll be able to write in ways I wasn’t able to before and I think that's something I really look forward too. -McKenzie Fox, Fiction Editor

Èlan Literary Magazine is celebrating its 30th year Anniversary. In honor of the evolution of our published writing, our editorial staff is appreciating the techniques and stylistic choices of those that have inspired them. I am a writer that is constantly battling whether I see myself as a fiction writer or as a poet. I think that I do well in both aspects but there always seems to be the need to categorize myself. Recently I have found that both worlds are attainable through hybrid writing. I am really inspired by writers such as Jamaal May and Lee Ann Roripaugh. These are artists who tell their poetry through a narrative lens. One of my favorite pieces by Jamaal May is, “How to Get Your Gun Safely out of Your Mouth”. The piece is a prose poem in which the examination of the retaining the will to live, to take a moment and breath. The poem takes you through a series of moments, and lists out the ideas to get the reader to take their time and consider the options to move forward. May uses second person perspective to his advantage in the poem, as he’s talking to the “you”, but he is also speaking of himself in the piece. I recently, tried to do this in my own poetry examining a similar pool of thought, and I wasn’t as successful with my endeavors, but I want to be able to speak to the reader and for myself. Lee Ann Roripaugh, is able to take on a more personal approach and even creates an almost, folktale, storyteller vibe. The voices in her poem seem wise and the structure of her poems mimic this. The poetic elements tangle with that natural and ethereal voice which makes me feel that her own story is something I can always take to heart. I believe I am drawn to prose poetry and poems that feel like stories because of their relatability aspect. Story telling is something all people have exposure to, and it makes a poem seem more accessible, and the visual style of a prose poem or hybrid piece always seems to be a journey. I am always interested in how visual structure can change the perspective. A reader can see the piece and dive in, and afterwards, feel in their chest that what they experienced was unique. How to Get Your Guns Safely Out of Your Mouth Go ahead and squeeze, but not before you put on some tea, clean two cups, lift shades and pin back curtains. Not before the end of this song, before dawn reaches in, before you turn the page or a woman apologizes for dialing the wrong man again—not before you learn her name, how to pronounce it, how to sing it with and without regret catching in your throat—Are you done? Go ahead and squeeze after the hinges are reinforced on all doors, the house secure from storm or intruder, your laces tied, this commercial break over, drywall taped, spackled, painted—a nail driven, a painting hung and adjusted— there is still so much to adjust, arrange, there is still time—and you write your letter, correct every letter, scrawl the signature so swift and crooked it becomes the name of another—relax the jaw that holds the barrel in place, remove gun, point to heaven, and squeeze until the clip is empty like the chamber. - Jamaal May -Kiara Ivey, Senior Layout & Design Editor

One of the (many!) writing techniques that has inspired me as an author is using flashbacks to add depth to pieces. It brings so much dimension to both the characters and plot, and though they can get tiring if overused, this technique, when used correctly and in moderation, can really deepen stories and their meanings. The technique is commonly used in children’s books, the most notable of which is Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling. During the last book, the author is traveling back in time to explore several different characters’ backstories. The technique helped pull the story together, and by the end of its usage, readers are left with a much more complete view of the characters and many holes in the plot are fixed. Although flashbacks are less commonly used in ‘adult’ literature, The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, employs the technique throughout the book. Fitzgerald uses this technique in order to give the reader background about both real historical figures he discusses in the story and his own characters. The main character, Jay Gatsby, frequently has flashbacks about him and the woman he loves, Daisy, in a desperate attempt to keep their past romance alive. The flashbacks are expertly placed, and they provide insight into the intent of the book. I don’t use flashbacks in every piece that I write, though digging into a character’s backstory—how they might have handled certain situations in the past or even imagining them as younger, different people in order to figure out how they’ve changed/what makes them who they are now— is something that has helped my writing grow with every piece that I write. And when I do decide to include flashbacks in my work, I find that it really helps deepen the plot and the ‘fullness’ of the characters. Backstory, whether actually written on the page or not, is vital to creating a meaningful and literary piece. When I was a younger reader and writer, this idea of literally being able to change/turn back time really resonated with me. I loved that I had the freedom to create an entire personal history for different characters and actually be able to employ it in my pieces—that’s a lot of power, especially for a pre-teen. In The Great Gatsby, Gatsby’s best friend, Nick Carraway, urges him to stop daydreaming, telling him that you can’t repeat the past, but as Gatsby delves even deeper into flashbacks of him and Daisy, he can only reply with, “Why, of course you can!” I think that this accurately portrays the importance of flashbacks in stories— they give both the author and the reader a chance to dive into aspects of pieces that would normally not be explored, and they give the piece a more meaningful background and plot. -Oona Roberts, Layout and Design