Storytelling
My work drifts between plays, short fiction, micro-musicals, and narrative fragments, but they share the same instinct: to explore memory, ritual, and the thin, unstable places between the real and the uncanny.
Maybe this began long before I knew what writing was: if you’ve ever stood in the half-light of a forest and stared at a single tree, long enough that you and the tree dissolve into the dark, you will then become a part of the tree. After enough moments like that, something in you shifts. You start drifting a little. You become absent-minded, half-attached to the world.
The heart has wandered off.
Writing became the place where that wandering could live.
I’m drawn to fractured structures—loops, fragments, shifting timelines, stories that act like systems rather than straight lines. I’m interested in emotional architecture: how a scene breathes, what is said, what is withheld, and how a space or sound can change a character’s fate.
Across all mediums, my goal is the same:
to build worlds that readers can inhabit. Worlds that hum, flicker, and open into something just a little beyond the ordinary.
Plays & Performance Writing
THE SEVENTH FIRE
Branching Narrative for Immersive Performance & Escape-Room Storyworld | Ongoing
The Seventh Fire is a multi-path narrative designed for my senior capstone: an immersive, actor-led performance that blends environmental storytelling, archival fragments, and player choice.
This story began with a structural question:
What happens when truth is not given, but assembled?
Instead of writing a single linear script, I approached the narrative as a branching, fragment-based system:
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the public myth of the Mystical Seven, preserved through curated artifacts and official history
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the hidden archives—letters, interviews, redacted documents—that contradict, distort, or deepen the myth
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the actor-driven present, where the last living member guides participants through conflicting memories and unresolved guilt
My focus was on crafting narrative ambiguity, emotional pathways, and decision-driven beats that allow participants to feel implicated in the society’s fate.
The result is a story not about supernatural power, but about inheritance, guilt, and the responsibility to decide which histories are worth carrying forward and which should be allowed to burn out.
Goodnight
One-Act Play | 2024
When 17-year-old Chad dies in a winter accident, his younger siblings Carl (11) and Claire (6) attempt to understand grief by creating a fantastical world: a snowy kingdom ruled by a Storm Dragon who holds Chad’s soul.
This play began with a single emotional question:
How do children understand death when adults cannot?
Rather than centering grief in realism alone, I approached the story as a dual-world narrative system:
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the real world where loss is raw, heavy, and unspeakable
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the imagined world where the children’s logic—messy, whimsical, magical—becomes their only tool to process pain
I built the structure to let fantasy and reality mirror each other, allowing motifs (snow, memory, monsters, bedtime rituals) to pass between the two realms. The result is a story where imagination is not escape, but rather a fragile scaffold for acceptance.
My focus was on crafting child voices, emotional architecture, and scenic rhythms that allow the play to oscillate between heartbreak and wonder.
Fiction & Short Stories
BEYOND THE CODE
Short Fiction | 2025
In a post-climate future where natural childbirth is nearly impossible, a humanoid robot learns love by imitating her inventor’s everyday rituals. But when her maker unexpectedly becomes pregnant, the robot’s coded devotion collides with emerging, very human jealousy.
This story began with an ethical question:
If care can be programmed, what makes love “real”?
Rather than centering speculative technology, I approached the piece as a first-person emotional study, filtered through code-clean language and the protagonist’s literal understanding of the world. The structure traces three parallel threads:
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the post-climate society where pregnancy is dangerous and rare,
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the robot’s intimate apprenticeship in mimicry and service,
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and the collision between algorithmic empathy and embodied experience.
Told in precise, first-person prose, the story explores motherhood, autonomy, and the fragile line between programmed care and genuine longing.
FART QUEEN
Folk Tale Retelling | 2024
In a small village where beauty is worshipped and feared, a girl hides an impossible secret: whenever she panics, she releases a fart powerful enough to shake mountains, flood fields, and rewrite the village’s fate. Told as a bedtime story passed down from my grandmother, Fart Queen mixes humor, myth, and the quiet terror of a girl whose body contains more power than her world can hold.
I approached it as a folk narrative of power, shame, and girlhood, shaped by the oral tradition I grew up with. My focus was on capturing the voice of a folktale keeper, the shifting tones of affection and caution, and the tenderness of an elder ending a wild story.
The result is a piece about inheritance: how humor softens fear, how myth masks truth, and how stories protect children even when the world does not.
Musical / Lyric Writing
Welcome to the plant kingdom
Music Theatre Fantasy | 2023
A lonely 10-year-old boy escapes family violence by slipping into a hallucinatory plant kingdom where vegetables talk, sing, and crown kings. Guided by a sarcastic cactus, he discovers a dangerous gift—the ability to hear what others cannot—and is pushed toward a choice that blurs fantasy, morality, and survival.
My focus was on crafting a fantasy world that behaves like trauma logic: colorful, comedic, and inviting at first, then gradually sharp-edged, persuasive, and morally unstable.
The result is a surreal musical where whimsy and danger coexist, asking whether imagination saves us, betrays us, or simply shows us what we’ve been trying not to see.
U*F^#O?
Music-Theatre | 2023
In a collapsing American farm town, a failing scientist, his unraveling family, and an increasingly feral herd of cows confront the news that a UFO has crashed nearby. Told through newscasts, absurd musical numbers, and surreal stage images, the piece spirals into a comic apocalypse where no one realizes how strange they’ve already become.
This piece began with a fascination for American UFO mythology that how ordinary families respond not to catastrophe itself, but to the idea of catastrophe.
My focus was on tone-shifting as narrative logic: the piece is funny until it isn’t, light until it breaks. By letting absurdity accumulate without commentary, the play examines how denial, boredom, and family dysfunction shape people’s reactions far more than the UFO ever could.