On the banks of the Snake River in Yellowstone National Park, Charlie Williams, a Park Ranger, struggles to overcome the grief of losing his wife and child. He relies on the day to day activity of the park, and a tentative friendship with another Ranger who is haunted by a past of his own. When an accident in the park sends both men through the backcountry of the Wyoming wilds, the events that unfold force Charlie to confront his grief. The two rangers may find that the raw destructive power of nature can also be the only thing that heals them.

This piece is an example of a research paper for linguistic theory. I thought that it would be interesting to see if I could create a linguistics project that focused on creativity itself, how creativity fits within linguistics, and if linguistic theory can be broken. There is complexity in the way language is constructed and how writing fits into the theories and rules that surround linguistics, so I decided to focus on trying to make sense of nonsense within this project. I was inspired by a poem by Lewis Carrol called The Jabberwocky. Lewis Carrol technically broke the barriers of language in his creation of this poem by using made up words based on linguistic theory. While they were made up words, they made sense, mostly due to phonetics. The way a word sounds when you speak it can have a large hand in the meaning it has. So, I wrote a poem that could accompany The Jabberwocky and used the linguistic practices within the class to do so. The poem is called The Jubjub Bird. The actual paper breaks down both Lewis Carrol’s original poem and my subsequent attempt to replicate his process in terms of phonetics, the compounding of words, and linguistic theory.

In this original short-story, a young man grapples with his brother's accidental death in the mountains. In an attempt to heal and learn from the accident, he ventures into the Rocky Mountains searching for answers but discovers that the wilderness is not so fond of giving up her secrets.

This is a piece of personal memoir. It recalls an influential story about my mother and I that helped develop my appreciation for nature, life, and death. While I was very young when this particular event occurred, I remember it with such visceral imagery and emotion that I had to write about it. I find creative nonfiction to be far more challenging for me than fiction, so I felt this was an important opportunity for me to challenge my capabilities as a writer.