Introduction

Hello! My name is Natalie Emerson and I am a current Senior in Film at Freestyle academy. Over the last two years, I have strengthened my interest in the visual arts as well as the art of storytelling. I enjoy reading and am drawn towards memoirs and other types of literary nonfiction, novellas, and historical fiction. Specific authors I enjoy reading and admire are Joan Didion, Donna Tartt, Ocean Vuong, and Claire Keegan. I have spent a significant portion of my time this year coordinating various events for Mountain View’s Me Too club, including a school-wide affirmative consent seminar in which I presented, along with the members of the board, to over 2000 students and faculty about the help resources that we pioneered in collaboration with the MVLA Title IX coordinator. I frequently used the design skills acquired at Freestyle in order to create promotional flyers for these events, which was a memorable and rewarding experience.

The piece that my showcase video focuses on is my Junior Year Lyrical Essay, as I feel that, through this assignment, I was able to exercise the skills I am most passionate about developing further. Going through multiple rounds of revision and learning to cut out sentences I had grown attached to was an extremely beneficial experience that I feel impacted my creative process profoundly. As I will mention in the video, this essay was published in a literary magazine last summer, which I also found to be an extremely rewarding experience.

I would like to know ways in which I can work to strengthen my syntax and diction in order to make my writing more effective. Is my use of metaphor and analogy effective? How might I create a more cohesive theme while integrating multiple variables into one piece of writing?

Next year, I plan to study Literary Journalism at the University of California, Irvine. I am incredibly enthusiastic to be studying under such highly experienced journalists while living in close proximity to the diverse and creative city of Los Angeles. I would like to pursue a career as a writer and intend on creating more advanced writing portfolios as I navigate my higher education.

Here is my Showcase video. Thank you so much!

You can find the full version of my essay here.

Reflection

Although this was an independent project, I received extensive feedback from my classmates and Mr. Greco along the way, which helped me finalize it into something I am very proud of. Using memories as a vehicle for storytelling was a valuable challenge in reflection as well as creative writing, as I had to carefully express as words what only exists as a feeling. The essay “Holy Water” from Didion’s “The White Album”, reflects Didion’s complex and emotionally tumultuous relationship with the artificial reservoirs of water in Southern California. The strength in which she evokes a sense of aggression and intention from an inanimate thing, something too large to even consider as one object, has motivated me to attempt to find that observational ability within myself. I attempt to create a relationship between the alienation of the Heron in its supposed natural habitat and the passive comfort of modernity, hence the frequent reference to the car I was in at that moment. Although no clear relationship exists between them, I wanted to avoid creating a message or takeaway that was too linear by showing that relationship through the cycle and loss of memory as time goes on. Challenges I faced during the process included frequently losing sight of the point, and allowing my ideas in the moment to direct my writing. This created a final product that was far too lengthy and entirely impossible to follow. In order to avoid losing clear sight of a goal, what are tactics that might be useful for me to employ?

To elaborate on the publication, my lyrical essay was published in the first issue of the student run literary magazine The Empty Inkwell. For that cycle, the acceptance rate for an applicant was approximately 4.6%. If you are interested in their publication, I have linked it below. I have also posted it to my personal writing portfolio (which I will not be linking in order to maintain anonymity). As of now, over 120,000 people have read it.

https://www.theemptyinkwellreview.org/issue-i: Showcase

Disconnected from my writing is my Reel, in which I quickly preview my strongest film projects from Freestyle.

Again, I wanted to express my gratitude for the time you have taken to review my work, and I am eager to improve my writing based on your feedback.