By: Kristin Storck
For career day in first grade, I tucked a novel under my arm and a pen behind my ear: all I’ve ever wanted to be was a writer. Throughout my college career, that initial dream has sharpened and evolved to encompass all the different ways you can tell a story, whether that be journalism, radio, filmmaking, marketing, or even starting a business. In this portfolio, I will be demonstrating all that I have learned in these different disciplines and how I have grown as a writer at my time here at UGA through these different artifacts. However, before you start reading, you must first understand that there are two main themes that wind like a thread throughout this portfolio: the deeply personal and the reoccurring motif of water that perhaps are more intertwined than you’d think. I’d like to think of this portfolio as a wishing well, which I invite you to peer into its murky depths and see what emerges for you.
However, before we start, there are two foundational pieces I would like to direct you towards first. So, from a more personal standpoint: writing has always been a mode of healing for me. I journal almost every night and I purge story and poetry ideas throughout my day as they come to me. A lot of my ideas come from my dreams or Tarot cards readings or late-night conversations with friends. I simply cannot separate myself from what I create. This tendency can best be seen in the first piece of this portfolio, “Seeds”. This is a short story I wrote as a freshman in college that became a sort of dreamlike amalgam of familial memories after a member of my family committed suicide in January of 2018. And I don’t think I would have processed this death the same without it. This past semester senior year, I have since reworked “Seeds”, which features how pandemic disease has affected the lives of one divided family (pandemic disease being an off-handed, seemingly faraway topic chosen by our eccentric, apparently psychic creative writing professor three years ago), to more accurately reflect how our day-to-day lives function under COVID-19. This foundation is necessary to understand how I work as a writer and who I am as a person. Plus, the main settings are the waters of a warm sunny bay in Florida and a snowy beach in Alaska, which introduces my next theme of water.
Now I have also noticed this compulsion or fixation on water in all its forms throughout my body of work, which has manifested in several ways namely in the other foundational piece of this portfolio, “Flooded”. “Flooded” is a twenty-minute short film I wrote my sophomore year of college, which I have since directed and produced my junior and senior year. “Flooded” is about a college student named, May, who is stuck between disillusionment, heartbreak, and the muddled future of a blossoming romance, coming to terms with her bisexual identity through poetry. I wrote the outline for “Flooded” after getting my heart broken, walking home depressed downtown after hanging out with friends. I then developed this script over the summer through several rewrites under the close advisement of several friends and faculty. This story consists of dream sequences of swimming in a lake, poetry interludes with images of rain and sink water, and basically the feeling of being drowned and haunted by your emotions for another person. I have worked on “Flooded” throughout my time here at UGA and this project has truly tested my ability to withstand the creative process. We faced many challenges like pushback from the department using Grady’s equipment, my DP experiencing the death of his father, and of course the pandemic forcing me to rewrite the script to be more COVID safe. This script won 2nd place in the Short Subject Category at the BEA Festival of Media Arts in 2019 and I am so excited and proud to showcase this film in the upcoming months as the editing process wraps up.
Other pieces in this portfolio include film reviews I wrote at the Cannes Film Festival with titles such as “Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse Plunges into a Whole New World” and “Parasite Artfully Demonstrates the Violence of Wealth Disparity”, Film Studies essays on topics ranging from High School Musical 2 to defining the female gaze, a pilot episode called “Contrafact” of a Glee-esque TV show about middle-schoolers who like to rock out, case studies on start-ups and VC’s I produced under the Entrepreneurship Certificate, mass amounts of gay emo poetry, and many other miscellaneous objects. So, without further-adieu, please peer into this wishing well and read whatever pieces call to you most. All I hope is that some of these stories stay with you for a little while and help you look inward, into the murky waters of your own subconscious.