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  • 2022 Short Story Competition

    Champagne

    Champagne was awful. There was no other way to describe the unpleasant taste on Finley’s tongue. Maybe she wasn’t educated enough on the finer things in life or elegance, but it didn’t change the way the sparkles assaulted her taste buds. And yet, she braved another sip of the foul liquid because it was the obligatory New Year’s Eve drink. The party was in full swing, well, at least Erin thought five people constituted a party. There were only a few more hours until midnight. Finley wasn’t sure all her mates were going to make it that far. Trashy 2000s pop music filled her ears as she made her way…

  • 2022 Short Story Competition

    The 1

    A slice of cake flew across the room. It was absolute chaos. This was supposed to be a simple rehearsal dinner for Kate and Ryan’s wedding, and it only took one comment about Kate’s short, off-white dress from Ryan’s mom to prompt an argument from Kate’s mom, which then became a full-blown war. Someone pulled someone’s hair, someone tripped someone else, and that’s when the first cookie was chucked across the room like a frisbee, hitting the maid of honour. Kate’s anxiety engulfed her, leaving her a mess in the corner of the room where Ryan had left her to separate the two parties. Kate’s body was tense and felt…

  • 2022 Short Story Competition

    Big Brother Bends the Universe

             Christmas is generally a joyous, festive time, if somewhat stressful and chaotic. But for those of us who lost loved ones this year, or were separated from family due to Covid-19, or have traumatic holiday memories or negative family relationships or for a million other reasons, the holidays can be a very challenging time.          I’ve had my fair share of terrible Christmases, but this was simultaneously the worst, and strangely, the best, in my 22 years of life so far (given the circumstances).          A bit of backstory: I’m the youngest sibling in a very large, branching, complicated family. I grew up with seven siblings, but for the…

  • 2022 Short Story Competition

    The Funeral of a Friend

    It was an odd thing to say at the beginning of an eulogy. I knew that the next time I saw her, it was going to be at her funeral. How do I explain that she told me that herself? The last time I saw her, we sat side by side on the bench outside of a coffee shop on the university campus. Spring was just about to end, but the last of the winds passing through the city would bite at any bared skin. Our elbows were separated by my hoodie and her black hand-knit sweater. The days were getting longer, but the sun was, nevertheless, setting behind us.…

  • 2022 Short Story Competition,  Blog

    The Sky, Today

    On bad days, William wore pink socks. Now there wasn’t particularly anything wrong with that morning, except when he had opened his eyes the sky had been all kinds of red, clouds of spun sugar and salmon guts. If he could reach out and grab some he was certain it would become a sticky mass between his hands, clumpy, some mucilaginous substance. Half-dry molasses. It wasn’t even that early either—7:30 on a frosty February morning. He didn’t usually sleep in this late and even still the sun was painting the sky psychedelic. The sky was not supposed to be that colour. So, before breakfast, he put on pink socks. He’d…

  • 2022 Short Story Competition

    Blue Eyes

    Once upon a time there lived a girl who loved a prince. Princes, as she well knew, marry princesses. But she fell in love regardless and adored him with the stubbornness and mystery of a first love. Whenever he rode hunting in the forest, her eyes followed boldly as his figure flashed past her window. Snow fell, flowers blossomed, and they both grew older. The King and Queen decided it was time for the prince to fall in love – or at any rate to marry – so they could retire and relax and do more important things at night than stare at the ceiling of their six-poster bed, thinking…

  • 2022 Short Story Competition

    In Fair Verona

    I find myself in the same interrogation room I had been before. Hands cuffed, in an orange jumpsuit, waiting for my one and only visitor. I recite to myself what has now become a comfort poem by Bob Kaufman, Someone whom I am is no one. / Something I have done is nothing. / Someplace I have been is nowhere. / I am not me. Enter Carlos Williams. He’s become older since the last time I saw him. He takes the seat across of me, taking his time, making me wait. He motions for the guard to go, a gesture I have seen him perform a dozen times before and…

  • 2022 Short Story Competition

    Serendipity

    when the world has gone crazy and the waltz playing in your head  is too fast  take my hand and lets  dance sway with  me like the roses  in the garden touch my shoulder and smile like i am the warmth and comfort the umbrella that will shield you  from the storm i feel your face because something tells me that everything will be alright if i just kiss you ___ This poem by A. February is posted in submission for the ESA’s 2022 Short Story Competition.

  • 2022 Short Story Competition

    Exotic Fish

    It is a starved town. Bone-white houses pave the beach like conches and oysters, although these oysters are bereft of pearls. Towards the edge of the town most distant from the beach, a thin train track etches its way through the sand to a run-down station and a dosing ticket-taker. The metal rails of the track are faded and frail, like the ribs of cattle skeletons that warn of a desert’s heat. Trains pass by the town infrequently, billowing out waves of smoke and silt which mix with the sand and vanish in minutes. Boats lie, grounded, anywhere between the beach and the station, some boarded up and full of…

  • 2022 Short Story Competition,  Blog

    i am pretty and i do not long for your approval

    in front of the fruits there stands a girl of sixteen, maybe less. she’s in a pretty blue dress and shiny black boots and she feels like the loveliest thing in the world. powder and ruffles curled, soft sky, buttons shy on pale skin, hair of velvet cream and a pin brooch from grandmother’s glass jewelry bin. sleeves of dream’s crêpe, high collar above champagne silver locket, hung with frail chain. she wonders, standing in the supermarket city, if mother will let her borrow rose blossom blush again. she thinks perhaps she likes this feeling of looking pretty. – but she does not like how they stare, eyes of oil…

  • 2022 Short Story Competition

    A Balcony in Paris

    The postcard was half a decade old and smelled of pomegranates. – A breathing scene, with every tilt and turn, pulsed in tandem with the curtains. – You could tip your head back to the ceiling of the sky. You could spell forgiveness in a dozen make-believe languages. – The mirror is adorned with thumbprints and they hold the paper edges for you, like a solemn kind of promise. – You said, “The neighbours are made of linen and charcoal,” and they laughed as if life was just a miniature in the absurd. – In the streets, the neighbours sing, “Salut,” while they are looking through the looking glass, looking…

  • Blog

    “There can never come much happiness to me from loving … I wish I could make myself a world outside it, as men do”: Sympathy and Femininity in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss

    “You have known Maggie a long while, and need to be told, not her characteristics, but her history … For the tragedy of our lives is not created entirely from within.” (Eliot 409) George Eliot, one of the biggest names in Victorian literature, was known for her realistic storytelling and her continuous goal to write literature with psychological insight and empathetic understanding. The Mill on the Floss, one of Eliot’s classic works, is the chronicling of the complete life of Maggie Tulliver as she progresses through a rebellious childhood, a painful middle period, and into the culmination of her adulthood through a difficult choice she must make between family and…

  • 2022 Short Story Competition,  Announcements

    Short Story Competition

    UPDATE: Submissions are now closed! Thank you to all participants. Calling all writers! Do you want to share your creative writing with UBC’s English community? Now is your chance! The ESA is hosting a short story competition where all UBC students can submit their creative work to be posted on the blog. The ESA’s members will then vote on their favourite submission to select a winner and two runner-ups. Prizes will be rewarded to all top three participants, with first-place featuring an opportunity to have their work included in the English department’s alumni newsletter. The prizes will be revealed in mid-January. This is an excellent opportunity to get your name…

  • Blog

    “The old way of love seemed a dreadful bondage”: Homoromanticism and Identity in D.H Lawrence’s Women in Love

    “‘You can’t have two kinds of love. Why should you!’ ‘It seems as if I can’t,’ he said. ‘Yet I wanted it.’” (Lawrence 481) D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love tells the story of love and tragedy between two women struggling with their own circumstantial love affairs. However, separate from the changing values of modernist heterosexual romance, Lawrence’s classic novel, lauded for its portrayal of modernist attitudes as one of the best works of literature in the 20th century, explores a complicated homosexual love affair between Birkin and Gerald. The two male leads are contrasted against one another and in intimate duality with each other, breaching an ascension beyond the…

  • Blog

    Gender Formation and Queer Love in Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 20”

    The young man, the subject of Shakespeare’s first 126 sonnets, is an ambiguous presence. Despite being written about extensively, he is never described in full. His gender, interestingly, is neither easily identifiable nor stable. In sonnet 20, the young man’s gender is confusingly put into focus and blurred. Either as a means of correcting Nature’s queer feelings or as a mistake, the young man ends up with a penis. By hypercorrecting—I adopt this linguistics term to mean mistakenly correcting something to avoid the nonstandard—her queer love, Nature ultimately perpetuates it and reveals the insignificance of gender as it relates to love.          The young man is immediately a gender-bending force.…

  • Blog

    Fire – A Current Review of a 16th Century Painting

    Image: Fire – Giuseppe Arcimboldo The Milanese painter, Giuseppe Arcimboldo, was famous for his collections of outlandish portraits, often assembled not with human parts but with objects from the world of still-life, such as fruit and household items. Fire is one of a series of four separate oil-on-wood portraits that are made to represent the Four Elements. The painting embodies Arcimboldo’s unique taste for “grotesquerie” in which the head and upper-chest areas of human subjects, sometimes even royalty, were constructed with inanimate objects of varied value, metals and organic materials that formed bizarrely-diverse representations of a single thematic element. Four years before the completion of Fire, Arcimboldo was commissioned as…

  • Blog

    On Kristen Renzy’s 2015 article “Dough Girls and Biscuit Boys The Queer Potential of the Countercommunal Grotesque Body within Modernist Literature”; and How I Envision Much Post-Pandemic Literature on the Human Body.

    Let’s start by admitting that, in recent times, we consciously veer away from other bodies in public, that we are in fear of a lot, if not everything, that comes out of mouths, and that when we touch things with our hands, it is as if we have rubbed the lining of our bowels and then smeared it all over the doorknob. Oddly enough, this deep disgust for the “grossness” of the human body is, in fact, a source of great comedy, crude and impertinent comedy, which pervades various works of modernist literature. To become acquainted with some of the central themes of grotesquerie in literature, I recommend this Kristen…

  • Blog

    Birdsong in the Air, Lilies on the Stream: On Keeping Time and Learning from the Past in Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market

    In Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market, the goblins call out to young maidens “morning and evening”, offering tantalizing descriptions of fruit “sweet to tongue and sound to eye” (Rossetti 1, 30). They promise berries, peaches, pomegranates, figs; a variety of fruit, “all ripe together/In summer weather” (Rossetti 15-16). But what they refrain from telling their victims is that the sweetness of their goods comes with a bitter aftertaste. The eternal summer—the promise of satiation—is nothing but “sugar-baited words” (Rossetti 234). The price that must be paid for this temporary feeling of satisfaction is a destructive and perpetual hunger that deadens the senses to everything but the desire for more fruit. Morns…

  • Announcements,  Blog

    Come Write for the ESA’s Blog!

    Have you ever wanted to talk about a book, but your friends have never heard of it? Or maybe, you watched a critically underrated film that boggled your mind so much that you pulled an all-nighter to write an essay. Whatever your reason may be, chances are that as an English student, you do a lot of writing. So, why not share it with the world? First off, let me introduce myself. My name is Atticus- yes, like the lawyer from To Kill a Mockingbird. I originally started off at UBC with plans to be a physics major, but after falling in love with English literature through the masterpiece of…

  • Blog

    The Flower That Blooms in Adversity: On the Value of Gentleness and Loving-kindness in Jane Austen’s Persuasion

    At first glance, the quiet and reserved protagonist of Jane Austen’s Persuasion seems to fade into the background of her own story. Even the narrator, “taking her cue from the dysfunctional family”, begins Persuasion by shining the spotlight on the “self-centered Elliots”, rather than on her main character (Judge 42). However, as her protagonist prefers to linger behind the curtains in places where the Lizzie Bennets and Emma Woodhouses of the world would command the stage, Austen’s trajectory from such an introduction must then be to “bring Anne out of the shadows” in her own way (Judge 42). Anne Elliot’s personality, circumstances, and abilities do not make direct confrontations or…