Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao tells the story of 18-year-old Wu Zetian, and if you didn’t pick up on the name, her story is meant to faintly echo that of the historical Wu Zetian, China’s only female emperor. The novel itself isn’t meant to be a historical retelling; it is set in a futuristic …
By Maddy Higgins Why don’t poems rhyme anymore? Chances are if you’ve glanced at a poem written anytime after 1900, it’s probably not going to follow rigid rhyme structures or have any kind of rhyme at all. Indeed, most modern poetry falls under the category of “free verse”, or “open form”, meaning that it does …
By Maddy Higgins The issue of personal pronouns and tense structures, which make up the semantic design of a piece of writing, in fiction has been a point of contention for a long time. In the 16th century, the Spanish picaresque adventure genre was one of the few of the era that told stories from …
By Maddy Higgins So, I haven’t gotten the chance to write about Jane Austen yet, which is a shame, because I cannot express how much I love all things Jane Austen. While there are so many things I could write about involving her books, in this article, I want to focus on one aspect that …
By Maddy Higgins Over the summer I had the pleasure of going on a seventeen day canoe trip in Quebec, specifically in La Verendrye Wildlife Reserve. The trip was run by a canoe camp in Vermont called Songadeewin of Keewaydin, which I have been going to for six years. However, the Verendrye trip was different …
By Maddy Higgins Jukebox musicals are stage or cinematic musicals mostly featuring songs already popular and well-known, with a minority or complete lack of original songs. Most commonly, jukebox musicals utilize songs from one well-known artist, composer, or band, as a way of honoring the legacy of their work. In this article, I’d like to …
By Maddy Higgins The famous soothing nature of cat purrs is not the only intriguing thing about them; recent studies have found that cats have the ability to heal themselves and their owners with the power of their purrs. Cats purr not only when they are content, but when they are injured, stressed, ill, in …
By Maddy Higgins Teen Beach Movie is a Disney Channel original movie released in July 2013, following two teenagers who get trapped in a movie musical. It parodies classic 60s beach movies, with a satirized West Side Story-esque plot and archetypal characters. In my opinion, the highlights of the movie are its musical numbers, with …
By Maddy Higgins The English “r” is extremely weird. For starters, although it is commonplace for vowels to have wildly different pronunciations in different varieties of English, there is very little of that variation for consonant pronunciations. But “r” isn’t like those other consonants, with many different allophones in English alone. Here is a list …
Hello! This is the first post I will be making on my blog. I love stories, and one of the ways I plan to use my blog is to write articles that point a microscope on any topic and learn about its story, because there is an infinite amount of them to be discovered. I …
