It all started with an old man's dead wife, and his obsession with putting flowers in her decaying ribs.

When I submitted several works to the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards in 2017, I never thought that seven months later, I'd be standing in Carnegie Hall, being awarded with a gold medal in flash fiction. Now, Clutching Roses feels like the beginning of my contemporary writing career: the mundane made divine, with a healthy dose of horror. 

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At eighteen, I was already an award-winning author. The future was bright. The future is perhaps less bright now, but that gold medal came at such a pivotal time in my life, that sometimes it's still the thing that I cling onto to remind myself that the writing is good, and the writing is worth it. The stories are always worth it.