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Poe’s Brutes as Mirrors of Madness

Kristine Starling June 3, 2025 December 31, 2025Analysis, Blog, Literature

Moonlit cellars and midnight studies are the stages Edgar Allan Poe sets for the uneasy quarrel between instinct and reason. In his tales, the boundary between man and beast thins to the width of a shadow: a raven croaks a single, damning word; a cat’s steady gaze needles a drunkard’s conscience raw. Poe does not grant these creatures speech or philosophy; he grants them presence. They prowl at the edge of the narrator’s vision, until guilt flares into terror and the mind fractures under its own weight. Inside Edgar Allan Poe’s haunted mind, the very word brute snarls like a feral beast. It names those…

Book Update: Finding My Way Through the Forest

Kristine Starling April 29, 2025 December 30, 2025Blog, Creative Writing, Debut Novel, Literature

Book update! It’s been a daunting journey, but I’m excited to share that I’m about 80% finished with a major developmental edit of my novel! This stage of the process has been one of the most challenging and most rewarding parts of writing so far. Every chapter, every scene has asked for more care, more honesty, and more patience than I expected. There have been days it felt overwhelming, like wandering through a thicket without a clear path, but slowly, step by step, the story is becoming stronger. I’ve been focusing on these areas during this revision: In the midst…

Popular Fantasy Tropes: Why These Classics Never Get Old

Kristine Starling March 15, 2025 December 30, 2025Blog, Literature, Opinion

A nostalgic look at the popular fantasy tropes that define the genre and why they still seize our imagination. You ever hear a story and think, I’ve heard this before? The farm boy who turns out to be the lost prince. The scrappy orphan who, surprise, is the key to saving the world. The reluctant hero, the wise old mentor, the ancient prophecy that may or may not be nonsense—fantasy is full of these. And yet, no matter how many times we read them, we keep coming back for more. It’s not because we don’t know better. We do. We…

Exploring The Metamorphosis: A Perspective Beyond Gregor

Kristine Starling March 13, 2025 December 31, 2025Blog, Creative Writing, Literature, Opinion

Transformation is often imagined as something poetic, something endowed with purpose. But what of the changes that bring only ruin? What about the slow unraveling, the spaces left behind, and the silence that settles like dust? For a recent humanities course, I was assigned to write a passage from Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis—not through Gregor’s eyes, but from the perspective of someone left in the wake of his transformation. I chose to give a voice to his sister, Grete, who has watched a beloved brother slip into something unrecognizable in form and in spirit. This passage explores grief as a…