The Girl Under the Magnolia Tree

preface

I love words. I love how a single word can hold so much meaning and the ways in which people can string them so perfectly together to form sentences that evoke something within us, telling of things we thought only we had lived or of things that are so beyond the reality of the world we live in. Words have the power to change things and even outlive the people who wrote them. You'll come back to them long after they've been written and feel that tug on your heart and ache in your chest or whatever magnificent feeling those words made you feel the first time you read them.

Writing has always been a passion of mine. For years, it served as an escape and a way to release the things inside of me that I bottled up too tightly and felt the immense pressure of until I finally let them out. Say You Won't Let Go, my first story written my freshman year of high school, was the result of me letting certain things out. But, I knew that I had more to say and would always have more to say and words to write and my hope is that the result is something even more beautiful than what came before it.

Starting my freshman year of college was an experience and left me with lots of feelings and thoughts that I had a hard time expressing to those around me for fear that they wouldn't understand. As a Creative Writing major, I felt this immense pressure to prove to myself and others that I was in the right place and the right program. But the words that seemed to come so easily to me before felt like they were stuck inside of me and the first few months of my first semester left me with doubt and confusion. Creative Writing, the class that I thought I would enjoy more than anything, became the thing that I dreaded the most.

When my professor assigned us our final project, he told us he wanted us to write a short story and do something different than what we've done before. I found that prior to this project, I was holding back and turning in stories that I knew did not reflect who I was and wanted to be as a writer and I knew that this final project was my last chance. This short story, The Girl Under the Magnolia Tree, is the result. It was my attempt at falling in love with words again and while there is no direct connection between this story and my own personal experience, I know that these words came out of me and I hope that you, the reader, can find some sort of connection with them.

With love,

Mia