HB Network Discussion/Writing Forums

Well, I figured that I'll be the guinea pig for the introductions forum!

My name (both given and pen!) is Lindsay York, and I'm 23 years old. I've got a BA in English from North Carolina State University, where my focus was "Language & Literature," which translates to a little bit of everything. Beginning this fall, I'll be a first-year MA candidate at NCSU, focusing somewhere in the realm of literary scholarship. I'm also a feminist theory enthusiast so my focus may sit somewhere at the intersection of the two.

As for my writing career, I don't have one - yet! I've been writing for fun since I was 8 years old, and when I started out as a university student, my original goal was to study English in order to hone my writing skills (so I got half of the equation right, I suppose). Even with my new found professional aspirations, I still want to be a fiction writer. I took all of the undergraduate level creative writing workshops offered at NCSU (three semesters' worth) and they certainly helped my writing mature; I was also fortunate enough to have some amazingly prestigious instructors. As a result of my workshops, most of my completed written works are short stories, even though I'm not quite sure that's the path I want to travel. A good short story is a difficult thing to produce because it takes such a hefty amount of precision and what feels like endless revision.

A few motifs that recur in my works are death, loss, grief, and unrequited feelings (typically some sort of romantic love but not always). My short stories are typically contemporary fiction, and any longer works I've attempted are at least realistic fiction with borrowed elements of science fiction. I'll never forget when my most recent workshop described one of my pet projects as "noir punk" - a combination of film noir and steampunk, just without the steam. Honestly though, I don't consider myself a genre author because I'm inspired by elements of so many genres.

Since I was/am a literature student, I have a lot of authors who inspire me, including but not limited to: Thomas Pynchon, Flannery O'Connor, Raymond Carver, Cormac McCarthy, William Faulkner, Herman Melville, and many of the Modernist poets, like W.B. Yeats and Ranier Maria Rilke.