Burning the Midnight Oil

Before reading further, this page is for a college class, the idea is it is a magazine of sorts and I’m supposed to be the editor.  So for anyone not associated with BCC creative writing, if you continue reading this for the works posted bear with the use of “we” and the fictitious magazine article.

Burning the Midnight Oil is set up for short stories and poems about just about any topic.  We pick stories and poems with very little grammatical errors, and especially with the poems, pieces that were thought provoking to us and hopefully our readers also.  We picked two short stories which we saw as the best out of the selection read, granted we didn’t read absolutely everyone’s stories, but these two were two that caught our eyes with a decent story line.  They are told from drastically different points of view, David’s Crown by Travis Gillespie is told from the point of view, in third person, of a man just released from prison going to see his dying mother whom he didn’t even know he had.  The other, Move in Week by Harlee Alexander, is written from the point of view, in first person, of a girl who had just started a blog about her experience the days leading up to moving into the college dorm. There were about three other stories that were seriously considered, a couple couldn’t be accessed since they hadn’t been posted yet, and the others weren’t put on based on some editing issues.  Here are the first two stories:

David’s Crown by Travis Gillespie

Move in Week by Harlee Alexander

Now onto poems.  It was already stated how the poems are chosen, but to restate:  the pieces posted are thought provoking and well written and edited.  There is a wide variety of topics that these four poems cover, and the changes in mood between them are fairly drastic, but that is also a little the reason they were chosen.  Christina Johnson’s two poems are darker than Travis Gillespie’s but both have a lot of thought put behind them and you can hear it in the writing.  Mars Aligns with Jupiter by Christina Johnson is the only one of the four poems here that has much as far as the classical rhyme scheme.

It by Christina Johnson

Mars Aligns with Jupiter by Christina Johnson

The Nascent Poet by Travis Gillespie

Of Comics by Travis Gillespie

All of the pieces posted are quality pieces of work, hand picked by the editor to be examples.  We only touched the tip of the ice-berg with these three writers, and could probably fill three times this space if we used good the stories we’ve read and received but we had to pick the pieces that were the best as far as word use, grammar, and editing.