Author: jmhieber

Dear Class of 2020, I’d like to tell you a little story: There was once a bottle, freshly made of glistening glass, waiting. This bottle had high hopes for its future, wondering what would fill it, where it would be sent, and who would open it. The bottle had...

In times like these, we should all consume more post-apocalyptic literature. This thought has been circling my mind the last few weeks and in examining its origin, I found it rooted in my lack of immediate concern surrounding the current situation. As street and foot traffic slow significantly, store-shelves...

I’ve been writing stories since middle school. They weren’t any good (and some of mine now still aren’t) but I was writing. I didn’t start caring about the craft of writing until I had stories of my own I needed to tell. My drive to master the mechanics, conventions,...

I recently finished reading Soseki Natsume’s I Am a Cat, and shortly after I finished, Findus handed me the below reflections and insisted I publish them for him. So here you go. I am a Cat. The name they’ve given me is Findus. It’s as good a name as...

I have an uneasy relationship with superhero movies. As a lover of SF and fantasy, I appreciate the transcendent and speculative nature of the stories and characters. As someone that enjoys mindless action movies to unwind, the power and motion of the action-sequences are often mesmerizing. But as a...

*contains some swearwords I have a theory on why words start sounding really weird if we repeat them over and over. Mostly, when we use language, we’re not actually thinking about the sounds that our mouths are forming, but the meaning attached to those sounds. Listening to a foreign...

It has come to my attention that there are people who behave abnormally and in a totally unacceptable manner when they awake in the mornings. As any rational and well-behaved human should know, the morning is for being chipper, awake, breakfasting, and socializing. Unfortunately, we are faced with a...

Complex storytelling and how the masters use language differently One of my favorite moments is opening a new novel and experiencing the confusion of reading the first chapter. It’s not a bad confusion in which I’m lost or unable to parse the language. No, it’s like being plunked into...

I remember the dread that filled me on the way to school. Every year in middle school, these terrible physical tests in PE reared their heads and one of those fearsome monsters was the mile run. I never did well, hated every moment of it, and was embarrassed by...

After living in an oasis for three years, where even the greenery is often covered in sand and a dull yellowish color suffuses everything, the green of Penang was overwhelming when we first moved here. This jungle paradise is rich with plant-life, birds, insects, larger animals, streams, mountains and...