My Portfolio Explained

Neither the professors nor the academy at Ingolstadt were to blame for Victor Frankenstein’s obsessive desire to forge life without God’s all-spark. In the same manner, neither the college I attended nor the benevolent individuals who taught me are to blame for my sins (literary or otherwise).

I don’t just write juicy, juicy genre fiction. I got my MFA in all this *gestures around at the words*. I spent a frightening amount of time studying narrative craft, structure, and voice, and analyzing popular fiction. I dissected, considered, and practiced the skills and methods I hoped would make my stories as worthy as those that shaped me.

My graduate studies resulted in some of these articles, though said articles are a fraction of what I put into, and what came out of, my efforts in class. If an article’s early draft saw the inside of a professorial inbox, the name of the course and the wording of any prompt will be paraphrased and/or abbreviated from the original. I do this because the assignments, the class structures, the pedagogical skills, are not mine, but the articles are.

Read on, and remember: My writing was meant to be beautiful, but its spark was human, so it is imperfect, like me. I would not have it otherwise.

—Vivian Walker Ward