Published and un-published written works
Prairie Fire was my submission for the YYC-POP poem anthology. YYC-POP was a call to the Calgary arts community
to capture a literary portrait of a Calgarian who has left their mark on the city. I was inspired by a great Calgarian that I had the pleasure of meeting just the previous year.
Someone who's grit is embodied through the pillars of education and academia he established in Alberta.
His accomplishments burn like a fire across the prairies, inspiring
those who would follow in his wake.
Prairie Fire can be read here
The YYC-POP anthology was published in Fall 2020 and can be ordered here
ENGL 594 is a course which challenges students to complete a long work of fiction totalling around 100 pages. For my project, I chose to expand on Zabaleen a short story I wrote for a previous english class. Taking place in the "Garbage City" in Cairo, Egypt, Zabaleen tells the story of a young girl and her brother struggling to find their identity in country which has struggled to define itself. Zabaleen is the longest and most challenging piece (so far) that I have written.
I intend to develop Zabaleen further and hope to publish it someday so I will only post a chapter here. If you are interested in reading more, feel free to reach out and I can send over the whole manuscript.
This is the full submission I created for ENGL 594 (Creative Non-Fiction). For my subject, I chose to wrote about Terry Davis and TempleOS, an operating system he built as a tribute to God. This is a very unorthodox story, which is why my approach in writing about it is just as unorthodox. Inspired by House of Leaves, I chose to create a piece brimming with verisimilitude by writing this piece in the style of an online message board. This piece was a blast to write, and I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.
You can read my final version of this piece in its entirety here
Tranquility is a short story created as a capstone for a course I took in Fall 2020: ENGL 335 (Reading Like A Writer). The course is an exercise in drawing inspiration from unlikely sources. The inspiration for this story came from some lyrics from the Arctic Monkeys' song "Four out of Five" and the fascinating imagery of a luxury hotel on the moon.
You can read Tranquility here
Infinite Regress was my submission to WriterByte's "Boundless Night Science-Fiction Short-Story Contest" in Fall 2018. It was awarded third place, and for my efforts I earned my first (small) paycheque as a writer. When I wrote Infinite Regress I set out to write a story which would encompass some of the concepts that I had just begun to learn in my Computer Science degree. I knew I wanted to play with the idea of recursion (recursion(recursion)). Like many of the stories I write, I knew exactly how I wanted to start the piece, and how I wanted to end it. The hard part was writing everything in the middle.
Infinite Regress can be read here
I have had the idea for The Wager for a long time now. Inspired by William Gibson's seminal short-story The Gernsback Continuum, I wanted to exorcise the semiotic ghosts left flying around Las Vegas. What if someone from the ancient world saw how their sacred sites had been co-opted for entertainment?
The Wager can be read here
The most expansive piece I have written for ScholarlyGamers.com, A Survey of Cyberpunk Videogames is an in-depth look into the history of the cyberpunk genre's effect on videogames. Using my knowledge of the cyberpunk literary tradition as a jumping off point (Shout out to Dr. Camara at the University of Calgary), I show the evolution of the genre in games from its rock 'n roll roots to more recent forays into post-cyberpunk.
A Survey of Cyberpunk Videogames can be read here
The reason why I love writing for ScholarlyGamers.com is because they give me free reign to write about difficult topics from my favorite games. Even when that topic is how Bloodborne uses the idea of maternal horror to craft a unique female gothic story. I wrote this piece after finishing Bloodborne (after a year of suffering) and realizing that there hadn't been very much written specifically about gothic literature's connection to childbirth.
Bless Us With Blood can be read here
In October 2021, I will be co-presenting alongside Owen Brierley at the Game Industry Conference held annually in Poland.
In 2019, my team and I made history at the 2019 iGEM competition. We became the highest placing Canadian team in the competition's history when we placed 2nd overall in the undergraduate category, beating out teams from MIT and Harvard. Among our achievements, we also received the following awards:
We worked hard all summer to develop a novel industrial process using specialized proteins to remove detrimental pigments from processed oilseeds. I was chosen, by my peers, to be one of the presenters for our keynote presentation (which you can view here and view our slides here). Since the end of the competition, me and a few of my colleagues have decided to pursue our research further and have incorporated into a biotechnology company. I am currently serving as Chief Communication Officer.
I am eternally grateful to the wonderful tutelage of our mentors: Dr. Mayi Arcellana-Panlilio, Dr. Marija Drikic, Dr. Elke Lohmeier-Vogel and Jacob Grainger.
In the final year of my Biology degree I undertook an independent research project in Zoology. I worked under a Masters student and generated data that would eventually get published. At the end of the year, I wrote a final thesis and participated in the University of Calgary Biological Sciences Undergraduate Symposium where I was awarded "Best Presentation".
This paper was written using data I generated during independent studies in my final year of studying Biology. A link to the paper can be found here
Paper can be found here