The Write Track

     "Have you ever wanted to be in two places at once?"      Daniel asks me this with an annoying amount of excitement as I'm putting my shoes on to head to the dining hall.      "Uh," I contemplate this. "Probably, I guess, I dunno. Why are you asking?"      "Cause, we're goin' on a road trip tonight, so be ready by 12:50am."      I give him the kind of benefit of the doubt that I know will lead to either enticing or illegal decisions, because Daniel's my friend and I like being invited on adventures.       He tells me later, after we've eaten dinner and gone back to the dorm to decide which movie to watch, that since tonight is the start of Daylight Savings, we just have to do something kind of dumb.       "Explain this to me again?" I say, confused and irritated that his idea of a fun time is always set in the two spheres of the world I hate: outdoors and after 7:00pm. I'm usually out of my bra and doin

The following is a sample of a poem I recently read at the COPLAC Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity Conference at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. This material is copyrighted by myself as the author, and I reserve all rights to this material and the borrowing of this material for reproduction purposes. For inquiries, please email me at olivia.m.cyr@maine.edu "What Will Kill Me" I. Alcohol My father’s father bottled everything. French Canadian by blood and mean. We don’t talk about it—Daddy turned out alright. We don’t talk about it but it runs in the family, drips and branches down glass, then pools. My sister, me, our children, drenched in 80-proof. I am 19 and angry: The irritating, self-righteous, contradictory, indulgent voice in my head speaks when it is very seldom spoken to. I make every attempt to drown it.                         (What are you having tonight?)                                      Plea

For this weekend's adventure, I agreed to go camping at Mount Blue State Park. Though I'd left behind more than three hundred pages of reading assignments, I packed my backpack with bananas, a packet of maple almond butter, a stick of deodorant, and my pillow, sans its brand new, white cotton pillow case, and we piled five of us into Daniel's jeep and headed toward the mountain. It rained. A lot. When we woke this morning, it was pelting the tents with such force that my pack got wet from inside, the moisture from the water dripping down the warm plastic made it soppy come sun-up. We'd taken a drive to the general store in town, a few miles from camp, for more rations. We were looking for a deck of playing cards because none of us had come prepared for rain or service-less cell phones, but we bought some chips, ginger ale, and candy bars. Camp was foggy and damp when we got back, and to our surprise, a stray dog was perched on our picnic table, having frozen in place

Click this link to check out my short story (on p. 173) in water soup's Winter 2015 issue! WaterSoupWinter2015

I never thought I would really have a blog; like an actual written online blog where I write consecutive entries for a maybe public audience. My experience with blogging extends short of daily tumblr-ing and the occasional journal entry in a $10 Wal-Mart notebook. So, this is a new experience entirely. Here, I am entering uncharted territory for somebody like me--a writer who is wholeheartedly convinced that she has nothing good to say. When I was a child, I read everything I could get my hands on from the Bristol Public Library. Mystery, horror-lit, humor, kid fiction, even YA books that had appealing covers and cool titles. I wanted to explore the worlds Stephen King crafted, and be immersed in all things adult when it came to books. Those authors, they had something to say, and they said it well. While I was too young to read Stephen King at 12 and 13, I knew he was a genius writer, and I wanted to be just like him. But I wanted to be like R.L. Stine, too. I wanted to be like Barba

Welcome to The Write Track! Thank you for visiting this page, which I hope will become a positive space to share my ideas and stories with other people who love storytelling as much as I do. Here's to a wonderful year!