The fountain of youth
Myrra Ayra
To run is to hide
Sneha Dhandaphani
Storm in summer
Lucy Del Deo
Tick tock
Dahika Ahmed
The transport
Aditya Kannan
Fiction Edition
Presented by The Statement Magazine
In my senior year of high school, I took a creative writing course with my favorite English teacher. On the first day of class, she asked us to bring a different notebook: one that should feel freeing, comfortable — something for who we were outside of the academic space. Mine was a small, purple hard cover with a rubber band as a bookmark. She told us to decorate it with things that inspire us, so I plastered the front inside cover with “Good Will Hunting” quotes and doodles sketched in the period prior. She called them our idea books.
Distinct from journals or diaries, our idea books were supposed to be a safe space for literary genius. Other students littered the pages with characters and fantastical plot lines, but the most I could muster were short poems about the flowers in the supermarket or the children shouting outside my window; I was only able to write about the things I could see — the moments I experienced.
When I showed my teacher my idea book, I told her that I couldn’t write fiction: I wasn’t capable of the deceptions and lies required for an imagined narrative. She looked at me stunned.
Years later, after a few semesters as an English major, I’ve learned just how wrong I was. Fiction creates the space for us to tell the truth — to be vulnerable and explore our nightmares. To find humor in the mundanity of reality. Fiction frees us from the lies we tell ourselves and forces us to see the parts we turn away from in the mirror.
Though I didn’t know it at the time, my idea book was a space to explore all those truths: to experiment with parts of myself and turn them into different — truer — characters and worlds. I find myself doing something eerily similar while writing for Statement: rather than explore my innermost thoughts within the fictional landscape, I investigate my character through questions and concepts. I grasp onto the narratives of my life and pull at the seams of reality for an answer.
Fiction and nonfiction encompass the layers of ourselves scribbled into each of our metaphorical idea books. I like to think we can all find our own truths in the stories we read, and I like to think the stories below reflect each of us in a way that makes us feel seen.
- Reese Martin, Statement Managing Editor