creative writing conclusion

My portfolio consists of three works, all centred in varying ways around mother-daughter relationships. In the first, You Find Yourself in a Room, I employed ideas about game design and branching narratives to create a story with several possible paths. Beginning as a locked-room mystery, it transforms during the telling into a common familial tragedy – a tragedy which the protagonist herself is incapable of comprehending. Although she achieves a kind of enlightenment at the end, her enlightenment comes not out of understanding, but out of obliviousness; and despite the multiple available pathways, only one conclusion is possible, denoting the inevitability of her condition. This idea of ignorance is continued in the following two pieces, both of which were inspired by Valerie Sonanas’s SCUM Manifesto. Here, I have tried to communicate the brutality of the world Sonanas suggests to us, a brutality inherent in any society that seeks to elevate one type of human being above another. In Options for Termination, two women discuss the possibility of aborting a male foetus; Flora’s desire to keep her child indicates the possibility of progress, but she is ultimately held back by her need to adhere to binary gender norms, suggesting they “dress it in girl clothes” so that its existence will not flout the system’s matriarchal laws. Likewise, in Salt in the Wound, I sampled Ezekiel 16 (arguably one of the most misogynistic chapters in the Old Testament), and through alteration, redirected its vitriolic language towards men rather than women. In the end, although its target is reversed, the vitriol itself remains, symbolising the fact that as long as we cling to a desire for superiority, true advancement and equality remains out of reach.