I’ve always been interested in the concept of a home. It is, to me, a space that is very alive, filled
with our own personal rituals. I wanted to stretch the meanings of home and family, utilizing
stereotypes from family sitcoms and tropes from the horror genre. To me, this project is an
exploration of genre, I love blending nostalgia with darker concepts, and delving into the topic of
girlhood and all of its contradictions.

I was stuck, for a while, in the process of conceptualizing, and trying to make sense of my ideas.
One thing that always hinders my creative process is the idea of format and structure, I was very
stuck on a particular structure and fitting my writing in a box. Worried it would be difficult to
understand otherwise. This led to quite a bit of scrapping and starting over, and being over
critical.

Getting rid of structure and format altogether was what helped to start loosening the tension I
had surrounding this piece. Letting the words and language determine their own structure.
Basically taking a hammer to the entire piece and moving around all of the broken fragments.
I think really playing with the idea of what it means for a space to be haunted, what is a
haunting, how does it manifest, pushed me forward in conceptualizing my project. What really
inspired this particular piece was the idea that we, in our day to day lives, haunt every space we
inhabit. We leave marks everywhere we go, changing, mutating every room we enter.

Hauntings, in horror movies and books, are extremes. I thought, in passing, as a teenage girl,
you exist to haunt your father’s home. A haunting is a persistent disturbance, and a teenage girl,
constantly changing, is persistently disturbing, whether it be physically or atmospherically, her
father’s home. Actively contesting and contradicting it. From there I was able to really piece things together.

This as well as, beginning to describe this writing to myself as body horror, where the body in question is the home.
 

I really enjoyed the freedom of being able to write without a set format or style in mind, I liked
being able to delve really deeply into a subject matter, creating a strange amalgamation of
poetry and short story writing and having the comfort of being able to share it in a
non-judgmental space.