Eliza Non Fiction Writing

To begin, you can’t discuss Central Illinois without first mentioning the incredible flatness of it. When you’re in a city, even a small one like Champaign, you can ignore it, but the second one drives past Savoy into Tolono and Arthur and beyond, the sheer amount of space you can see on either side is a little shocking. The whole terrain is neat rows of plants as far as the eye can see. Corn and Soy in summer, and whatever dead bits remain in winter. You can find a very similar sort of arrangement in much of the Midwest.  I think Central Illinois is somehow very easy to dislike. Not so much for me personally, but I can understand the people who can’t wait to leave. I think part of it might be the repetition of the landscape. All it takes is one sports bus ride to really drive that point home. On the way to the tiny schools we’re playing it’s always light out so we can admire Illinois for all its natural beauty. Usually, the most interesting landmark we see is a billboard. I’m bein...

Prompt: At the assembly on the first day of school, Dr. Majerus instructed us all to imagine a place that makes us feel peaceful. Describe- as concretely and vividly as you can- the place you imagined that morning.    In December of 2020 my family moved houses. We didn’t move far, we didn’t even leave Savoy, but all the same my space changed drastically.  My room is at the very end of the upstairs hallway. It’s the smallest bedroom and has purple walls. It’s a very light shade of as pure of a purple as you can get. It doesn’t lean pink and it doesn’t lean blue. It’s perfectly in the middle.  I know a very young girl chose this color. The images we saw online when deciding whether to buy the house or not showed dolls arranged neatly on a pink desk in the corner. That was all gone now, and the walls looked somehow uninviting and cold to me at first. In the empty room the purple reflected a weird grey in natural light. I was put off by it at once. I remember asking ...

Subbie year, my father and brother took a trip to Bulgaria. My mom, sister and I were left at home for 1 month, and during that month, we decided to make a change to our household arrangement. Entirely on a whim, we went to Petsmart, with the intention of only looking around at the different animals. We watched the dogs get haircuts for a while. My sister tried to count the pink fish in one of the tanks. We looked at the reptile section and debated the merits and detriments of being cold blooded. It wasn’t until we were nearly done that my mom saw a glass display off to the side with two little parakeets inside, one white and one yellow.      We had never had pets before. Immediately my sister felt a sort of attachment. She was 5 then, and the idea of having birds, or really any pet, seemed to her the most fantastic thing in the world. I was incredibly surprised when my mom seemed to be open to the idea. Somehow, in the span of 10 minutes, we were picking out ca...

  Each evening I choose an outfit for the next day, and with this choice comes the burden of a character. That concept might be overused, but it’s true. What you wear has everything to do with how you carry yourself, how you sit, how you speak, your mindset even. It’s a costume in the most subtle and organic way. The way we act in formal wear, for example, really demonstrates this change. If we remove the expectations, the social cues and etiquettes, the subconscious (or conscious) acting we do each time we get dressed, what would be left?  When it comes to the question of what the aesthetic at the core of my style is, perhaps my most transparent look into that came during the beginning stages of the pandemic, when I started to design and sew clothing for the first time in my life. The creative liberty was entirely in my hands, to an almost worrying degree. I was not only not confined to the styles in stores, I got to choose everything about the clothing; color, fit, pattern...