This is the last of the self-indulgent posts about my early work, at least for now. Just in case any of you have remarkable amounts of time on your hands or want every advantage in some future blackmail scheme directed against me, here is a collection of essays ranging from eighth grade to freshman year of college.

The formatting might be off because I’ve been transferring these from PC to Mac a few times, with the originals in an outdated version of Word.

Eighth grade: Assignment was to write a personal narrative, so I wrote about my battle with the office ladies and the quest to get my flute from the locked band room. (CClick here)

10th grade: Essay about the connection between 20th century war and art, foreshadowing my thesis and exposing my ignorance that to the fact that the Spanish Civil War was not part of WWII. The assignment was to write a research essay with a topic related to war. (Click here)

In my three-year ALP class (stands for Autonomous Learner Program, and if I haven’t explained it to you it’s probably not worth wondering about), we were required to turn in “reading logs” once a trimester, which basically meant essays relating books we’d been reading to concepts from class. In theory you wrote them throughout the trimester, which meant three nights a year the 50 kids in our class all pulled all-nighters to write the things. I was awesome at them even when I was writing about nothing late at night; I don’t think I ever got more than one or two points off.

10th grade: Anthony Burgess, Fitzgerald, Shirley Jackson, C.S. Lewis, Orwell, Tolkein, Salinger, Poe, Ayn Rand, etc. (Click here)

11th grade: Joseph Heller, Oscar Wilde, Camus, Herman Hesse, William Golding, Chinua Achebe, etc. (Click here)

12th grade: Ibsen, Tim O’Brien, more Salinger, Margaret Atwood, Faulkner, etc. We were all slacking by then. (Click here)

Freshman year: This is the embarrassing one. It’s what I sent as writing samples to The Arizona Daily Sun in Flagstaff to see if they’d let me work there as an unpaid intern. I had never heard of AP style at the time and had no journalism experience whatsoever. This is part of the reason Evergreen applicants should never be judged too harshly. (Click here)