Featured Author

Savannah Bradley is a sophomore majoring in the English and Comparative literature interdisciplinary studies track, and also creating her own double major in creative direction. Her hometown is Charlotte. She is the 2018 Thomas Wolfe scholar, which grants full tuition to UNC for those with a focus in creative writing. She serves as the fiction editor at Cellar Door and will begin as Editor-in-Chief there this semester. Savannah produced writing for a few magazines in high school and now currently runs her own online media platform, Haloscope. Her story, “Boys”, received a runner-up place in this year’s Mini Max competition.

AE: What inspired you to write your story?

SB: Well, whenever I write fiction, I write a lot about femininity. I think that’s just my default. And I wanted to challenge myself and write about masculinity for once. I didn’t have a thesis, but I thought masculinity has become fractured in how we talk about it. It was difficult to kind of come up with a real solid thesis statement on what masculinity is in 2019 and how it perpetuates itself. I get a lot of my writing prompts from the news, and I was trying to think up and look up stories about men, and I think violence was a recurring thing… I think violence and masculinity go hand-in-hand and they shouldn’t necessarily. That’s when I decided to use headlines that were actually real. I considered even for a moment doing a second paragraph that was headlines about women. But I think violence against women is just so pervasive in the news and writing that I just didn’t want to write about it.

AE: What have your interests in writing been?

SB: I did a lot of studio art as a kid, it was only until I was 13 or 14 when I was like “Oh, I’ll write poetry” in high school and it was really bad poetry, but I was writing. I was a journalist for a really long time, in the beginning doing music criticism, then I shifted to poetry and prose and concentrated more so on fiction and essay work. Recently, I started Haloscope magazine. It started out as more of a media platform. We don’t put a lot of pressure on writers. It’s just like once a month, get one or two things in. And I think that gives you more time to write what you want to write.

AE: What are your future goals?

SB: I think just continuing as an editor, in charge of any kind of publication. I think that’s where I kind of thrive, I don’t know, just kind of managing. A lot of my family has been journalists. Like being able to be in charge of a platform and being able to publish people’s work.

AE: What is your favorite book? Author? Literary genre?

SB: Either Hopscotch by Julio Cortazar or The Girls by Emma Cline. I read a lot of essays and creative nonfiction. And just short stories. I think if i seek out reading poetry, I get overwhelmed.