I’ll soon be posting various writing samples as blog posts, but for ease of acquisition I’ve uploaded a zip with several of them in word format and categorized by type, which you can download here: Brien Southward’s writing samples.
If you have any questions or want further samples, please don’t hesitate to contact me.
Here’s a poem I love dearly.
TO A HISTORIAN,
by Walt Whitman.
YOU who celebrate bygones,
Who have explored the outward, the surfaces of the races, the life
that has exhibited itself,
Who have treated of man as the creature of politics, aggregates,
rulers and priests,
I, habitan of the Alleghanies, treating of him as he is in himself
in his own rights,
Pressing the pulse of the life that has seldom exhibited itself, (the
great pride of man in himself,)
Chanter of Personality, outlining what is yet to be,
I project the history of the future.
I just created this blog anew and a lot of what I write here is going to be arts-related. (I talk about geopolitical stuff on social media and in person, but that’s also part of my current writing contract, thus necessitating an outlet for aesthetic concerns as well.) At the moment, however, I feel more like writing about something interesting that happened earlier:
I feel lucky to have been able to swoop in on this story relatively quickly today, about an earthquake striking 70km from Iran’s nuclear plant, before it really seemed to be getting attention from Western news outlets. Whether it has any longer-term consequences I can’t say yet, but it felt good to see something I wrote show up relatively high in a Google News search for “Iran earthquake.”
Conveniently the website I wrote that piece for is a news outlet for the power and oil industries, both of which, of course, have been mired in Iran-related crises for decades. I sincerely hope no one in Iran got hurt, but what a serendipitous start to a day from my perspective as a writer/journalist!