By Abigail Woods ~
As a member of Klio’s first editorial team, Brianna Zigler helped bring our fledgling creative arts journal to life, nudging writers to submit, serving as poetry editor, and playing a key role on the Musings team. She wrote one of our first Musings posts in the fall of 2016, about Penn State faculty member Joe Bueter, who was a frequent contributor to Kalliope when he was a Penn State student. (See “Fledgling Poet to Faculty Member: Joe Bueter”.) And she offered a blog post reflecting on finding her way in the world as a writer and filmmaker. (See “Literary Magazines: A Layman’s Conversation.”)
Both editor and writer, both University Park and Abington student, Zigler seems a perfect fit for Klio’s Musings feature. She was published in the 2015 edition of Abington Review, in addition to the 2017 edition of Kalliope. The Klio staff is pleased to share her nonfiction piece “We Were Our Own Hometown Heroes” from Kalliope.
Zigler is a fifth-year senior from Lansdale, PA, currently doing two extra semesters at Abington to complete a writing minor to add to her film/video communications major. In addition to writing, Zigler enjoys movies, comics, crochet, and cross-stitch.
Brianna Zigler reads her poetry at Klio’s fall 2016 Art Jam
She prefers to tell her stories from a first-person perspective, narrating from the thoughts in the character’s head, to help the character’s voice come through and make them sound, “like an actual person.” She’s been told by numerous teachers that her writing has many stylistic quirks, and said that, “my biggest one [is] finely crafted and purposeful run-on sentences, which always piss people off and I love it.”
She prefers to tell her stories from a first-person perspective, narrating from the thoughts in the character’s head, to help the character’s voice come through and make them sound, “like an actual person.” She’s been told by numerous teachers that her writing has many stylistic quirks, and said that, “my biggest one [is] finely crafted and purposeful run-on sentences, which
The piece she published in Kalliope, “We Were Our Own Hometown Heroes,” started as what she describes as a “flash memoir” of her friendship with Sabine, a close friend of hers from middle and high school. As background to this piece, Zigler writes:
“I gleaned the memories of my middle/high school friendship with Sabina, which is quite storied and hectic but it feels like we had this very movie-esque teenage life, but that’s probably just my brain glorifying the memories. We rode our bikes everywhere, we went exploring, we got into trouble, like we were in Stranger Things or IT or something. My life growing up in suburbia has been a huge, huge source of inspiration for my writing, and almost every piece of my writing is affected by it. I think I’ve just always wanted to write about my friendship with Sabina because it was very true and pure and fun as hell, and still exists to this day.”
You can read/download “We Were Our Own Hometown Heroes” below.
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