“Writing for me has always just been a way for me to focus all of my problems into one [thing].”

Samuel Minioza: “For me, writing has always just been an escape in every form. Over the years, it’s kind of evolved into an obsession too, and I feel like it’s the only way I can truly express myself. There’s nothing particularly special about writing that attracted me to it. It’s just that I’m not very artistic in the sense that I can’t draw. I’m pretty bad at making music (at least from a playing perspective), and I’m absolutely terrible at dancing. Writing happens to be one of the few things I genuinely believe myself to be “good” at in any capacity, so I’ve kind of dedicated myself to making my writing as good as possible and to write as much as possible over the last couple of years. Ever since around 8th grade, I’ve been really into poetry; it started when I was assigned to write a rough draft about an important personal experience from our lives, and when I started writing, I could just feel myself wanting to write it as a poem. It’s weird to say in retrospect, but I basically wrote an epic, I think it ended up being 5 pages long of poetry. It was one of the first things in my life that I really felt proud of making. Over the last year or so, I’ve written for local school newspapers, I write poems weekly and share them in public discords dedicated to writing, on the side I’m slowly writing bits and pieces of a novel, and I try to write about music, the other love of my life, as much as possible; I have a separate Instagram account where I write short music reviews of albums I listen to, and a website where I write long-form essays on different albums that are important to me. Writing just fills that creative need I think a lot of people have in their lives, and for me, it’s really cathartic to just sit down and make the words on the page as beautiful as possible. Even though I hope my writing inspires others, it’s honestly more selfish than some people might immediately think. I just like being able to itch that creative bone I have in my body, and it lets me communicate and process personal experiences I’ve had that really shape me. I hope that by the end of it all I’ll really have written some things that I’m really proud of, and along the way maybe inspire or help other people too.”