Writing – Paradise Prose Blog

Love keeps trying to open my eyes: a poem

By: Shreya February 26, 2022

Writingacceptance, creative, creative writing, eyes, gaze, humble, humbling, humility, kindness, look, love, poem, poetry, WritingLeave a Comment

With love, Shreya

Mind Monsters Inc.

By: Shreya July 10, 2021October 2, 2021

Creative Knicknacks, Writingart, art therapy, creative, doodles, fearless, hindu, kali, WritingLeave a Comment

My mind has birthed some monsters, and I am here to share them with you. Go figure (see below): Parnika was one of my first creations, though I have only named her in hindsight – today. Parnika means small leaf; it is an alternative name for the Goddess Parvathi. She is a small leaf, the…

Self-Song – A Poem

By: Shreya April 14, 2020April 14, 2020

Life, Writing, Writing in the Real Worldbengali, Life, new, poetry, pohela baisakh, reflection, self, Writing, yearLeave a Comment

Today is the Bengali New Year (Shubho Noboborsho or Poila Boishak). Since people from West Bengal mark this festivity as a time of auspicious beginnings, I thought that I should write a poem to mark a sacred beginning of my own creation.

Water-Forms Poetry Project: Final Poem

By: Shreya February 23, 2020

Writingconsciousness, creative, creative writing, divine, draft, experiment, God, poem, poetry, seeking, spirituality, water, water forms, WritingLeave a Comment

A poem about water-forms.

Water-Forms Poetry Project – Part 1

Hello again, I’m back with (more) attempts at writing poetry and an update about starting Hilary Term (i.e. Term 2) at Oxford. Since I’ve been gone, I’ve been writing away for our weekly essays about everything including the lives of saints in Old English up until the modernist experiments of T.S. Eliot. I’ve taken up…

Falling in Love – A Poem

Trees spilling with boughs of white flowers Like bright eyes, shrouded in the waxy palms of leaves I watch some fall, stolen by the breeze, I watch them fall (in love). Petals unfurling, they embrace the dusk with open arms, sprinkling the earth. Hush. Listen to them land: tiny, soft blankets for unseen slumbering fairies.…

Thinking in Zebra Mode – and Literature

By: Shreya August 3, 2019August 5, 2019

Life, Reading, Writing in the Real Worldcriticism, essay, interpretation, psychology, Reading, WritingLeave a Comment

Reading Literature is more than just a question of books; it’s a question of our worldview, our endless mental assumptions. This post is an attempt at becoming conscious of my own Achilles heel – black and white thinking.

Home: A Poem

I wrote this poem in light of the events in the news recently that have made the word ‘home’ a politically charged one, and also as a memory of my personal experiences that put into question what home might be.

Literary Theory: Why Should a Young Writer Care?

By: Shreya July 14, 2019

Reading, Start Hereacademia, critical, english, literary theory, literature, studies, study, Terry eagleton, university, WritingLeave a Comment

Why should I be spending my summer holidays reading Terry Eagleton’s ‘Introduction to Literary Theory’? The unglamorous reason, of course, is to acclimatise myself to the looming rigours of studying English at university. Another reason is anxiety: count yourself lucky if you can sit in one place without your mind running wild. Mine, meanwhile, needs…

An English Literature Workshop with Myself, Age 14

Humbling, funny and cringeworthy – that was my experience of writing this scene imagining myself as a mentor to a teenage version of myself. For all the earnest young writers and English students out there!