Callie Lau's Story Portfolio
Hi there!
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Welcome to my Story portfolio. Below, you'll discover my personal short stories, poem projects, personal artworks, and music.
As a Story Artist, my passion lies in story development, character arcs, and world-building. I have a burning love in my soul for delving into the intricacies of prismatic perspectives. Thinking about how characters respond, evolve, fear, hope, and dream—that is what fuels my creativity and voice. I am a bicultural and bilingual (English and Chinese) writer; I demonstrate my grasp of kaleidoscopic storytelling frameworks in my embrace of provocative humanistic themes within my works. Narrative development and directing are two instincts that complement my passion and joy for collaboration and storytelling. This is my Story Artist’s motto I have established for myself thus far on my journey of life:
We all see color and hear sound, broken up into a trillion chips named pixels, and we spend the rest of our lives trying to fabricate all the fragments together to make one whole mosaic of a story, so we can just see color and hear sound and be at peace.
01
ANATOMY OF A LEAKING REVERIE
DECEMBER 2023
https://issuu.com/hauteusc/docs/limbo (pp. 336-343)
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Anatomy of a Leaking Reverie is a short story about a woman breaking free from an asymmetrical relationship. The plot lends itself to an Aristotelian structure in terms of the reversal-discovery pattern. The female protagonist encounters vivid dreamscapes (inciting incidents) and discovers truths about her partner, herself, and her reality (exposition), driving her naivete, emptiness, and suffering into knowledge and processed emotions (internal conflict), bad fortune into good fortune, and love into indifference.
I also intended for my plot to diverge from a traditional structure. I imbued my short story with meta-cinematic imagery, mainly the moonlight, the bleeding sun, and the wild waves. I swirled an abundance of respective concepts around the edges of these imageries: the human condition of the female experience, the fluidity of art and history as written by hegemonic structures of power, and the power in memories and dreams.
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While both characters have distinct yearnings and agendas, they do not directly battle or fight. Rather, I chose to use dialogue to illustrate the tension and collisions of their different desires and how abuse intertwines with love and fear intertwines with freedom and elation.
As the female protagonist challenges the borders separating terror and liberty, vulnerability and strength, and death and birth, her journey of self-defense and self-creation for her existential identity as a woman forms my story’s plot. Her stamp of modularity emphasizes the realm of the fantastic that metafiction, or “Leaking Anatomy,” on female liberation occupies—an unfixed, conscious confusion between possibility and reality.
02
THE POETICS OF ORIENTAL FEMININITY IN THREE PARTS
DECEMBER 2023
https://issuu.com/hauteusc/docs/limbo (pp. 344-351)
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This 3-poem saga is an enunciative textual expedition on authenticity within the oriental feminine. It is my personal racial project on Chinese American femininity that simultaneously interprets, represents, and explains racial dynamics in an effort to reorganize and redistribute resources along particular racial lines. It puts my very own conceptions of my personhood's boundaries on the chopping block. Above all, it calls for me to plunge headfirst from the double social psychosis of cognizance and manifestation to open myself up to the violence, vulnerability, and vibrancy of my own barren flesh. It is a process of internalization, healing, and reincarnation. That is the key to understanding the beating heart of my project.
Each of the three poems in this project suggests that Chinese American femininity is not an integral entity or a stable site, but instead, a palimpsest of identifications, laminated and layered and encoded with internal incongruities. I asked: “What is the Poetics of Chinese American femininity?”
In my creative stage, as I answered this question and uncovered the very human pains and traumas behind racial abstractions that have culturally mummified the Asiatic woman, I have come to a conclusion: Her self-identification, or disidentification, includes but is not limited to her wounds—the possibilities of reincarnation and reanimation lie equally in her temperance, rage, sophistication, honesty, joy, and most of all, healing. During this project, I have found my speaker's voice, because she wept. And now, without burden, mounted on nothingness and infinity, she shall begin to sing for the question: “What can be the poetics of my Chinese American femininity?”
04
THE GROTESQUE
APRIL 2022
https://dornsife.usc.edu/palaver/past-issues/issue-13-spring-2023/
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In these 2 poems, I maintain the aesthetics of the Grotesque through my use of dynamic symbolism, transgressive imagery, and my denunciation of binary logic within language.
“Angel Raptors” conveys how there is no beauty without ugliness. I intend to evoke a sense of grotesque mysticism that shifts from materialism to symbolism, inhumanity to anthropomorphism, and beauty to terror. By delineating a twisted combination of attraction and repulsion, violation and defiance, and terror and beauty throughout my poem, the art of the grotesque in “Angel Raptors” lies its critique on gendered power dynamics and toxic relationship patterns.
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“Sunflowers” is a revelation of humor and death; it expresses how there is no comedy without tragedy and. My poem imagines the saga of Van Gogh’s self-mutilation—on December 23, 1888, he cut off his left ear with a razor while staying in Arles, France. Additionally, there has long been speculation over Van Gogh’s incessant usage of yellow hues in his paintings such as in Starry Night, Olive Trees, and Sunflowers; some suggest that his yellow-tinted eyesight was a side effect from his excessive drinking of absinthe, whereas others theorize that he had been over-treated with digitalis, a heart medication known to cause “yellow vision.” Inspired by his painterly style of impressionism and the spectatorship surrounding his life, I conjure a fantastical account of Van Gogh’s mutilation in “Sunflowers.”
05
CROSSING MOUNT LADYFACE
DECEMBER 2022
Upon watching the noir film, In a Lonely Place, I was inspired to write and direct an alternative ending for it about the potentiality of queerness and the beauty of the “in-between.”
In my script for Crossing Mount Ladyface, I inject direct references to the original film within my written dialogue, character developments, themes of impermanence and transformation, my cinematic choices of color imagery, and the shooting location: the mountain as a liminal space (a convention of noir film settings).
06
A VAGABOND'S LULLABY
MARCH 2022​
I wrote and imagined this song from the perspective of a baby Mockingjay growing up and leaving Silver Gray's (her mother's) home. It is a song about the simultaneous excitement, nostalgia, and bittersweetness of a bird's overseas ventures.
FOR THE NIGHTS WITHOUT WINGS
MARCH 2022​
I wrote and imagined this ballad from the perspective of two star-struck astronauts battling not only the vast emptiness and uncertainties of space but also within their own hearts. This song celebrates not simply a happy ending, but more so the struggling, fighting, yearning story of love.
03
TRAGEDIES IN JULY
AUGUST 2022
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I wrote, directed, and produced this music video for my original song, Tragedies in July. My song's name is a nod to "Poppies in July" by Sylvia Plath; she is one of my favorite poets. My lyrics in the song represent a mixture of resignation and defeat, but also of an irrational yearning for struggle and hope. I wrote it at Big Wave Beach during a visit back home to express how much the weighty suitcases of our personal lives end up becoming echo chambers of internal monologues in and of ourselves, and how we’re left with an unscratchable itch for mutual understanding, empathy, and intimacy.
But, there’s a lovely urgency and universality in loneliness: beaches always remind me of our hunger for this spot of sweet oblivion and human connection that is free of the weight and fate of the world. I delineate the complex interplay between fear and distrust, and the desire to communicate in my lyrics and music video.