“My blood is ink and flows thickly,
coursing black within these veins,
pulsing the words of life
throughout this empty shell.
Upon the paper,
blank, it drips,
slowly with the clotting.
Till in the end,
my life is spent
and but dried upon a parchment.”
Sreya Bremtin had a normal, happy childhood until the year her grandparents moved very, very far away. After that, growing up a somewhat lonely child, Sreya kept herself entertained by voracious reading and an active imagination.
There were monsters under the bed, a tiny door to another world at the back of her closet, and twice a day when the digital clock read 10:01 she could travel through her mirror back in time.
She drew her own treasure maps, packed supplies into her dad’s old, oddly colored neon orange backpack and climbed out her bedroom window to set off through the fields in search of adventure.
She started her own detective agency. She had cool clubs, of which she was usually the only member, complete with homemade IDs and secret codes and messages hidden in emptied out lip balm containers.
She had the usual cats and dogs as companions and partners in crime. Yet no one but her ever saw the tiny tarantula that would come out to sit and watch her do her homework or write at her desk with all eight of its glossy black eyes.
Living inside one’s own head can be a dark and scary place sometimes, so Sreya read a lot in order to escape to other worlds and times. Not having many friends to talk to other than the cats and dogs, she started writing in order to alleviate the excess of words swirling through her brain.
And she happened to be none too shabby at it.
Her earliest work debuted in third grade with a poem about a brown cat. From there she never really stopped.
In a special advanced class in elementary, she wrote a short play, which the class performed on stage. In junior high she was well on her way to writing as many poems as Emily Dickinson. By high school, her creative writing teacher offered to be her literary agent both times she took the class.
After graduation though, Sreya felt like a little bitty fish in a very big pond and kept her writing mostly to herself and got lost in everyday life.
She would meet people, now and then, that would fan the spark of writing into flame once again. She would share her work with them. She would be inspired to write and write and write some more. But always, after awhile, she would let it die back again to embers and return to the day to day grind.
Until finally, one day, she realized half her life was gone and she still wasn’t what she had dreamed of being. But now, she was determined enough to finish what she had started.
She began selecting some of her poetry and short, short stories for collections. She started working on several novels. She self-published several books featuring her poetry, short works and photography. She has several more poetry collections in progress to be published at a later date. She is also currently working on several science fiction novels.
