NOVEMBER 2025 (INTERVIEW): Amelie Simard

"The story is over when the feeling is gone, and what I had wanted to say had been said..."

This November is a busy month for Artists from Maryland! After finishing up our high school creative writing contest with Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, we have decided on three winners and one runner up! We are featuring the runner up, Amelie Simard! Below is our interview with her, and you can read her story here!

Amelie Simard is a fiction writer with a taste for poetic language who tends to lean into nostalgia and the human experience when writing.

ALDRIN: Hello Amelie! This story was a delight to see in the submission pile. Let’s start with a general question: What is your writing process like as a writer? What motivated you to write “Brother, Return”?

AMELIE: When I write, it is mostly spur-of-the-moment. For “Brother, Return,” I wrote it after my brother was sent to the mental hospital for the second time. I was motivated mainly by a feeling of loss; it was easier to hate him when he was living in the house. There was a feeling of void left every time he got sent away.

ALDRIN: I was immediately hooked by this introduction while reading.

"In another life we could have been good friends; in fact, I believe we would be if we were born to the same world. You are so far away from me now. What I might give to have been born a guardian angel to deliver you from darkness." ("Brother, Return")

The opening lines in any piece of writing are always some of the most important. Do your stories always have the correct opening lines right away? Do you have to move things around to get them to fit, or do you stick with whatever opening you wrote at the start?

AMELIE: I feel like the opening lines are always what inspires me to write the rest of the story. I begin with an idea that I can’t get out of my head, and they are seldom changed in later refinements because they are often the reference point for the rest of the work.

In the case of “Brother, Return,” I started off with this feeling of nostalgia for the lost childhood friendship of my brother and I. The second idea of “guardian angel” has always followed my family. Especially for my brother. Mainly the first idea of lost friendship is what stuck with me for the rest of the story.

ALDRIN: Who, and/or what, inspires you as a writer? Do you believe in the idea of a muse? If you do, do you have something/someone that fills that role?

AMELIE: Emotions and nostalgia, or the overall sense of something is what inspires me the most. It is why I write in a very poetic way: to capture the feeling of a moment or a memory or a dream.

ALDRIN: Now let's look at the closing lines:

"There is so much I still haven't told you. So much you'll miss if you fall too far. I miss you. If the tree is gone. Let's cut it down and build something new." ("Brother, Return")

What is your approach to writing the ending for a story? Is this process similar to the process you described earlier about your opening lines?

AMELIE: I have a different approach to the ending lines than the opening lines. The story is over when the feeling is gone, and what I had wanted to say had been said; I look for the end rather than a beginning.

ALDRIN: How (if at all) does being from Maryland impact your creative writing?

AMELIE: Being surrounded by talented writers and artists definitely inspires me to keep making art.

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