I’ve been drawn to stories for as long as I can remember. Some of my earliest memories are tied to books. The small library in the town where I grew up, the smell of old pages, and the hours I spent disappearing into stories that felt larger than the world around me.
Writing eventually became my way of making sense of that world.
What began with poems, unfinished stories, and journal entries grew into something more personal. I found myself returning again and again to grief, nostalgia, heartache, and the strange ways the past follows us into the present. Writing gave me somewhere to put the things that were difficult to say plainly.
Those themes still live at the center of my work.
My poetry often comes from lived experience. My fiction ventures into darker territory, where grief and ordinary life can slip into horror, the supernatural, and the unsettling.
I’m less interested in darkness for its own sake than I am in what it reveals about people. The things we fear. The things we hide. The memories we can’t quite escape. And the pieces of ourselves we continue carrying long after we thought we had left them behind.
I grew up in California and eventually traded the ocean for the desert. These days, writing is part of my everyday life, whether I’m working on poetry, fiction, or something that falls somewhere between the two.
This site is where I share that work as it evolves.
Some of it is painful. Some of it is strange. Some of it is deeply personal.
All of it comes from somewhere real.
– Renee Hargrave