Hello! My name is Alena. Welcome to the last archive of my teen years. My personal Alkive. The work presented in this website is a collection of my writing from youth: the good pieces and the pieces that probably should’ve stayed in the archives. Yet here I am.

Once in a blue moon, I find myself rereading old research papers, stories, and essays I wrote from various stages of my writing career. If I can help it, I try not to resurface these pieces because I cannot help but be repulsed by the works that I once believed were good. And they were good. At the time, anyway. But as Robert Frost once said, “Nothing gold can stay,” and writing is not an exception. My standards have undeniably changed as I age.

Through this process of creating Alkive, I have concluded that falling out of love with the old is okay. My past writing may make me physically cringe, but writing is fluid and evolving. Perfection cannot exist in writing for this reason. Yet, it’s precisely imperfection which makes writing a beautiful craft. Why hide the parts of my writing history which were steppingstones to my current writing style? Hence, Alkive was conceived: Alena’s archive on full display. A final memoir on the literature of my teenage years, a digital collection that I may look back upon to marvel, and perhaps loathe, as my writing matures.

Like all writing, Alkive as a literary collection will always be unfinished in some regard. As technology progresses and my own style morphs, Alkive will inevitably become dated. However, this reminds me that the act of writing is timeless because it can never reach finality. Therefore, may writers continue to strive for unattainable excellence for the sake of becoming the best communicators they can be. This is my purpose as my archive grows into a perfectly imperfect collection of me.