We at Nā Leo are proud to announce the December 2019 Student of the Month:
Joey Cochran!
Joey is a quiet, curious, kind, and friendly student born and raised on Maui. He spent a few years of his childhood on the island of Oʻahu, but feels that Maui is his home. He is currently residing in Wailuku.
Joey is passionate about manga, anime, and Webtoons, and says that much of his interest in art and writing stems from them. Reading is another one of Joey’s loves; he reads at least nine hours a day if he’s not busy with homework. Reading helps Joey unwind and escape reality.
He is inspired the most by fantasy worlds. Joey loves The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter, so he likes to incorporate fantasy aspects into his work. Other elements found in his literary pieces involve LGBTQ+ and mental health. These topics hit home with Joey as he has been through a lot of hardship as a trans gay man. Jeff Jackson’s creative writing class is recommended by Joey to help yourself create awesome stories.
*SPOILER ALERT AHEAD* Read Joey’s short story here before moving on!
As December’s Contest Winner, Joey decided to share the story behind his winning piece “And They Changed the World”:
“For my winning piece, it was actually a short short story assignment I did for creative writing. Since it is a short short there is a word limit of 1,000 words so I really wanted to build a lot of suspense within the limits I had. I also wanted to keep a lot of things unknown, the main idea for my story I got from a writing prompt I which said, ‘Write a story about a character that you don’t know is a villain until the end.’ So, when I had my main character talking about these other ‘people’ I didn’t want it to be known about the chaos they caused until the very end.”
Along with being a writer, Joey is also a talented artist. He loves to draw plants and bones, and draws inspiration from nature. With his literary submissions Joey has also created fantastic visual pieces to go along with them. The visual piece he created to go alongside his short story is titled “Two Sides of a Coin.” Joey gave us an insider scoop about what went into creating this piece:
“For my cover image I decided to draw mannequins because I love the shapes that goes into drawing them and I mainly wanted to create a duality of good and evil with them and show that there is beauty within the dark.”
We are beyond honored to showcase the amazing literary and visual works of Joey!
More of his astounding work can be viewed here.
