What Life Could’ve Been by Anna-Lisa Barrett

Inspired by: Lunch Break by Greig Sanders

Artist Statement:

This short story was influenced by Greig Sanders’ Lunch Break, and Jacob Souby’s Glowing in The Dark. I continuously kept looking at the art piece and listening to the sound piece with my main focus being on the semi-futuristic vibe that Greig and Jacob are portraying. By doing that, I created the short story What Life Could’ve Been. This piece consists of a short story about a girl named Liddy, in the year 2035, working a delivery job with her cat Maislee, and she explains the story of how technology began diminishing her family. The focal point of this story is the advancement of technology and the negativities it will bring. I chose to create this because this is happening in our real world today in many manufacturing and service based businesses. I hope that when others read this piece, they realize that this story isn’t as fictional as it sounds because this is happening right in front of our eyes, and we aren’t seeing it yet.

Artist: Anna-Lisa Barrett
Program: Justice Studies - University of Guelph-Humber

I am Anna-Lisa Barrett, and I am currently a third year student at the University of Guelph-Humber, obtaining my undergraduate degree in Justice Studies. As a child struggling with anxiety, writing was my coping mechanism, and still is to this day.
Since I was a child, creating characters as imaginary friends would end up being beneficial. “Your head is always in the clouds.” I would constantly hear since I was three years old. When I was a child, everyone found it so adorable that I would have imaginary friends which as an only child was normal.
However, I was creating characters that I would end up writing about later on in life. In hindsight, my imagination never shrunk, nor did it ever go away. It became bigger and I now use it to my advantage, by putting my own world on paper.
My favourite genres to write about are Coming of Age stories, as well as Fantasy. It gives such a huge sense of nostalgia and intensity, specifically to the targeted audience.
I am currently in the process of trying to get a story I’ve written over the past three years published. It is called, Throne of Spikes which is a mixture of both of those genres. I’ve started writing this as a short story for an assignment in my creative writing class in twelfth grade back in 2018, and it just became this novel right in front of my eyes, and I finished writing it this summer.