With the end of the year on the doorstep, students in capstone classes find themselves finishing up their year’s or semester’s work. For those in Professor of English Brinda Charry’s creative writing class, the students had to read excerpts from their journals that the class focused on creating on Wednesday, April 30, at 4 p.m. in the Mason Library.
The class itself focused less on writing pieces and more on the students putting pieces made in previous classes into a portfolio. In addition, the class worked together on a journal, which they named “Journal 603” this year, compiling one piece from each of the students, as well as the new addition of having submissions from authors outside of the class.
“An interesting thing this year is they decided to ask for guest author submissions so they put out a call for submissions,” Charry said. “They had quite a few submissions, and they actually ran a whole selection process where they selected the pieces that they thought worked well and then they edited, so it gave them a lot of hands-on practice and putting together a journal and then they did the design and the layout.”
Members of Journal 603 were at a table at the Academic Showcase on Friday, May 2.
The event started off with an introduction from Charry, and then the students came up one by one to read a few pieces or segments of their work before introducing the next student with an overview of their writing at KSC, as well as a fun fact about them.
A total of 15 students read during the event, both juniors and seniors.
“Sometimes students have to take it in their junior year, especially the [education] students because they’re going to student-teach,” Charry said. “The class is offered once a year in the spring, and many of those students teach next spring, the spring of their senior year, so they couldn’t take the class if they didn’t take it a little bit early.”
A range of genres, such as comedy, historical fiction and romance, and the diversity of pieces that were from poetry, fiction, memoir or creative nonfiction classes gave the audience something new with every speaker.
The audience was filled with people from all over, including English professors, alumni and students who were not a part of the capstone class, said senior Jacob Conway, a student who writes a poem a day. As the second reader, he read two prose and one poem. His origins with writing came from living with his grandmother, who was a published author, for the first 12 years of his life.
Being a film major, he said he “doesn’t want to stop telling stories.”
“I like stories, stories are fun,” Conway said. “I already have an idea about a novel but wanting to start my filmmaking career, I might have writing fiction be a little on the side.”
There were a few plates with arranged cookies stacked high on a table in the back of the room that were picked on as the students read.
Charry talked about the importance of the event, but also of creative writing as a whole.
“It’s not something we should forget, especially in this day and age when [higher education] is so focused on all kinds of other stuff, so it’s always interesting to me … where there’s so many people who were minors in creative writing and they come from majors in a variety of fields,” Charry said. “It still means something and I think it’s important for us to know and it’s important for the college administration to recognize that creative writing still has an important place in the lives of young people.”
Hayley Doda can be contacted at
hayley@kscequinox.com
