As students participating in the Center for Research and Writing’s contest are learning, sometimes a picture only speaks 100 words (or fewer).
This writing contest comes in collaboration with the Keene State Archives and the Bricowlage Literary Magazine, and invites students to write a piece based on old photos taken from the Archives.
All participants will be entered in a raffle to win one of five $20 gift cards to the Toadstool Bookstore. Five entries will also be selected for publication in Bricowlage and will win one of five Polaroid-style cameras.
Assistant Archivist Mary Meagher said students from the Center for Research and Writing selected the photos for the contest.
“The students selected photos they found puzzling, confusing or fascinating,” Meagher said. “Most of the photos are of student life around campus, while others focus on the environment around Keene State– like the flood of 1936.”
Head of Special Collections & Archives Rodney Obien said that Assistant Director of the Center for Research and Writing Dr. Molly Parsons reached out to him about the contest.
“Dr. Parsons approached us about using photographic material from the KSC Archives & Specials Collections for the contest,” Obien said. “Mary Meagher and I decided the best source for photographs are KSC publications, such as the yearbooks and college newspapers. We thought images of the college and college life would be of interest to students and the campus community.”
Parsons said that the contest was made possible in part by a PEPSI grant.
“One of the things that’s really important to the tutors and our staff is to give people opportunities to write for pleasure and for fun, and we thought a contest would be a good way to do that,” she said.
Parsons said that entries don’t have to just be stories.
“Poems are great, a Yelp review about an image if you wanted to, you could do a horoscope,” she said. “It’s totally open in terms of genre. We just want short pieces of writing that are inspired by the pictures.”
Parsons said that she hopes the Center can do something like this again in the future.
“With support, absolutely, [we’d] love to run this kind of contest or something else that just gives people an opportunity to write,” she said.
Senior and Head Tutor at the Center, Evan Parker, said he hopes students will have fun writing for the contest.
“A huge part of it is taking time to do something just for the sake of fun,” he said. “Writing for the sake of writing rather than purely for academics and tapping into that leisure writing, or exercising your brain for fun or for the sake of doing it rather than for a class.”
Parker’s advice for students who want to participate is to relate the photos to their own experiences.
“What can you relate to about the picture? I think drawing from that is something I personally get inspiration from. Then you can take that next step afterwards,” he said. “It can even just be a fun thinking exercise to do before you start the writing exercise.”
Submissions for the contest will be accepted until Friday, March 13.
Emily Sloane can be contacted at
