A Night To Write
Connor Strange
Co-Editor-in-Chief
With pencils in hand and plastic cups of Mountain Dew at their side, the attendees of the school’s first Writer’s Workshop penned poems and prose on Tuesday afternoon.
The workshop was sponsored by the Slam Poetry team, and was open to any interested parties. Half a dozen eager writers arrived after school to put to paper their thoughts on prompts provided by slam senior leaders Amanda Marco and Riley Westerholt.
The half dozen budding essayists to come to the library were few, but their writing was still tremendous.
“I think it would’ve been great to have more students attend, but with the small group that we had the students did a great job sharing and writing. It was fun to listen to what everyone had to say,” Slam Poetry sponsor Kelly Bielenberg said.
Though the attendance wasn’t overwhelming, the thoughts that the participants shared were profound and well-written.
“It’s not about the amount of people that come, it’s about how they write,” Marco said. “We had a lot of good writing happen here.”
The inception of the Writer’s Workshop came with the Louder Than a Bomb slam competition in Omaha. Members of the club discussed opening their regular writing nights to the rest of the school.
“We’ve only done slam poetry nights,” Westerholt said. “This year, we talked a lot about it and we thought it would be good because the arts don’t get a whole lot of attention in the school.”
The pen prowess encouraged during the slam nights was continued and exemplified by the writers on Tuesday.
“It amazes me any time that I work with a group of students who only have five minutes to write and then read something so poetic or thoughtful or witty. I think we had examples of all of that in the short time they had to write,” Bielenberg said.
In perhaps a less kind manner, Westerholt also expressed her excitement at the writing skill shown during the workshop.
“Sitting in class, you listen to people read what they’ve written and you want to slam your face into the table,” Westerholt said. “In here, when you read something it makes you feel.”
The slam team plans on holding more of the workshops in the future before they need to focus entirely on club matters. Even for those talented in other areas than writing, Bielenberg believes the workshop is a great opportunity for a creative outlet.
“There are a lot of really talented students at Waverly,” Bielenberg said. “I hope that more kids take advantage of their creative side and try stuff like this, even if they don’t think they’re great writers. Anyone can write; it doesn’t always have to be brilliant the first time around.”
