As a freshman at Douglas Anderson, I experienced my first Writers’ Fest on a whim, oblivious to the work that goes into the event. Something that I did notice, despite my naive nature, is that the writers had a lot of interesting and thoughtful things to say. They spoke to me in few ways people do; they listened to my innermost questions when it came to writing, and provided answers I still use today in my work. One of those people, specifically, was George Saunders.

George Saunders and Tracy K. Smith were the headliners that year, and I went to both of their lectures. Coming out of both, I gained valuable information that is universal to my work.

George Saunders had a wonderful question and answer section, which let writers ask questions that matter to them, and lets them receive a response from a world-class, bestselling author. One of the questions that came up in the question and answer section was simple: what does writing mean to you?

His answer, unlike many public figures in today’s world, did not try to avoid the subject matter. He took it head-on, thoughtfully, and left us with something deep to think about. Writing is not putting words on a page, it is communicating a message in a universal way, and benefits society in ways that few other methods do. It strengthens our bond with our own humanity, and creates new ones with other people. Not only does it do justice to the questions of our conscious, it implements a major rule in our lives: don’t hold anything back.

Hearing this, the last few words reminded me of a poster that hung, and still hangs, in my creative writing classroom: “Go so deep into yourself, you speak for everyone.” – Galway Kinnell.

Through this immaculate response, I now use this method and way of thinking about writing every time I pick up my pen. If it is going to be something more meaningful than a fun read or a stream of consciousness, it needs to hint at a deeper message. It needs to speak to people and let them leave with something meaningful. Good writing lets words jump off the page, and stick in the reader’s mind for a long time. Couple that with an important message, and suddenly we’ve made a monumental change in the world with only some words, some paragraphs, some pages. It fills in the holes we have as humans, and it lets us fumble without feeling we’ve failed. This is what writing now means to me, thanks to that simple question and a beautiful answer.

George Saunders was not the only writer that made a meaningful change in the way I view writing, and, therefore, the way I view life. Other writers made meaningful comments and showed us techniques that I still use daily.

It is through these conversations that I had with wonderful writers that made me the person I am today, and that is all thanks to the Douglas Anderson Writers’ Fest. Without it, I would never have gotten the opportunity to experience such wonder and skill. I am still thankful to this day, and with a new Writers’ Festival coming up, I’m looking forward to being there.

– Jasper Darnell, Junior Layout & Design Editor

One of the most meaningful workshops I went to, was accidental. I had heard from one of my classmates that an essayist was going to be in a room upstairs and across campus, when I had gotten there, a small sign on the door told me she was moved downstairs and back across campus. With two minutes left to get in a class and me, being a small anxious 9th grader, didn’t want to walk into a workshop late, have everybody’s eyes on me and leave a bad first impression. So, I turned around to the next door, hoping that there was a workshop going on in there. It was Teri Grimm’s workshop, a local poet, who I hadn’t paid any attention to before that very moment.

Much of the workshop consisted of us, me and the other people in the room, picking a small stone from a bag, with our eyes closed. And then, with our eyes still closed, we wrote how the stone felt; the stone I was holding was small, no bigger than the pit of a peach, but it was fairly heavy, like a few quarters in my hand, and it was smooth and very cold, I tried to warm it up between my palms. Then, she wanted us to open our eyes and write what it didn’t obviously look like, mine was grey in an obvious way, but if you were to look closely there were streaks of whites and somewhat purple colors, to me it looked like the rolling clouds of a thunderstorm, or a water cup murky from paint, less pretty but more accurate.

The workshop could be described as ‘odd’, but it could also be described as ‘supercalifragilisticexpialidocious’; before going to the workshop I didn’t realize how important it was to focus your detail and attention on other sensory details, rather than what is obviously being seen, that a whole world isn’t really created without smell, taste, touch, and sound. If you give the reader, or even yourself as the writer, only what you see, you only paint a picture, something they can look at, they are never really there with you without being able to hear what you hear, and how you hear it.

– Zoe Lathey, Junior Editor-in-Chief

The first time I engaged with the inspiriting vulnerability, the transient warmth of Yvette Angelique Hyater-Adams, I was wandering Douglas Anderson’s 2018 Writers’ Festival. It was my sophomore year, and I, a naive and craft-study-suckling, self-proclaimed “poet” had willingly been at the mercy of an artistic puberty that most creatives know all too well— beginning to feel changes, such as my eyes sharpening to find real-world images, metaphors, poems, and noticing more and more often a prick in my heart that felt something like bee teeth: in those moments leaking the sticky, honey-esque sealant that bound me (hostage as a house guest!) to the unconditional love of Writerhood.

Though I’m not particularly sure what inclined me (our shared name? my infatuation with essay writing and all its intrinsic intimacy?) to sit in on her workshop, “Plaits and Weaves: The Braided Personal, Place, and Social Justice Essay”, the experience would prove to be one of the most impactful moments of my creative life. With my pen and journal—an old diary with a small spiral notepad taped outward on the back cover— anchored in hand, some friends and I made our way into the theater where Mrs. Hyater-Adams (who would now likely roll her eyes at that formality!) was presenting her workshop. Beside her, the projector she used was not unlike a fireplace, the glow of front-and-center slides lighting the dim space with words that warmed and thawed us then to our most vulnerable roots. I most distinctly remember Mrs. Hyater-Adams showing us there an excerpt from Claudia Rankine’s essay, Citizen: An American Lyric— a piece about living as a marginalized racial identity that translated this experience through a second person, internal musing and the braided use of prose poetry, descriptive vignettes, lyrics and lyrical essay.

Being the little biracial, lyric-obsessed writer that I was/am, the entire excerpt had me both hungry and fed. At the time too, my inner poet’s puberty had me lusting for the sweet push of my thoughts pressing against boundaries— for personal truth, and making paint from the velvet blood of my deeply cut vulnerability. Afterwards, Mrs. Hayter-Adams gave us a range of different sources to write from— one of which was an early 2000’s song that everybody knew (but I can’t really remember the name of…) that prompted me, for the first time ever, to write about my dad. After sprawling out the now vivid memory of my dad and I speeding late at night to the liquor store, windows down and the car’s music bass boosted, I slowly let myself crawl into using my words to explore our complex relationship: by my senior year, I’ve probably written eight or nine poems about him. I’ve definitely cried twice that in doing so.

Out loud, I shared that image with the workshop group. A year later, Yvette Angelique and I would cross paths again during a therapeutic poetry workshop that I was monitoring and she was invited to teach at. At first, we laughed about our shared name— hers with a Y, mine with an E, but it got us to start talking on a more meaningful level. There, she invited me to her summer writing intensive for women, Narratives for Change, which I participated in over the summer with seven other women whom I developed an unbreakable bond with. In Yvette’s program, I wrote about my sexual assault for the first time in my life. My last day there, Yvette hugged me tight and safe in her arms while I cried… what I’m trying to get at, I think, is that I met Yvette Angelique Hyater-Adams at Writers’ Festival and now I’ve adopted her as a mother. She was the person who sat down with me and helped me make a list of colleges with undergraduate writing programs that would be supportive of my mental health when I was in the midst of convincing myself that I’d never be able to get into, let alone handle college. She told me that I had an undeniable talent for writing, that I had passion, and that she wouldn’t let me let that go to waste.

I would have likely never had the opportunity to develop such a meaningful relationship with her if not for Writers’ Festival, and I am eternally grateful for that. Not only that, but the entire experience of the festival filled me with a general feeling of worthiness as writer: there, I got to choose my own destiny— I was in total control of what I got to engage with (the possibilities of which were many), and so I was able to tailor the experience into what would be most meaningful for me. In having that chance, my creative life was able to jump from that ledge and experience a breathtaking sort of butterfly effect: all of the pieces adding up to span outwards from me into a set of wings, a post-cocoon body grown with memories that would forever remind me that yes— from this high up, it is undeniable now. I am a valid writer, and I don’t ever want to let that go to waste.

– Evette Davis, Senior Web Editor