Later this month, Winthrop’s Creative Writing Program will be hosting a student reading, which will showcase some of the program’s most talented writers.
Five of the student readers for the event were available to speak about the event, themselves, and the piece they plan to read.
The first is Samantha Melander, a junior theatre performance major and creative writing minor. While Melander is no stranger to performing in front of people due to her major, she doesn’t often perform her written work. According to her, “this [story] is close to my heart. It was originally an assignment for a flash fiction written with only one-syllable words, and it ended up being double the pages Hoffman had asked for! Most of the prose is still kept choppy as in the original, but this edited version I’ll be reading does have bigger words.”
Melander hopes everyone enjoys the event and believes that it is “a good opportunity to develop a sense of confidence and pride in [her] work.”
Senior mass communication major Téa Franco is another participant of the event. Franco, who also has minors in creative writing and political science minor, plans to read what she dubbed an “experimental” flash fiction piece called “Up Next: I Dye My Hair Blonde.”
“The narrative takes the frame of a young girl doing a YouTube tutorial on how she straightens her hair. It’s basically a parody of the beauty industry specifically surrounding the ideals that it places upon young women of color,” Franco said. “I wrote this piece actually out of necessity, as Dr. Hoffman told me I should have some experimental flash in my packet for graduate school applications, and it turned out to be something that I am proud of and excited to share. It will be my first time reading it to an audience and I am a little worried because the piece definitely requires a very animated read and that’s not something I have done before.”
While this will be Franco’s first time reading this piece, it is not her only time reading prose to an audience. “I participated in the creative writing student showcase last year where I read two poems and then a few months later I was given the chance to read more of my poetry at the South Carolina Arts and Humanities Festival that Winthrop hosted. Last semester I organized and emceed the student reading as I was one of the creative writing program interns, so it will be exciting to get to read at this one. I’ve never read fiction to a crowd before despite it being my dominant genre so I am excited about this opportunity,” Franco said.
Joining Franco and Melander is Hayley Neiling, an English graduate student with a concentration in rhetoric and composition. Her planned piece is a “bit of an experiment that I took from George Saunders’s ‘Lincoln in the Bardo’. I wanted to create the image of a character entirely based on her perception by other people. I also wanted to include the voices of women writers who have written about other women in romantic ways, so I’ve taken snippets from Virgina Woolf, Emily Dickenson, Alison Bechdel and others like them.”
Neiling has previously read poems for the English Department and was in a creative writing showcase a couple years ago. She is glad the event is giving her a chance to share her work and allowing students a chance to celebrate the “other wonderful writers at Winthrop.”
Jammie Huynh, a senior Spanish and English double major who is also minoring in sociology and political science, is also reading at the event. “A lot of my poetry stems from how I grew up with my family and culture. A lot of my poems are about the trauma I’ve gone through with my father and my poems explore that.” Huynh said.
Huynh hopes that this event allows them to simply “better my poems and learn how to project them to an audience. Writing a poem and performing a poem are two different things and I want to be well versed in both.”
The last reader that was able to speak was Lyric Knuckles, a senior English major and creative writing minor. Knuckles’ planned piece is “generational neglect as it follows a daughter’s relationship with her mom and grandmother. It also captures the hesitation the daughter feels to combat societal pressures.”
Knuckles is no stranger to these kinds of events, having done readings and spoken words since she was in middle school. She hopes to “generate inspiration while also gaining some [her]self” at the reading and appreciates the opportunity to read her work to other Winthrop students.
The Student Reading will take place on Feb. 27 at 6:30 p.m. in Whitton Auditorium. It will also count as a cultural event. Asides from the students mentioned, other readers will include Casey Smith, Jariel Bido, Kyra Pearson, and Ali Womack.
Photo: Marisa Fields-Williams/ The Johnsonian
