ESTA SE TT rsonal narratives

glas writers come together for/an

By Jacey Gibb
ast Tuesday night played host
to the Writers Unplugged
event, which brought together

all the students enrolled in creative

writing courses at Douglas College.

The evening was filled with various

writers reading two too three minutes

of their personal works; poems, short
stories or even screenplays.

The main objective of the event
was to give students that are currently
enrolled in creative writing courses
(Intro to Writing Fiction/Poetry,
Memoir Writing, etc) an opportunity
to see what their peers in other,
related, classes have been working on
so that they themselves might look
into the courses.

Every year, Writers Unplugged
has a guest writer join for the evening
and this time around it was an author
by the name of Steven Galloway, who
recently released a novel called The
Cellist of Sarajevo. He started the
evening off by reading a few pages
of his recent book and continued
on to give a speech about writing in
which he stated that having someone
put the time into reading what you
write is a privilege earned. To quote
Kurt Vonnegut’s number one rule
of writing, “Use the time of a total
stranger in such a way that he or she
will not feel the time was wasted.”

   
 
   
    
 
      
 
    
 
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
 
       
 
 
       
 
      
 
 
       
 
   
      
 
   
      
 
      

Galloway’s speech might not have
been necessarily inspiring, but at
least it was refreshingly honest about
the upsides to writing as well as the
downs.

After Galloway took his seat,
it was time for the students to take
control of the evening. It seemed
there were no limitations to the pieces
being presented, as they ranged
from a poem on young love, an
excerpt of a short story on princesses
slaying dragons, and even to a story
detailing John Hinckley Jr.’s decent
into madness before he attempted
to assassinate Ronald Reagan. The
real gems that garnered the most
crowd approval came from the two
screenplays that were presented closer
to the end: one offered a unique
perspective of a scenario in which
God comes to Earth to stand trial for
all her (yes, God is a young woman)
crimes against humanity, while the
final screenplay had a hilarious take
of two newlyweds trying to legally
change their last names (the roles of
the actors were filled by writers in
attendance.)

It was an evening filled with
coffee, friends, and glimpses into
what the future might hold for the
aspiring writing students of Douglas
College. This was the third time the
event has been put on and it didn’t
show any signs of it being its last.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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