By Melissa Sanders-Self, MMS High School English/Creative Writing Teacher
“Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.” – Anton Chekov
The Mount Madonna School (MMS) high school Creative Writing Reading is an annual event where students, faculty, parents and friends gather together to listen to our student writers read. Mark your calendars and save the date! This year it’s planned for Friday, March 21 from 7:00-9:00pm in the Assembly Room at MMS’ Upper Campus.
Holding a Creative Writing Reading as an annual event came from the students’ desire to share this part of themselves with each other and as word got out, with their parents, family, friends and community. We generally host between 100-150 people and although the room is packed you can hear a pen drop.
This sharing of themselves, their imaginations, their emotions and their desire to know one another better is part of the implicit Creative Writing curriculum. The event allows our implicit curriculum around creative self-expression to become visible. For 9th graders the event is mandatory since they’ve never tried it, but after that, students choose to come and read. I’m happy that participation after 9th grade has stayed above 95%.
This year we will listen to open letters to entities unlikely to respond, villanelles, short stories, sestinas, sonnets, monologues, first-person narratives, experiments with clichés, childhood horror stories and many other inspired forms of writing. Be advised that the content of writings can run the gamut, and is suitable for mature audiences only.
The quality and variety of writing produced by our students is matched only by the experience of hearing them read their work aloud. It is a magical night; images rise to the rafters and the emotion in the assembly room is electric listening, laughing as the students stumble, cry, laugh, gush and nail it. People are transformed.
The energy generated at our Creative Writing Reading has spilled over into other satisfying Creative Writing achievements; in 2012 our students organized to produce a newspaper that has continued and includes publishing their own literary efforts. Over the past seven years two MMS students have won the Santa Cruz County Poetry Competition three times (one student won twice), another won second place, three have received honorable mentions and every year many of our students’ poems are published in the Santa Cruz High School Poetry Competition Anthology. We have also had numerous Creative Writing students accepted to the California State Summer School for the Arts as California Arts Scholars and many of our alumni pursue college and graduate degrees and careers in English, Literature and Creative Writing.
Over the years, parents have commented: “Great school event, my true favorite! Wonderful acceptance and support of students for each other.” “Some make you laugh, some make you cry…all of them were great.” “I applaud your honesty and bravery and humor.” “All are wise beyond their years.”
A few years ago, one of our writing-loving seniors summed up the student experience: “What I like about the creative writing reading is what it exposes about the other kids in the school. After the readings I feel I have more understanding and more connection with my peers. We’re up late, together, being honest and sharing our personal thoughts and creative work. It is raw and wonderful. What could be better?”
Students at MMS are asked to perform in many different ways, but the experience of reading out loud a piece of your own writing is uniquely challenging. Our imaginations, fictions, dreams, and actual moments recalled, funneled into words, reveal aspects of ourselves that sometimes surprise even the writer of the piece.
Events like the creative writing reading remind me why MMS is such a special place; here my students feel confident enough to be vulnerable. As an educator I have the opportunity to witness and guide their growth, their creative writing and their ability to feel good about sharing a piece of themselves with others.
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