By Logan Monteleone
Incoming News Editor
The image and metaphor-rich writings of seniors who shared their work in the Rose O’Neill Literary House last Wednesday evening transformed the porch’s ceiling to a sky with tipped-over stars; replaced the blinds in the windows with ghosts of grief and longing; and turned the podium into a prairie with a monarch butterfly in place of a microphone.
Along with allowing underclassmen to glimpse the potential for creative accomplishment that results from a college career committed to growing as a writer, the Senior Reading allows professors to hear their students’ work outside of research and academic papers.
“We believe in a capstone experience at Washington College, but capstones take all sorts of forms, and watching…students share creative work ranging from a homicidal medieval queen’s play, to a breakup poem with an atheist, to a family memory about a grandfather’s secret, is a capstone experience for your professors,” Associate Professor of English Dr. Katie Charles said.
As for poetry, Sarah Coverdale read a persona poem written in conversation with Robinson Jeffers’s “The Deer Lay Down Their Bones” that empathetically explores the potential for kinship with the natural world from the perspective of a deer.
Helena Cress read a poem titled “Keep Me a Haunted House” that employs gothic imagery and a ghost-filled house to represent experiences of love, loss, and longing.
Another poem set in the natural world, Iris Scherr read a piece in which the speaker compares themselves to a monarch butterfly who has travelled through various landscapes and undergone many changes.
Representing creative nonfiction, Natalie Martinaitis read a piece centering Lois Lowry’s “The Giver” that meditates on the role of memory and the importance of love, interweaving the speaker’s personal narrative with the dystopian novel’s main character, Jonas.
Elm copy editor Grace Hogsten shared a piece, which was published in Collegian last year, that captures a young girl’s experience trying to fit in with adults while also preserving her youthfulness through a stargazing game. Forthcoming in Collegian, Elm Editor-in-Chief Riley Dauber read an excerpt from an absurdist piece in which a woman is ushered into a hospital room filled with people before giving birth.
Evan Merk read a creative nonfiction essay about his father’s struggle with cancer filled with emotional intensity, painful recollections, and affection in the form of a stuffed Pikachu offering.
“Sometimes it’s easier to write things than say them, but it’s also really cathartic to say them,” Merk said.
Merk also read the part of a knight in Courtney Poetsch’s play about a fiery queen and two forbidden-lover knights who are punished by their ruler. In addition to her own play, Poetsch read alongside Faith Jarrell in a scene from Jarell’s playwriting SCE, “To Survive or to Live,” where the characters Xander and Zaelyn have a fraught discussion about their missing friend, Evan.
“I like being able to have a piece that I can read with a friend because I feel like it also makes it slightly less nerve wracking to read,” Jarrell said.
Some students also read pieces created for courses at the College.
McCartney Ryea read a humorous, reflective epistolary piece from a travel writing workshop addressed to a guide on a paleontology tour in Wyoming. Also written for the workshop, Elm copy editor Lucy Verlaque read an excerpt from a piece about her grandfather’s storied life and unexpected secrets.
Composed for a genealogy course assignment that asked students to explore a traumatic moment in their family’s history, Kaitlin Osucha’s essay blends her own memory and research with her grandmother’s firsthand account of an uncle’s struggle with polio.
Assistant Director of the Literary House Amber Taliancich announced the winners of the Literary House Writing Awards at the end of the reading. The $100 Pfister Poetry Prize for a single poem of exceptional literary merit was awarded to sophomore Sophie Kilbride.
The Genre Fiction Prize for a story of science fiction, fantasy, mystery or horror, also $100, was awarded to sophomore Liam Siobhan Luckey. The Warner Prize for Writing on the Environment for a piece that demonstrates an aptitude for writing about the natural world was awarded to incoming Elm sports editor freshman Aaron Rodenhausen.
Merk said that the opportunity to read his work aloud is valuable but most meaningful is the chance to hear the finished work of his peers.
“It was lovely to hear all my friends beautiful work, especially lots of them I had read drafts of or seen at earlier stages,” Merk said.
Photo by Olivia Long.
Photo Caption: Seniors did not have to be English majors to read; Cress is a business major and read a poem.