Revelry Night

As the first welcome party designed to introduce students to others in their program, Sept. 13 marked a change in the Creative Writing and Literature department’s usual welcome routine. Rather than hosting a reading by returning students, writers instead engaged in rapid-fire speed chat to introduce themselves, competed fiercely in games of Taboo, mingled over cake and jumped in a character-building exercise.

Read about the Creative Writing and Literature department’s welcome party at Jackalope Magazine.

SWA Welcomes Writers Back

Every Tuesday night in a cozy Alexis Hall lounge, members of the Student Writers Association gather to de-stress, improve their craft, and forge new friendships. SWA is the Creative Writing department’s flagship club, led by officers Amaya Hoke, Andrew Koss, Charlotte Renken, and Kylie Yockey. Though it’s commonly thought that writers choose to work in isolation, SWA aims to break that mold of thinking.

Read about SWA’s goals for the new year at Jackalope Magazine.

Elegy Made Manifest – an interview

y648 With the close of September, Anne Valente’s debut novel Our Hearts Will Burn Us Downapproaches its release date. A local school shooting leaves a St. Louis community reeling, especially high school juniors Matt, Zola, Nick, and Christina. The four main characters struggle to piece their lives back together and make sense of the tragedy while a series of fires continues to ravage the homes of victims’ families. Ultimately the story within is a stunning tale of the all-consuming nature of grief and the permanence of loss, in and of itself a statement about a society where mass violence is increasingly common.