|
In 2007, MFA student Brenna Casey began to organize writing workshops at South Bend’s award-winning Center for the Homeless. MFA students continue to meet once a week with the men and women who live in the center.
The students develop and lead an exercise, including writing time and time for sharing writing with one another, and both the students and the residents participate in the activities each week. The group size varies widely—from one resident to twenty—and the format and activities of the workshop also vary.
Under the faculty guidance of Valerie Sayers, the student coordinators plan and implement the workshops by sending reminder e-mails, asking students to lead the exercises, and putting together an anthology of the residents' work at the end of the year. These workshops are open for all MFA students to attend.
|
Each semester, a group of our students heads over to South Bend’s Riley High School as part of a community outreach effort begun by Rumit Pancholi and Christina Yu in 2008.
The gatherings include MFA students from both the first and second year classes in poetry and prose reading their favorite writers' work and their own work to over sixty students from Linda Antonazzi's junior English classes. Some semesters, the students also help teach class sessions on writing.
While it’s true that some of the students at Riley High School who attend these readings don’t want to come, some of them write notes to one another during the readings, and some fall asleep, it’s also true that many of the students are thrilled to hear poetry read to them. They are excited to talk with the MFA students and sometimes share their own work with us.
|
In 2009, four of our students resurrected the writing workshops at the South Bend Juvenile Correctional Facility that were begun by Colby Davis in 2007. With anywhere between three and fifteen eager attendees each week, the workshops are bound to continue for years to come and possibly through the summers.
Using practices adopted from programs like Voices UnBroken and Women Writing for (a) Change, the students have formed a casual but focused hour-long weekly workshop for their friends in the facility, boys aged twelve to eighteen. Both the MFA and the facility students look forward to that time to talk with one another, write, and share their work.
Because of the background check and training required to volunteer at the facility, and because of the sense of consistency that the young students require, these workshops are only open to those who can commit to them for an entire semester.
The anthology that results from the workshop is available in June. For a copy, please contact the program.
|
