In November, Students and Alumni Challenge Themselves with Weekly Writing Sprints
Every November, writers across the world celebrate National Novel Writing Month by completing a month-long writing challenge. At its most extreme, NaNoWriMo consists of completing a first draft of a novel –– a task many writers find themselves unable to accomplish in years, let alone a single month. Many, however, take NaNoWriMo more loosely, and choose to follow the spirit, rather than the word, of the challenge: to write with frequency and commitment, to set goals and fulfill them.
To accommodate this multitude of interpretations, the Creative Writing program, headed by Professor Sarah Gambito, decided to allow students and alumni to define their own challenges for themselves. For the month of November, several current and former students, as well as faculty members, are holding weekly writing workshops with a set group of attendees. Each group leader was able to decide the focus of the workshop themselves: for instance, alumna Jessica Cozzi (FCRH English/Creative Writing ‘20), a Young Adult writer, chose to focus her weekly workshop on YA/Romance –– a subject which resonated with many people, making her workshop the one with the most participants. As a writer who primarily works in poetry, but has roots in visual art, I decided to center my own writing group on hybrid form and mixed media writing, drawing both poets and prose writers to participate.
I began my workshop, held at a cafe near the FCLC campus, with an invitation for the five participants sharing their personal goals for November. Much the pieces we were to workshop, the group members’ answers varied widely –– poet Lyss Witvoet (FCLC English/Creative Writing ‘24) was planning on using the time to polish their Honors thesis, which will be a comprehensive portfolio of their work. Gracey Downer, also a graduating FCLC senior majoring in Music, has her eyes set on pursuing an MFA in Poetry next year, and saw NaNoWriMo as an opportunity to workshop and proofread her writing sample required to apply. Kim Naples (FCRH ‘13), who works as a librarian at the Village Library in Katonah, NY, joined us from upstate to work on her draft of a YA fantasy novel exploring themes of trauma recovery.
We decided to start our workshops with a prompt: for the first meeting, I brought in two very different poems –– “Love Letter” by Nathalie Handal, a prose poem which highlights its lyricism through repetition, and “palindrome” by Nate Marshall, which tells the story of a failed relationship entirely backwards. After reading and discussing the two poems, I suggested that we all try to write based on the form of one or both of them. In the second week, I gave the group a more specific formal challenge: to create a visual poem based on an outline of our hands. The results came out differently: below are photos of the exercises from me, Kamau Nosakhere (FCLC Theatre Performance/Creative Writing ‘25) and Isabella Acuña (FCLC English/Creative Writing ‘25).
This prompt highlights the different ways that we all interpreted the exercise, and the vastly differing creativity that NaNoWriMo engenders. Sharing our pieces at the end of both 45-minute sprints has been incredibly helpful in building a community of creative peers.
Afterwards, on both weeks, the group members and I helped Gracey look over some of the pieces for her MFA application, rounding out our time together with constructive feedback made possible by the trust built over the course of the workshop.
Due to the Thanksgiving recess, Friday, November 17th, will be the last of our weekly writing sessions. Even over such a short time, I have found an incredible community and support in the writers in my workshop, and am excited for us to continue sharing work with each other in the future –– even beyond November.