Next week, 45 area sixth- through 10th-graders with a passion for writing will spend five days on the Colgate campus stretching their imaginations and discovering new ideas through the act of writing.
The Young Writers’ Workshop offers a chance to experience writing in a community of peers, instructed by noted writers from a variety of genres. The featured artist/instructors include:
• Fiction: Natasha Friend, award-winning author of Bounce, Lush, and Perfect, and a central New York native.
• Poetry: Rachel Guido deVries, a novelist and children’s book author who serves as a poet-in-the-schools in upstate New York. She is author of Teeny Tiny Tino’s Fishing Story and Gambler’s Daughter.
• Nonfiction: Bob Cowser Jr., an academy of American Poets prizewinner and Pushcart Prize nominee and faculty member at St. Lawrence University. Author of Dream Season, about returning to football after being a college professor.
• Screenwriting: Hamilton native and actor Matt Malloy, who starred with Aaron Eckhart in Neil LaBute’s In the Company of Men and has appeared in Bones, Hawthorne, Desperate Housewives, and other TV shows.
The workshop, organized by Georgia Frank, a religion professor at Colgate, and Linda Leach, a teacher at Sherburne-Earlville, is a true town-gown collaboration.
“I think it’s a nice thing that the college is nurturing young writers and giving them a chance to see what college life is like,” said Leach. “They can go back to their local schools confident in writing, and that is no small thing.”
Frank, who stressed that the organizers sought to develop an affordable program, said she became interested in the role of writing programs and community service when she saw a need for more summer programming for young teens in the region.
Thanks to funding and grants from a variety of sources, approximately 40 percent of the participants are receiving scholarships.
The students hail from eight area school districts including Sherburne-Earlville, Hamilton, Morrisville, and Vernon-Verona-Sherrill.
Grouped by age, they will work with the featured artist of the day, assisted by secondary school teachers and interns — four Colgate students and one Hamilton Central School graduate, who all attended similar workshops as young people. On the final day the students will give readings of their work.
Partners and sponsors of the workshop include the Emerald Foundation, Earlville Opera House, New York State Council on the Arts, the Colgate Bookstore, and Colgate’s Case-Geyer Library, Center for the Arts and Humanities, departments of English and writing and rhetoric, and Upstate Institute.