Creative thinkers and avid authors who have a voice that they want to share have a new opportunity to do so with the kickoff of Legacy’s new “Author’s Club” in which students can express their ideas through an interconnected network composed of the entire district.
“This club can be a breakthrough to build a community for people who love to write,” sophomore Katie Eisenhower said.
The MISD Writing Partnership, also known as the “Author’s Club”, was initially formed as a conglomerate with Timberview and Lake Ridge, while the other remaining high schools plan to shortly follow. The partnership received $4,000 in grant money and the current club members encourage students to join to take advantage of the network and opportunities it withholds.
“I think that the big end of course test we take at the end of the year, the critiquing we get from the club will help bring our scores up because we will receive feedback,” sophomore Ivy Glaze said. “That feedback can be used in our writing for the [writing portion of the] test.”
Ms. Lisbeth Bennett, Pre-AP English II teacher and sponsor of the club, published her writing before and currently works on new content that she hopes the group will engage with. She hopes that students will take advantage of the chance to join this club because she believes writing serves as a good way to learn from others with the constructive criticism they provide each other with.
“Your best resource is other writers,” Ms. Bennett said. “The club is nice because it gives you opinions and makes you realize that there are other writers and that you’re not working alone.”
The current club members agree that the organization will help them blossom as writers because they possess the advantage of having like-minded people honestly critiquing their work and supporting them, even beyond high school.
“Honestly, if you were to go to a friend, they may not be completely honest with you [concerning your writing] and may sugar coat it,” Glaze said. “Being a part of another group gives others the chance to be brutally honest.”
The fledgling writers submit their work online through a group in Google Drive which contains enthusiastic members from the various high schools ready to read their work and provide constructive criticism through Google Forms. This allows the young authors to learn and develop their writing. The group welcomes endless amounts of genres, including music/ song lyrics, college application essays, resumes, sci-fi, poetry, and fiction.
“The club maximizes my potential as an author because of all the resources we have,” sophomore Ethan McMillen said. “Everyone in the club specializes in their own special type of genre and you get to talk to them and get a lot of people’s point of view which normally we would have to pay for [with an editor]”
The organization created a content creation mandate that requires members to bring one to two pages of their work every other week. The club members write 10 minutes a day, so the mandate won’t feel overwhelming on them and they can get their ideas out.
“You’ll start writing for an hour but it won’t feel like an hour. Writing is a legalized hallucination,” Ms. Bennett said. “It’s awesome.”
