The rare privilege of editing a national literary journal as an undergraduate (not to mention the daily promise of coffee) is enough to nudge my weary body out of my dorm room every morning and into the necessity of story. At first, it is the tender process of making Relief Journal that overwhelms me: the elusive connection suspended between writer and reader now becoming tangible. Writers trust us to listen, to lean in close, just as we trust them to move us, to illuminate uncharted nuances of the human condition. Vulnerability for vulnerability. Relief Journal provides space for us students to bask in the good, to wrestle with the ugly;…
-
-
English Majors Complete Funded Summer Research
Camy, Hillary, and Hannah Today’s post comes to us from Hannah Perry, a junior English/Systems major. This summer, I had the pleasure of working with Hillary Foreman, Camy Hanna, and Dr. Carie King to create a youth summer writing camp. (The first camp would take place on Taylor’s campus in 2018.) Our research was sponsored by the Faculty Mentored Undergraduate Summer Scholarship (FMUSS) program at Taylor, which funds work in various academic departments across campus. While we all belong to the English department, each member of the team had a different concentration that allowed us to contribute unique perspectives to the project. Hillary Foreman, a senior Creative Writing major, was…
-
Writing As Pilgrimage
Today’s guest post comes to us from Jennifer Ochstein, Assistant Professor of Writing at Bethel College. The more I write, the more I’m convinced that writing is, for me at least, a matter of courage. The problem is that I am not very courageous. I became acutely aware of this during my recent pilgrimage along the Camino de Santiago, or The Way of St. James. The 1,200-year-old Christian pilgrimage trail traditionally begins in St. Jean in France and extends nearly 500 miles to Santiago de Compostela in Spain. My husband and I walked about 150 miles of The Way earlier this summer. When we arrived in Madrid after an…
