Anna Agadjanyan praises the Kelly Writers House
Anna Agadjanyan (WH '02), a business student who took a creative writing seminar taught by Karen Rile in the Writers House
It was a nice fall day, one of those days that still has summer written around its rims. Over twenty warm bodies were crowding a stuffy room on the second floor of the Writers House. It's one of those mysterious houses I have always wanted to enter but never had the chance to. No, wait. I did once when I was sneaking a pizza from the Commons to my freshman-year roommate who was working there late. But that won't count.
| It's one of those mysterious houses I have always wanted to enter but never had the chance to.... The truth is that the twenty people in that little house off Locust Walk are different. They are people driven by passion. |
What I have uncovered since is that going to this room in a house carefully hidden from the rest of Locust Walk, became my favorite thing to do on Mondays. The rest of my days are spent in the same digitally-equipped rooms of Steinberg-Deitrich Hall. Or Steiny, as those of us who practically live there have kindly began to call it. The people in my finance, statistics and marketing classes are the same people whom I see each semester, each day, going through the same exams, under the same pressures.
But never have we smiled at each other in passing, or stopped to exchange a few lines and discuss the latest writing assignment, and needless to say there was never a chance of running into them at a concert in Irvine auditorium. The truth is that the twenty people in that little house off Locust Walk are different. They are people driven by passion. Passion for writing. And it is only from these people that one can learn.
And though a part of what I take away from this by-now familiar room is that one will never find agreement on writing. That people's opinions, driven by their preferences can often be polar opposites. I am taking away the standards for writing short stories, the tools every artist needs to learn well, that is before he can begin to break them one by one.
Because in order to truly understand my own likes and disliked I had to first identify their source. Yes, writing is an art, but in all art there are rules. I had never taken a writing class I had never known these rules. People are often afraid that learning a framework will hinder their 'free spirit', but in truth, the learning that I take away has made me free. Free to experiment, and make the new knowledge a part of my unconscious, where it can bring about more ideas.
I learned that my fear of a lack of imagination is nothing more than a fluke. Because in truth, best stories are based on moments taken from life, things that have lingered long enough to hit the tips of our ears and had our imaginations finish them on paper. So I am finally willing to describe and uncover those things that have a meaning to me, and am willing to wait for other topics to trot along as I grow older in my experiences and encounters. In the end, the short stories we were asked to tell during the first class have evolved into a larger one. A story that has come full circle growing fuller with each Monday. It grew until a point - now. When it has become ready to burst and fling us to remote islands, where it can test what we have learned, and let us see where we can go on our own.