Turning a New Page
The Creative Writing Club sponsor has changed since last year.
Emleia Underdown and Isabella Lathan listening to Mrs. Gilmore
Creative Writing Club started with Lynette DeVoe, an English teacher who taught AP Lit, English 3 and 4, and Creative Writing. After retiring, that responsibility was passed onto Tori Ramsey, who is also an English teacher, focusing on English 1, Creative Writing, and AP Lit. Recently, the club has been passed over once again to Kayla Gilmore, who teaches English 3, along with Honors English 1 & 2. Over the years, the premise of the club has also changed. What started as a club to publish students’ writing has slowly turned into one just for writing overall.
“…It was under her, I believe, that it was Blue and White Ink and they did all of that publishing, so it’s kind of her brain child. A few years ago, she retired, and of course, it has to go to someone, so that’s when the saga of the Ramsey-Gilmore time began,” Ramsey said.
Because of COVID, then the funky 21-22 year between then and now, the publishing part of Creative Writing has died out, the name changing along with it. COVID messed up a lot of things – with all clubs, Creative Writing specifically being almost non-existent in the 2020-2021 school year. It grew more last year, but now, it’s larger than it’s been in awhile, though some feel not all the change is good.
“We’ve done a lot more writings, there’s a lot more ideas thrown out, I think people are also being more vocal about how they feel about the topics that we’re writing about, for example with the Homecoming parade, we had some disagreements, which isn’t bad, and I think that’s super important that people speak up and everything” Julia Villa said.
When constructing the club, Gilmore didn’t think too deeply about it, going off the information she knew from the year before, and growing onto it more.
“I had taken over for one week last year and thought maybe this could be something fun, that went over very well and I thought maybe we could continue something like that,” Gilmore said. “I looked up different types of ways to get students writing prompts, styles, different methods of getting kids to write, like our times, sentence starters, and round tables,”
Esports was one of the main reasons why Gilmore had taken over any of the club meets last year, the game days often overlapping with the Creative Writing Club meetings, making it difficult for Ramsey to do one or the other.
“It was that we’d have games on the days that we had already scheduled meetings for Creative Writing, or when it came time for events, like the carnival for Student Council, both wanted to have events at the carnival, and that made it very difficult to decide which I was supposed to do, and how much time I could give to one group or another, cause I did not want to neglect either.”
Ramsey has also said that her duties as a teacher had been getting increasingly difficult whilst trying to run both clubs, most of her time to grade or do other things that needed to be done being taken over by the two clubs.
“It didn’t leave me a lot of time to do some of the things I needed to do at the end of the day as a teacher, which makes things hard,” Ramsey said.
Despite the troubles that Ramsey had running the club, Gilmore accepted the offer of taking it over almost automatically.
“The previous person, Ms. Ramsey, was getting a lot more responsibilities after school with Esports, so she wasn’t able to commit as much time to Creative Writing Club. she kind of reached out to me and said ‘Maybe would you like to be this person, it’s getting harder for me with other priorities’ and I said ‘Yeah, oh yeah, I can do that,’” Gilmore said.
