This Friday marked the end of this year’s first Creative Writing artist-in-resident, Jeff Mooney. In a week of “writing through sound,” Jeff gave us the assignments “a time when you disagreed with someone” and “The Voices in my Head,” leaving them open-ended, allow us to take the prompt in whichever direction we choose and reflect the best of us. His questions brought us through class-wide discussions and debates on justice and intuition. His classes consisted of a variety of ways to fit ourselves together within a group using rhytm, and then to pull away from what everyone else is doing and to focus on ourselves. The exercises with rhythms and tunes offered us new ways of portraying our writing, different ways to interpret our words.

“Hopeful,” Jeff answered, when I asked how he felt about teaching our class. “It feels hopeful when people get together to talk and do something about things they care for. It was exciting to discover the diverse ways people articulated their thoughts.”

It was an experience I doubt anyone of us would be forgetting soon.

-Midori