Even before I’d entered the Creative Writing program at RASOTA, I had been made aware of the infamous “lit crits,” or literary critiques. I was told how challenging and high stakes they were, my fellow Creative Writers talking about pulling all-nighters and laboring for hours when writing them. Which is why I became anxious when Heather, our art lead, told us that we were going to be starting our lit crits. Thankfully this year, since she had noticed how much people struggled on this assignment, she decided to do things differently. Instead of having everyone stress out on their own, we had time to work on our lit crits collaboratively throughout the week. Heather gave us a small packet of poetry that we read together in class. That night, we all chose the poems we would write about and annotated them until there wasn’t a single space left on the sheet. I chose the poem “Supermoon,” by Abby E. Murray, a beautiful piece about a mother and daughter staring at a blue supermoon. In class the next day, we discussed our thoughts about the poem and had in-depth conversations about the meanings each of us perceived. Analyzing this writing was unlike anything I had ever done before. I had never thought so deeply about a piece of literature. As I looked around the Creative Writing classroom, I felt overwhelmed with how wholesome the whole scene was. A group of students in one corner expressing their love for poetry, a group in another corner discovering the meaning of life. I was overjoyed to see my classmates so passionate. Writing the lit crit itself was just as difficult as I had anticipated, but the process of exploring these pieces of art proved to me that Creative Writing is a place of gratitude, humanity, deep thinking, and is such a blast!