The annex! A magical place filled with the fervent creation of stories and a lot of groaning & banging your head on the wall.

Every Wednesday, since my first day in Creative Writing over three years ago, the elderly senior class would lock themselves into the annex to work on their theses. Even as a junior planning the topic of my own thesis, I was still in so much awe of this mysterious tradition. Just you wait, the seniors would tell us, soon this will be you. 

Yet even this past summer as I was toiling over my characters and worrying over page counts, it didn’t feel quite real yet. As I greeted my classmates on the first day of school and smiled at the new freshman’s nervousness, I felt like I was just doing another creative writing assignment, just returning after another restful summer, and just going to keep doing the same thing that I had been ever since I was the nervous freshman on the first day of high school.

And then—the annex. After community bonding weeks at the beginning of the school year, seniors in creative writing are banished into the annex with the senior thesis coordinator to make the first steps at turning whatever incoherent word soup they drafted over the summer into the neat and tidy book that will be read at the end of the year senior thesis reading. Filled with workshops, peer editing, workshopping, and more, this week is an intro to the weekly thesis workshops that the seniors have every Wednesday for the rest of the year. This was when the realization hit me, as we sat discussing the sliminess levels of my friend’s main character, I suddenly understood how all the past years of seniors felt: we’re old as hell!

This light bulb moment got me thinking about how cool creative writing’s structure is. Yes, it does feel like just yesterday that we were all freshmen with iffy haircuts who didn’t know what iambic pentameter is, but when I take a closer look I can see how much we’ve managed to pack into the past three plus years. Thesis writing seemed like such a far off thing when I was an underclassman, but that’s the beauty of how creative writing works, and how magical it is to keep growing with the same group of people for four straight years. Every analysis that ended in laughter over someone’s completely unrelated tangent, every afternoon spent after school abusing our whiteboard privileges, every museum trip we’ve ended with a random talk about bugs on the train ride home, every lazy day spent in a patch of sun in the botanical gardens like a pile of kittens, every poem we’ve watched each other cry over, every day we’ve spent not saying anything to each other because four years is a long and tiring time, every confession, every mundane conversation, and everything under the sun has led us to these quiet days spent on the final thing we will write for creative writing. This assignment doesn’t just feel like another thing to check off the list before I graduate, it’s a culmination of everything that I’ve learned being surrounded by such a beautiful class of writers. And while at the end of the day this is a solo project whose content we’ll have to cry over in our own bedrooms at three o’clock in the morning, there is still that tradition. That tradition where, every Wednesday, as we meet to curse our last-month selves for not doing better time-management planning, I am reminded that even though this is our last year together, we are still spending the whole thing as we’ve spent our entire time here: together.