I was talking to a girl last week who told me how interested she was in writing. I asked her what kind, and she mentioned fiction and creative writing being her favorites. Being a creative writing major myself, I got really excited.
“What’s your major?” I asked, expecting English or journalism to be her answer.
“Marketing!” she said.
“…”
Here she was, charismatic about writing, full of ideas, intrigued by my own stories, and she never got to share any of her work.
It was the next day when I heard about Penmoot, the new event on campus.
Penmoot (Moot being from the Anglo-Saxon word “meet” = Meeting of the Pens) is a creative writing group hosted by Honors students in the Honors lounge every other Thursday night. The group was started by Christopher Hearn, a junior history major and president of the Honors Student Association at Union. Hearn did a lot of creative writing in high school, so he and his classmates shared a lot of their writing together, which led to them continuing to do so even after they no longer took the class. It was this dedication and partnership that made his writing better. When he came to Union, he noticed there wasn’t any place for writers to share their work without being in a class. But that wasn’t the only source of motivation for the creation of Penmoot.
“As part of the Honors Community, a lot of people on campus don’t really get what the Honors Community is about,” Hearn said. “I was trying to think of ways for Honors to mingle with other things. Honors can seem very exclusive, but we don’t want it to be that way. I had creative writing on the brain so I pitched this idea of, as Honors students, host this thing for students in our Honors lounge but make it open to everyone.”
Penmoot is quickly gaining traction. Several professors have talked to both Hearn and his fellow Penmoot founder, Danielle Chalker, a sophomore English major, about what it is and how more students want to get involved.
“I want there to be room for dialogue, not just a workshop,” Hearn said. “Workshop” is a term writers use for when they put all of their heart and soul on a page and then drag it down to the town square where other writers can give it a good stoning.
“This isn’t a workshop. There are places you can go for writing workshops, but we wanted something a little different.” (Those places are ENG 312, ENG 425 and ENG 426 for anyone interested.) Luckily, Penmoot is a little more personal.
“The idea is that you are getting feedback from people you trust,” Hearn said. “Feedback on your writing from people you trust is a lot easier to accept. Writing is a really personal thing for people. It’s hard to separate criticism with your technique from criticism for you as a person. I really want Penmoot to be a friendly dialogue. Not ‘hey, here are some things to fix in your writing.’”
Penmoot isn’t just a poetry reading in Portland, either. It is an actual place to have encouragement. It is not just an anonymous poetry reading. According to Hearn, people either love creative writing and have no one to share it with, or they love creative writing and they don’t have the accountability they need in order to make them keep writing. Penmoot is designed to provide both of those things.
“When people write, they feel a satisfaction of knowing that they’ve written something well, and I don’t want the angle to be that they have to write in order to be graded,” Hearn explained. “I hope there is a community of people who want to use writing as a form of fun and expression.”
The first Penmoot meeting was last Thursday, moderated by Danielle Chalker.
“The atmosphere is pretty chill,” Chalker said. “We sit on couches in the Honors lounge and talk about story ideas and listen to people read their work. Penmoot is for new writers. We don’t expect you to have been writing forever or to have finished anything. If you love to write, come. You don’t have to be part of some mysterious inner circle.”
To read, writers can bring their work of reasonable length to the meeting, somewhere between three to five pages of prose or a few poems. There are some guidelines for content, which will be handed out at the next meeting.
“The goal is for writers at Union to have a welcoming community in which to share work and make it even better,” Chalker said. “We believe in the power of writing to communicate truth and beauty.”
Writing is something that is very personal and, frankly, scary. Penmoot is a great opportunity for people of any major who are interested in writing, scripting, poetry or any sort of creative prose to come share their work in a safe and fun environment. Writers need encouragement. We are emotional beings that need to be pep-talked and cheer-led all the time in order to continue working on our craft.
Talking about writing is just as important as writing. Often times, it is when we are talking about ourselves that we discover the most about ourselves, and the same rule applies to writing as well. Penmoot is a place where writers can do that without having their work flogged by critiques and grades. The small atmosphere helps make it a non-intimidating place where new writers can feel comfortable because writing is personal. Writing is always personal. Putting something that you thought, felt, dreamt, experienced or a plethora of other things on a page and then sharing it with everyone is one of the most vulnerable things you can do. Finding a place where that is welcomed and received with open arms is rare.
So for all you writers, potential writers, closet writers or wannabe writers, cease this opportunity and moot with the pens.
Photo Courtesy of Campbell Padgett
