Kenyon College’s Young Writers Workshop (Opinion Piece)
By Bobin Park
Ascension Hall
KENYON COLLEGE YOUNG WRITERS
Alongside the drily welcoming stalks of crops, the camp bus carried the ten or twenty-something high schoolers deeper into the Ohio valleys until houses finally dotted next to the road. Gambier, Ohio was where Kenyon College welcomed its fresh batch of young writers every summer.
The high-school literature community, unlike the marine corp’s logo: ‘the few, the not-particularly-proud’, boasted considerable opportunities for college writing workshops over the summer. The ones in Kenyon and Iowa along with a handful of others were known as the most prestigious.
When I first began writing, I had not expected many opportunities to be available, especially due to my status as a “young” writer. I could not work on long pieces because of schedules and a lot of writing competitions had expensive dues and set wordcounts. On the other hand, I was pleasantly surprised at the abundance of college programs that high school students could sign up for. The concentration on growth rather than competition and publishing proved to be helpful. It also provided valuable lessons about the literary industry as a whole. My experience at writing camp this year made me believe that summer camps are necessary components of education.
Going to these summer camps, not even just writing ones, are quintessentially the experience component of your learning. It offers you a vision of how you would look as one of those people in the camp, pursuing the program as an occupation in the future.
My time at Kenyon this year was an alternate universe where I was not plagued by unwanted summer homework and part-time jobs but where I was free to leisurely explore my literary passions. As an advent writer who loiters around creative writing and journalism, the place was welcoming to writers who were unsure of the style of writing they wanted to pursue. The rest of my peers also shared some of my uncertainties. Some of them didn’t know what style of writing they liked. Some didn’t know whether they were good at writing or art or both. Some didn’t know why they were there when their admission pieces were, in their opinions, utterly ridiculous.
Like everyone else, I had only been slightly confident in my writing skills before Kenyon and didn’t see a future for myself in literature. Writing had always been a small hobby on the side yet at Kenyon, I saw the number of writers that were utterly devoted to this uncertain path and this unquantitative craft.
The pessimistic me had known before that I could never make a living in literature unless I was prepared for financial hardship perhaps for the rest of my life. And I wasn’t. I was already pulling part-time jobs to support my single/working mom who, in turn, was working to fund my siblings’ tuition fees. But my time as a young writer showed me the ropes of being a young writer and the infectious passion of being surrounded by likewise passionate writers. From the free writing in antique gothic classrooms to the Wiggin Coffeehouse with its Indie music playlist and wooden desks, the small campus revolved around something I had previously thought to be insignificant: literature.