blue moon held their second winter workshop last Wednesday, Jan. 26 in the Glover Alston Center to help draw awareness to the magazine before its submission deadline on Jan. 31.
blue moon staff hoped that a series of workshops would offer access to the peer editing and response normally only available to those in creative writing classes.
“We wanted to have one workshop that was before break where people could come and write and work on brainstorming their ideas, and then a second one right before the deadline where people could either start new ideas or workshop together to maybe refine what they were working on before,” said sophomore Eleanor Ellis, a blue moon staff member.
The first winter workshop was held before winter break in the Writing House, and was attended by about 20 students. blue moon also hosted a comic art workshop in the art building.
The workshop series is new this year for the magazine. According to blue moon editor-in-chief senior Lara Mehling, the magazine’s typical calendar of events focuses first semester on publicity and second semester on getting submissions.
“[We wanted] to have our publicity campaign be more interactive, and really give a face to blue moon and the staff,” said Mehling of the workshop series.
Martin Stolen, blue moon’s prose selection editor, hoped that by providing an open venue the new workshops would dispel the magazine’s past reputation as elitist.
“I don’t want student writers at Whitman to think that the workshops are meant to dictate what we, as prose and poetry staff members, think poems and prose should be,” said Stolen. “Part of what makes language so vital and engaging is its ability to express meaning in extraordinarily diverse and unfamiliar ways.”
Workshop participants enjoyed homemade apple cider and cookies while they worked with prompts such as “follow the lives of an acorn, a squirrel and a wolf.” At the end of the hour, the writers shared the ideas they had started. Junior Brynne Haug, who worked on a new prose piece during this event, described the process.
“I just started writing; I didn’t really have any ideas so I just started a story and it went ways I didn’t expect it to go,” said Haug.
Haug also attended the first workshop, where she broke from her usual prose habits to write poetry. Her only concern with the workshop was the low number of participants; of the dozen people there, more than half were blue moon staff members.
“It probably would be nice if there were more people who weren’t on staff,” said Haug. “It was just a little bit intimidating.”
Despite the low turnout, staff seemed positive about the workshop’s success. For Stolen, even just the process of putting on the workshop fulfilled the goal of raising awareness about the magazine.
“Whether or not people actually came, the past four days everyone’s been like, ‘Oh, you’ve got the workshop tonight, huh?'” said Stolen. “People know about the workshop and people know about blue moon just because I’ve been blasting the list serve, and people know we’re out and active on campus.”
Haug agreed that the workshop was valuable. Although she was unsure if she would submit to the magazine, she would attend another winter workshop.
“I like to write creatively, but I don’t have a lot of mental energy for it during school, so it’s nice to have a time when I feel like I’m allowed to do it, as opposed to having to think about school stuff,” said Haug.
