WILL CONDENSE INTO MY OWN WORDS, TAKE OR FIND PICTURES OF GRAPHITE MEETINGS AND EVENTS, MAKE A BRIEF LIST OF THE EVENTS THEY'VE HOSTED IN THEIR FIRST YEAR AND OF OFFICERS. THIS IS FROM AN INTERVIEW WITH KENDRA SANDERS
Graphite began out of the need for a creative writing club on campus. Professor Julia Johnson was very much interested in filling this gap and UK. She approached Katie Cross with the prospect, and I quickly got involved. Before Graphite, there was Pleiade, but the club sort of crashed and burned soon after it began. So there was a period at UK where no CW club existed.
Basically, our purpose is to bring the UK creative writing community closer together and to also connect the UK community to the creative writing community in the greater Lexington area. We want to create a safe, fun, and comfortable place for writers to share and grow their craft.
We rely on social media and classroom/email announcements as promotion. We also make posters for events, which we hang up around campus. All of these things seem to work pretty well. I think the most difficult of all of them is social media though. It’s difficult to sound hip and cool on things like Facebook.
All kinds of students attend Graphite meetings! It’s really great. We get English majors and Engineering majors—there’s a large range. We also get regular members who attend. But some drop off and some come every once in a while. I think we need to do more workshop related meetings to stimulate interest. It’s a challenge to hold effective meetings that make people want to come back. We’re in a bit of a learning curve right now. This is the first time anything has really lasted this long as far as creative writing clubs go (in the recent past, at least).
We play word games and such to stimulate creativity in the writing process. Sometimes we just have meetings in which we write or share work the entire time. We also hold large, well-organized readings by established authors like Gurney Norman and Ed McClanahan. We held UK Night at the Carnegie Center this year and all of UK’s cw faculty came (except Frank, whose very busy as Poet Laureate!). I think students really like the big events, but I’m not sure about meetings. Katie and I are still trying to get a feel for things.
The Creative Writing Center definitely supports us, but we don’t have a close relationship. Maybe little fliers on tables, advertising Graphite, would be useful. But beyond that, I’m not sure about what sort of support I’d like to see in addition to their current support.
I was vaguely aware of the Creative Writing Corner, but only because I was involved in starting Graphite. Otherwise, I never would have known it existed. It wasn’t really a model for Graphite, because it didn’t seem to have a lot of success. We also wanted our group to be more intimate and club-like, so the “drop-in” structure wasn’t really what we were going for. I do like the idea of a small publication though. But we do already have Shale on campus. I also would like to get grad students more involved in Graphite. I think that’s where we are currently falling short.
