By Gabriel Millen
March 26, 2021

The Creative Writing Club (CWC) at GCC is a small group but offers a lot for those looking to find their strengths as a writer, rehash old ideas, or develop new ones.

Members can also expect much less predictable benefits. Whether you’re a leader striving to pave your way, or a member wanting to learn from others, everyone can say they walked out with something they never knew they needed.

Anna Kubiak is quite familiar with this phenomenon. As a member and leader since last fall, she has developed a genuine mutuality with the CWC. “I guess just really being in a leadership role is about representing and knowing people and then presenting their ideas,” Kubiak said. She said she practices her leadership skills at Student Government meetings at GCC.

The CWC has remained entirely online since the necessity arose because of COVID-19. To Kubiak, this ended up being a major advantage due to not being particularly close to GCC’s campus centers. “So, when everything went online, and sort of, the other activities that I was doing and the things that I was a part of kind of shut down, it opened up a very unique opportunity for me to become more engaged with the college, because everything was virtual,” Kubiak said.

Kubiak and her fellow members, including Club Advisor and Assistant Professor of English and Cinema Shawn Adamson, certainly took advantage of the online component. Kubiak said that the CWC uses an online blog to serve as a breeding ground for the group’s ideas and prompts for each other. Whether it’s poetry, short stories, or the start of a novel, everyone is encouraged to write their heart out.

Adamson also posts photo prompts to the club’s blog. These pictures are selected to elicit emotion, and members set the scene with their words or describe what feeling they associate with the image. Members can leave it at that or build on any further inspiration they get from the activity. Kubiak really made it clear that all of them want to make each other more vivid and spirited writers whenever possible.

The CWC also tackles larger projects together. The first of which was an anthology project, where each of the group members contributes a part of a story, and then it’s stitched together into one.

Members of the Club use writing and the meetings to de-stress. “In our meetings, it’s pretty much an open ground to just talk about whatever we want to talk about, and have everyone contribute,” Kubiak said, “and by the end of the day, there’s enough of each of us in the project that it really does build a sense of community.”

If you are interested in what the CWC is doing or you’d like to read some of their work, go to their webpage at: https://gcccreativewriting.blogspot.com/