FAIRMONT — With any luck, a new creative writing club will join Fairmont State University’s pantheon of existing writing clubs next year.
In a collaboration between written arts and visual arts with the Department of Humanities, Assistant Professor of English Robert Powers and Joel Dugan, chair of Architecture, Art and Design a showcase of their students’ work from spring semester debuted on May 14. The showcase displayed a fusion of print and visual art, both serving to tell a story a student writer wanted to tell while adding a visual element to express the ideas in the text.
The event served as a soft launch for the future club.
“I’m hoping to build and grow a creative writing club,” Powers said. “West Virginia is blessed in that you find hidden gem after hidden gem in every single little enclave.”
The showcase was the culmination of work students made from a fiction writing workshop throughout the semester. Twelve students presented work. After the student’s in Powers’ class wrote a piece of flash fiction, they presented it to Dugan’s class. From there, Dugan’s students would pick an aspect or element from the text to illustrate. The goal was to capture the narrative visually.
Sophomore Elisha Dailey, 20, said after she and her classmates submitted their pieces to Dugan’s class, Dugan’s students provided snippets of the companion art. Dailey’s work was titled “Grief.” Writers didn’t really get a say in the direction beyond what was already provided. At the end, they all met in class and both groups had the chance to talk to each other about how the work was interpreted from the writer to the artist.
Dailey is an English Creative Writing major who is minoring in art.
“I found it very beneficial,” she said. “And just awesome, because I like to see how other people interpret my writing, and it really gives me a new light on how I describe things, where I need to improve or add more stuff.”
Dugan said this collaboration between English and visual art began as a way to try and find ways for art students to overcome any writing anxieties. Dugan said often, artists can visualize a piece but they don’t know how to add words to it. The partnership itself was born out of a professional development session for faculty that Dugan led and Powers attended.
“Robert Powers was telling me about how uncomfortable he was, and I professed to him that sometimes in a written environment, I am also very uncomfortable,” Dugan said. “But I felt it was important to see the effectiveness of story, particularly to illustration students when the two would be married together.”
Being able to interpret text into visual art has commercial applications as well.
Powers said creative writing has applications for marketing and branding. Powers himself has a past as a writer for a multinational telecommunications company, where his job was to translate the musings, scribblings and communications of engineers and translate them into marketing and branding that could impress customers who were seeking to throw millions or even billions into a project done by Powers’ company. Their success literally hinges on creativity in the written arts.
Dugan added there’s visual illustrations that go with book covers, or splash illustrations on the inside of a magazine. But it’s also important to remember the humanistic aspect of creativity, which doesn’t exist to simply make money for someone else. Dugan said the university’s goal is to impart to students that everyone has different lenses through which they experience the world.
“This challenge gets students to identify the limitations of their own lens and to try to put themselves in someone else’s shoes or perspective, and to be able to do that with respect and admiration,” Dugan said. “It’s all about identifying those lenses, seeing the boundaries of each one of our points of view but understanding the importance of the moments when they overlap or interchange.”
