We’ve just welcomed the first 90 of the most talented high-school aged writers to one of the most beautiful places in the world to write for the next two weeks: The Kenyon Review Young Writers Workshop in Gambier, Ohio. The 2011 program will host writers from 40 states and seven foreign countries. The geographic and socioeconomic diversity in the program, a hallmark of its success in recent years, comes through significant support from donors who share our passion for education and the written word. What they’ve enabled the program to become is truly remarkable: through fundraising from the annual KRALA dinner, annual foundation support, and individual gifts, we will be awarding nearly $125,000 in financial aid this summer to worthy young writers with demonstrated need.
While at Kenyon, the writers participate in an intensive two-week series of workshops designed to help them become better, more productive writers and more insightful thinkers about their work and the work of their peers. For more than nineteen years, Young Writers has provided a lively, supportive environment where these students can stretch their talents, discover new strengths, and challenge themselves in the company of peers who share their creative interests.
The source texts for the program’s curriculum are culled from the back run of the Kenyon Review–this year, in addition to many other texts, we’ll read stories by Flannery O’Connor, Don DeLillo, Abby Frucht, and Patrick Tobin; we’ll read poems by Alice Fulton, Dylan Thomas, Mahmoud Darwish, George Starbuck and Allison Joseph, and nonfiction by Colleen Kinder. With a focused, generative curriculum, students will leave at the end of the two weeks with a notebook (Ink! Paper!) stuffed with ideas and starts, as well as a few polished pieces and a framework to think about revision and future work. And many, many new friends.
But they’ll also leave with more, if the first nineteen years of the program are any indication. Most will leave having had their first significant experience in a community of writers, a community formed by what the writers have in common (their passion for hard work; their commitment to experiment; their willingness to aspire contagiously; their mutual risk in sharing early drafts) rather than what is different among them (their high schools, their geographies, their home lives.) They’ll have had an experience where the community cared for them and what they could do on the page.
Much continues to be made of the impending doom of the existing publishing model. The ground is shifting beneath our feet, and the only thing we can be certain of is that this will continue for the foreseeable future. But it’s hard to worry about any of it during the summer the Gambier, during these workshops. We get to reaffirm each summer what we already know: the writing will be just fine.