LIFESTYLE
Crafting a Canvas for Creative Connection Travis Whitt
T
eaching young people how to creatively write through the last two years has been a fever dream. Or nightmare, I can’t decide which. As a teacher and a coach, I pride myself on my ability to bring people together. When we left school in March of 2020, everything just stopped. All the momentum, all the excitement, all the creation, all the connection just ceased to exist. Though this was not a unique problem, it has certainly been the most crippling moment of my career.
“Everything just stopped. All the momentum, all the excitement, all the creation, all the connection just ceased to exist.” The repercussions of a year of loneliness are still vibrating through my classroom. I teach differently than I used to because my students learn differently than they did pre-pandemic. The act of teaching has lost the personability and connection that it used to have, at least for now. Students are not as willing to be open and build relationships because they’ve seen just how easy those connections can be severed. So, imagine my excitement when, for the first time since the pandemic, I sat down face-to-face with a brand new group of creative writing students and saw the fire in their eyes that has been missing from my classroom for far too long.
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Sitting around a table in the middle of winter is one of my favorite things to do. Especially when those that share the space with you are just as hungry to create and connect with their community. This moment in my classroom was a catalyst for a nostalgic flashback that I am still far too young to yearn for. Nevertheless, sharing this table with a collection of the most creative kids I have come to know transported me back to the winter of 2016. In hindsight it is incredibly clear to me that I needed to lay off the caffeine. It was late, but I was fired up. Most likely coming from my favorite professor’s night class, I made an exasperated call to my editorial team with an invitation to a meeting in Anderson. For some reason, still unbeknownst to me to this day, they all showed up, notebooks ready for whatever I had to say. I didn’t realize it then, but those nights with my team were some of the most influential moments of my life. Cloe Gray, Sean Hanson, and Rebecca Higgins listened with open minds and were willing to do the work to change our publication, then Pipers InDepth, to something much different. When we took the magazine over that year it was established as an award-winning campus magazine, but it felt like a pamphlet created by the admissions department. It covered a ton of impressive people on campus, but to me they were not the people who made my dayto-day life on campus interesting. I wanted to shine a spotlight on the artists and weirdos that did all the cool stuff that motivated me to create. I shared this idea with my amazing editorial team and they were on board immediately.
I wanted to shine a spotlight on the artists and weirdos
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