As the annual Trinity University Festival of the Arts (TUFA) drew to a close, the creative writing program hosted a poetry and prose reading on Nov. 13. The event featured 15 students, each giving three minutes to share their original work. Samara Gerstle and Devon Bellamy, senior English majors who serve as the creative writing department interns, organized and emceed the evening.*
Andrew Porter, author, director of Trinity’s creative writing program and professor of English, said the reading event began with the inaugural TUFA in 2023. Since then, Porter said the event has welcomed students from a wide range of academic disciplines to share their stories.
“[The reading] has become a really nice tradition where we all get together during the busiest week of the semester, have a little break and share work,” Porter said. “The exciting thing about the event is that you never really know what individual students are going to read. It’s not rehearsed, and it’s always a surprise.”
Since the release of his book, “The Imagined Life,” Porter has done reading events across the country. He said TUFA is a rare opportunity for students to practice reading their work aloud to an audience.
“There’s something different about the experience of hearing a story read to you in a live situation, versus reading it on the page or even experiencing it as an audiobook,” Porter said. “It’s nice to hear a variety of different types of creative work: poetry, fiction, nonfiction … It’s a very dynamic event.”
Among the student readers was JaeAnn Hines, sophomore accounting major. She said that she signed up for the event in the spur of the moment and was nervous to share her poem, “Down Down Down,” until she stepped onto the stage.
“The bird wants to wait for another day, but animals are watching. It doesn’t want to disappoint them, so then it just goes for it,” Hines said. “I intentionally left it [open-ended] because sometimes people push me and I have a lot of fun, but other times people push me and I do things that are definitely out of my comfort zone.”
Hines said that Trinity’s creative writing program reshaped her understanding of what writing could be. She described the feeling as akin to the bird in her story.
“I’ve learned that writing doesn’t really have any rules we can follow,” Hines said. “I’ve felt encouraged to spread my wings and find new writing forms, like poetry, that I enjoy. I don’t feel the pressure to follow strict conventions, like every rhyme has to be the same, no slant rhymes, the meter.”
Kate Kuper, junior communication major, also read at the event. Unlike Hines, this semester was her first foray into creative writing at Trinity. She said that Porter encouraged her to share an excerpt of her short story, “The American Dream,” a dark comedy inspired by Roald Dahl’s “Lamb to the Slaughter” and Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.”
“I wanted to showcase the pressures and expectations of a housewife in the 50s,” Kuper said. “Cindy has this to-do list of things she needs to accomplish, but one wrong thing that Charles, her husband, does offsets her entire schedule for the rest of the day. That was her breaking point.”
Kuper said that Cindy’s unraveling throughout the story is symbolic of the societal pressures that women, especially stay-at-home mothers, experience.
“The piece was about motherhood, criticizing the expectations and overlooked pressures they go through,” Kuper said. “Especially during that time period, women were expected to be perfect all the time while also having to maintain the entire household. I wanted to hone in on that and do a funny but also dark twist to it.”
Although Kuper and Hines are not English majors, both said they plan to perform at next year’s TUFA reading. Porter said all students are encouraged to do the same.
*Samara Gerstle is the Trinitonian’s Editor-in-Chief. Devon Bellamy is the Pulse Editor. Andrew Porter is on the Board of Campus Publications.
