This year’s Writer’s Week featured Menlo alumni, book authors, and Menlo students. Read below to find out more. Photo courtesy of Pete Zivkov. 

By Abby Wolfenden

This past past week, March 6 through 10, Menlo held its annual writer’s week, a week designed to encourage and educate students about various styles of writing. The week was led by English teachers Maura Sincoff, who is also the writing center instructor, and Patty Carleton. Menlo had a large variety of speakers share their writing experience each day at Martin Hall.

On Monday, Menlo alum Antonio Lopez came to speak about both his time at Menlo and his unique style of poetry. “[Lopez] went to Menlo and started loving writing during his time here, but he also used it as a way of processing his experience as a Latino at Menlo. His experience and his poetry was super interesting [because] he mixes both Spanish and English in his poems. It’s an unusual format that Menlo students aren’t used to, and [it] exposed them to a diverse voice,” Sincoff said. Students got to hear about how the Menlo experience can influence a person’s writing and creativity.

Similarly, on Thursday, students listened to another Menlo alum, Nick Casey, who has worked for The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times as a journalist. “His work at The New York Times has involved lots of travel, especially to South America, where he has ventured into the jungles to talk with drug lords. He’s done some fascinating work,” Sincoff said. Casey was very appreciative of his experiences at Menlo, as they set him on a path of writing.

On Tuesday and Thursday, Menlo was able to host two novelists, Marcia Sterling and Parker Peevyhouse, to discuss their journeys in fiction writing. Sterling had multiple careers involving writing, while Peevyhouse is a science fiction writer. “[Sterling] talked about how she went from being a journalist to a lawyer to a high school teacher and now a novelist. She talked about how for her, writing came from all kinds of losses in her life. [Writing] goes beyond being a novelist, it crosses all her fields,” Sincoff said.

Sterling has written a novel called One Summer in Arkansas and emphasized the importance of writing as a life skill. Peevyhouse, who recently published her debut science fiction book, Where Futures End, focused on the imagination. “She led students through a cool series of imaginative exercises, where science fiction predicts future problems that come from technology and how that process worked out in her writing of her science fiction book,” Sincoff said.

Friday was an opportunity for student writers to share. For many students, writing is an important part of their self expression. All in all writer’s week was extremely successful and helped to promote different styles of writing throughout Menlo.