By Felicia DeMatteo | Staff Writer
Last year, Salve junior Victoria Laureano created a student petition for those who would be interested in supporting a creative writing club on campus.
Like for any new club, she went through the process of filling out forms related to the club’s goals and how it adds uniqueness to the campus to submit to the Student Organization Recognition Committee. The creative writing club, called Modern Ink, was recognized second semester of last year as an official Salve Regina club.
Laureano, founder and president of the club, was involved from the beginning as she went through the recognition process and worked with interested students to create the mission and constitution of the club.
“The purpose of Modern Ink is to foster a creative environment that promotes and encourages all members to enhance and develop their creative writing skills,” Laureano says. She says that the club always welcomes new members and encourages students to introduce their own unique views, comment on the world around them, and give their own interpretations of life.
The club strives to provide a safe and encouraging atmosphere where people can express themselves around others who are passionate and share similar goals. Modern Ink wants students to find inspiration in the creativity of the other students.
Another important aspect of Modern Ink is to help students that would like to be future authors. It gives them the opportunity to work on their writing with the support of other writers, so that they develop the necessary skills to someday work towards having their own published pieces of literature that can be shared with the world.
“Providing writers with a place where they can feel comfortable enough to share their work with other students and express their individuality is essential to promoting diversity, harmony, and inspiration within the literary world,” Laureano says.
Modern Ink hosts workshops where members can write about a given prompt and listen to and critique each other. In doing so, the club hopes to take the aspects of what it means to be a writer and implement those skills in the writers while creating a strong, understanding, and supportive community, while still offering constructive criticism.
“This club allows students to express themselves in a purely creative way,” Laureano says. “It’s so important that students have an outlet for their creativity and thoughts when surrounded by the stress and seriousness of college life.
“Our club is a close-knit group of people that motivates, supports, and encourages each other to be ourselves and foster our creativity,” she says.
This semester, the club plans to host poetry and short-story readings on campus. They also hope to hold weekly write-ins in November, which is national novel writing month. These write-ins will motivate people interested in writing stories and novels to begin writing.
“In the short time that we have been recognized as a club thus far, we have formed such strong friendships and connections with the other members of the group,” Laureano says. “We feel comfortable writing and sharing our work with each other and learn so much from the feedback we get from fellow writers.”
Modern Ink is a club for any student that has ever be interested in writing, or has ideas they would like to get out onto paper.
