Spencer Kennedy: Hi, I’m Spencer Kennedy, and I’m here with a very special guest today.
Ivy Hoffman: Hi! I’m Ivy, class of 2027, a prospective English literature major, and I am the president of The First Page here at Swarthmore college!
SK: So, what is The First Page?
IH: It’s a creative writing club! We’re here to provide a safe space for people who like creative writing, no matter the genre or experience level. We meet once a week. Students show up, we hang out, talk, and then usually we start off the meeting with some kind of writing warm-up or icebreaker.
SK: Writing warm-up–that’s interesting. What are some of those?
IH: My favorite is a sort of writing musical chairs, where someone writes a sentence on a piece of paper and then passes off their paper to someone else to add on another sentence. It’s fun to see what kinds of stories we get from the amalgamation of all the members putting their heads together.
SK: After the warmup, what do you all do?
IH: I give a prompt, and they write something using that prompt (but it’s not that serious; if people want they can write something without that prompt, it’s just a nice guideline for your writing.) We write for about 45 minutes, we talk about what we wrote and the experience of writing, and then we leave. Keep it simple.
SK: How do you come up with prompts, and what’s your favorite one you’ve come up with?
IH: They often reflect what I’m thinking about that week; it’s admittedly very self-centered. On one of my favorite days I remember, the warm-up exercise involved imagining stories for photographs I found in the Delaware archives (shoutout to my hometown, Wilmington, Delaware, greatest place on Earth), and the prompt I gave expanded on that; it involved running with one of those collective stories we had come up with. Anything that gets us moving and interacting with each other is really fun.
SK: What’s your favorite story someone’s written?
IH: I’ve been trying to get people to share more; it’s scary to share your writing. But often afterwards members will share it with me personally, which I love. I think that a lot of people who write want their work to be read, it’s just so scary to share it. So I can’t share those with you!
We have a lot of different writing styles, writing ideas–we have one member who writes fanfiction. I can’t pick a favorite. I love them all. That’s one of the things I love about the club; since the writing has just come from your head to the paper, it’s extra vulnerable, because you haven’t been able to polish it at all. I think that that raw word-vomit can be really interesting.
SK: You are the president of this club; what does that look like on an individual level, and what is the broader experience of running a club here at Swat?
IH: Honestly, I have a blast! I’m in a unique position because the first page is a Tri-College (Tri-Co) club, meaning we have branches in Bryn Mawr and Haverford, so we don’t have the traditional president-vice president-secretary setup; we have more of a board situation.
I meet with the Office of Student Engagement (OSE) to talk about the basics of running a club and being registered (different from being chartered, which means that you get a budget the school gives you). There are a lot of resources on campus for running a club; you can reserve spaces pretty easily and you can always send questions to the OSE.
For my particular duties as president of a writing club, I write a general outline of every meeting and how I want it to go; I have a document of writing exercises gathered through my many years of experience (interviewer’s note: she has .7 years), and then come up with the prompt. I try to get the exercise and prompt to fit the theme of what I want that meeting to be emotions-wise. I’ll also spend some time sending emails, checking room reservations, and the like.
SK: Now that you have us all hooked, how does a prospective member join?
IH: Email thefirstpageofficial@gmail.com for any questions or details. (Bystander: I like how you have “official” in there, like someone is trying to pretend to be you and you have to fight them off.) Or someone can just come to the meeting! We’re always happy to meet new people.
SK: I will see you at the next meeting then! Hopefully, I will see you (prospective audience), too.