By: Devynn Brown
Ms. Link is Redwood’s Lit and Expressions teacher. She has a deep passion of reading books and an endless love for writing.
When Ms. Link was 11 years old, she was on vacation in Santa Cruz with her family. She had grabbed a pad of paper, and the next thing she knew, she was writing a poem. She didn’t know what had gotten into her, but from that point on, she had loved to write.
Her favorite author is Nathaniel Hawthorne. She has enjoyed too many books to pick a favorite. Novels are her “favorite thing to read in the whole wide world.”
She finds inspiration everywhere. People, fiction, real/fake things all inspire her. When writing slam poetry she writes a lot about her family. She writes especially a lot about her big sister.
Something Ms. Link has come to learn over her creative writing journey is that she didn’t realize just how much she had come to love teaching it. She says “I love it. I love it more every year. Every time I teach it, it feels new. The new set of students each year never cease to impress me with their talents.” Her absolute favorite part is “watching a new writer grow. It does my heart good.” She also believes that “hanging out with creative people is fun”
Finding the time to write and read is the biggest struggle that comes with creative writing. She loves to teach it and it makes her want to write, but a lot of her time is dedicated to teaching and grading.
She says that for students the biggest struggle is “finding a way in for the student who has no confidence and has never done this before.” Starting the creative writing path can be very nerve racking, especially sharing out your work. However, Ms. Link is always finding ways to make it more “accessible and comfortable” for her students.
Advice that Ms Link would give to a student interested in taking this class is “be prepared to work. The class is fun and enjoyable” but will take effort. However, if reading and writing is torture for you this might not be the best fit.
“If you think you would like to try it, then you can have fun with the experiment”
Ms. Link
The best thing a writer can do to grow is to just “sit down and write everyday.” You can start a poem and then leave it and go back and finish…”it doesn’t have to flow out of you all at once.” Sometimes the problem for creative writers isn’t that they have writer’s block, but that they have too many ideas and cannot fixate on one.
Ms. Link has written a novel under literary fiction. It actually happened by accident. She was in a graduate school seminar and they were supposed to bring a certain number of pages to workshop. So, she filled up her pages with something she write off the cuff.
She returned to class with five pages of work and didn’t expect her writing to go anywhere. However, everyone at the seminar was enthrallment asked “what happens next in the story?” Each week she wrote more to the story and her teacher inspired her to make it into a novel.
Fans of reading, writing, or creativity will certainly grow in this class.