When it is time for a break from the typical schoolwork, many students turn to creative writing for a chance to relax. 

Morris Library sponsored the Little Grassy Literary Festival from April 16 to 18. The festival gave students the opportunity to hear authors give book readings, have their books signed, listen to fiction and poetry panels and ask questions.

The festival welcomed young writers, as well as the community, to learn more about the process and dedication becoming a published author entails.

A fiction panel was held the final day with authors Roxane Gay and Alex Shakar. Both spoke of their process of writing, editing, becoming published and the struggles they dealt with.

They said anyone who wants to, can write, and all types of creative writing can be inspirational.

“There’s so much good writing out there and it comes from so many different directions,” Shakar said.

With the spring semester coming to a close, most students do not have the time for breaks and personal hobbies. Some students, however, are able to blend their hobbies with their career goals to make for a better college experience.

Kayla Klugow, a sophomore from Amery, Wis., studying creativing writing and poetry, was not able to picture herself doing anything but that.

“I figured that if I love what I’m doing, then working hard for a job won’t be as stressful,” Klugow said.

Klugow said her passion for writing started as early as first grade when she would write out scripts and put on plays with her friends for the classroom.

“No one asked me to or anything,” she said. “I just would come to class with these weird animal drawings cut out of printer paper and have scripts written and pester the teacher until she’d let me grab a couple people and we’d put on the play.”

When she was around 10 years old, Klugow said she began to write stories. She began writing one called “Ginger Jacknife,” a story with somewhat of a blend between the “Harry Potter” series and the “Enchanted Forest Chronicles.”

“In late middle school, early high school, I definitely used poetry as a way to vent,” she said. “I still do that.”

She is not the only student who turns to writing as a way of expressing themselves. Many classes at SIU are offered to inspire and help artistic minds grow.

English Professor Edward Brunner teaches a different kind of creative writing course under the honors department titled “Comics Grow Up.” This class offers students a chance to learn more about creative writing in different forms other than poetry, short stories and novels, where comic books become a creative writing genre of its own.

Brunner said by teaching this form, he encourages students to broaden their creative writing skills by showing that what most think of as a “simple” piece of work, has much more passion in it.

“When students get into a form they know but have never handled, it almost naturally becomes a kind of problem-solving apparatus,” he said.

He said all the questions one has to ask in order to create the images in comics, such as “how do you draw your parents?” or “where does an adventure occur?” make a student able to create a form through their personal understandings.

“I’ve found that when a class is given the curiosity to look at a problem, and some tools to work with it, they often devise remarkable, smart and creative solutions that far exceed anything I could have anticipated,” Brunner said.

Brunner said he feels as if he has done his work as a teacher when his students take the ideas from class and continue to apply them.

Pinckney Benedict, a professor in the English department also turned his hobby into a career as both a published author and professor.

Benedict said he began reading when he grew up in southern West Virginia because he lived far from the next town with any entertainment. He liked reading so much he thought writing would be the next best thing to do, he said.

He said writing helped him filter his stress when he was in high school at a very academically rigorous boarding school. He would write goofy parodies with his friends to have a good laugh and take their minds off work.

“Second semester of my freshman year (in college), I took a really great creative writing workshop with a writer and it just completely changed my life,” Benedict said.

He learned from a nightmare he had as a child he enjoyed the experience of waking up and realizing it was not really happening, he said. It was this experience that led him to continue writing and turn his passion into a career.

“It was that feeling that I would have immediately after awakening from a nightmare knowing that I would like to cause other people to have something like that same experience,” Benedict said. “I would like to terrify them and make their lives stressful then also let them have the kind of relief that comes from realizing that something you were sure was happening isn’t quite terrible in the terms that it’s not really happening at all.”