“Shouts and Confessions”

Sitting in a circle on the grassy lawn outside the College of General Studies, a group of 15 people laugh at a pedestrian running by on pogo shoes. Passersby would never guess that this group is a college-level creative writing class that is collaborating on a soon-to-be-published book.

The book, titled Shouts and Confessions, compiles true stories about various daily events, reflections on family, opinions on food and the occasional poem. The title was created by teaching fellow Catherine Con, who teaches the EN 202 class from which student writing is taken for the book.

Con said she was inspired by the openness of her students when discussing their personal experiences.

“At the end of each story, there’s a sense of self-discovery or identity,” Con said. “That’s related to the idea of shouting or coming to a place where you learn something about yourself.”

Insight into students’ stories

With an emphasis on short fiction stories, the book contains exclusively student-written pieces. Many are writing stories about personal challenges and family life, including relationships with grandmothers, father-daughter dynamics and the deaths of relatives.

Brittany Ring, a College of Communication sophomore, wrote about the internal struggles of a girl who moves from the Middle East to America and finds it difficult to balance the two cultures. Another piece, written by COM sophomore Chloe Director is about two girls who reevaluate their identities after returning to America from a trip to England.

COM junior Rima Butto and COM sophomore Victoria, “Tori,” Taylo wrote separate stories about the relationship between a girl and her father and how it changes over time.

COM sophomore Jamie Imperato also explored family dynamics in her piece about a girl’s relationship with her grandmother, which was inspired by a personal experience.

Other topics include inebriated adventures, urban isolation and alienation, futuristic dystopian societies and deception in New York in the early 1900s.

Cameron Brody, a COM sophomore, said the variety of people who drew from personal experiences and those who challenged themselves by writing something unfamiliar has given the book a diverse breadth of content.

Brody’s classmate, COM sophomore Daniel Stern, chose to push his personal boundaries and publish his story about a soldier and the struggles he faces upon returning from war.

“Dan’s never come home from war, but he’s really taken on the challenge of trying to put himself in that experience,” Brody said.

Community in a classroom

Many students said the sense of community fostered during the semester was unlike that of any other class at BU. Imperato said she was initially scared to take a three-hour class that was early in the morning, but was surprised by how much she enjoyed it.

“I feel like in a one-hour class or an hour and a half class, by the time you get into a stimulating discussion or topic, it’s already time to go,” Imperato said. “This class is three hours long, but it sometimes feels shorter than my other classes.”

With a field trip to the Museum of Fine Arts, class discussions about Passion Pit songs, doodling in “moon” journals — journals used to record weekly reflections about the moon — and exploration and analysis of poetry, students thrive on opportunities to get to know each other better. This helped the group become less of a class and more of a community.

“The photographs we viewed at the MFA that we based our poems on were very quiet and somber,” said Tom Vellner, a COM senior. “It was about the negative parts of urban life, so I feel that a lot of our poems went down a more somber path. We also listened to upbeat songs, and looked at happier aspects of that … With the poetry, songs and short stories, they’ve all led us to find our voice in different ways.”

Students were forced out of their comfort zones with weekly workshops where they read personal pieces aloud for the class to critique. After the second class, all the students became more honest with one another, said COM senior Alex Miller. Even with harsh critiques, class members were always positive and were quick to highlight one another’s strengths.

Miller said that his classmates’ voices became clear in the semester’s workshops, even if they defied expectations

“Cameron’s [voice] is completely Cameron’s,” Miller said. “But Tori’s is out of left field. It’s something that is so heavy.”

Several students acknowledged the lessons they learned from peer editing.

“No one was offended while we were critiquing everyone’s stories,” Ring said. “I wouldn’t want my story to be published in a book and then not be the best it could be, so I feel like the workshops definitely make our book stronger.”

Laura Meyers, a sophomore in COM, said her classmates made her realize the importance of peer editing and, now, it is a skill she considers invaluable for improving her writing. The three-hour weekly class gave students ample time to delve into each other’s pieces and take part in improving the quality of everyone’s work.

“We’ve gone through so many revisions of each other’s stories each week that, even if it’s not our own personal story, we’ve grown attached to the characters in everyone else’s stories,” Vellner said. “We really want to see how it’s developing, how the relationships between the characters are forming with the changes we make each week. We’ve read them so many times that I’m excited to see the finished product for everyone.”

Con said since early class sessions in January, students have become more outspoken, honest, confident and willing to critique one another.

“We’ve come a really long way,” Con said. “Overall, everyone’s developed a thicker skin to receive criticism, which has made everyone a better writer and harder on themselves and their peers because they want the work to be the best it can be.”

Production process

The students made an account on Kickstarter.com, which they used to raise the money needed to publish their book through the Harvard Bookstore. They uploaded a homemade short video with a preview of their class’s hard work for Shouts and Confessions. For the fundraising campaign, students held positions including cover designer, copy editor and Twitter manager. They successfully acquired the amount of money needed for publication.

During the semester, students published weekly blog posts, meant to familiarize students with putting their work into a public space with little or no revisions.

“In a lot of creative writing classes, your work just gets sent to the professor,” Con said. “I thought it would be fun to make everyone write something new every week, like exercising a muscle.”

Con said the blog posts increased the quality of students’ work and allowed them to get to know each other. She gave out blog awards every week for the one post she considered the best or the one post that students liked the most.

The grand finale for EN202

This class has inspired several students to pursue creative outlets outside of non-fiction writing. Vellner said his willingness to write fiction in addition to non-fiction has grown from his experiences in the class.

“I’ve always written a lot of personal essays, but I never really strayed into fiction before, because it’s a completely different world,” Vellner said. “I always had an interest in that but this brought it out more.”

Melanie Adams, a sophomore in COM, said she enjoyed combining her passion for filmmaking with the projects in Creative Writing. She filmed the video that was uploaded to the class’s Kickstarter.com page.

“Videos are what really help Kickstarter pages stand out,” Adams said. “[It] helped raise the money for getting us to be able to make this book. I was incredibly and pleasantly surprised by how many strangers donated to our cause. That was really unexpected.”

Students will hold a benefit reading of Shouts and Confessions Saturday, May 4 at 7 p.m. at the 808 Gallery. The book is dedicated to the memory of Lu Lingzi, the BU graduate student killed in the Boston Marathon bombings, and the money raised will go to The One Fund, which donates to families affected by the bombings.