The Red River Reading Series offered students and faculty a chance to share their writings, with three authors taking the podium to read their works.
John Schulze, associate professor of English, led the event, introducing leadoff speaker and English senior Michaela Aleman.
Aleman read a piece based on her own experiences with guilt and love regarding family members. The story centered on a visit to a nursing home to see her grandmother.
“I’d like people to take away that it’s okay to embrace the complex emotions that come with familial relationships. Not to be scared of them,” Aleman said
Aleman said she enjoyed the opportunity to present her work.
“I love sharing my work with people. I also love the experience that it gives me for just reading in front of people for future experiences like this. I think it went really well. I always get really nervous beforehand, but I feel like I’ve gotten a lot better at speaking before, speaking in front of people now. So I feel like it went really well,” she said.
English senior Bre Cotner shared her own creative nonfiction piece next, a deeply emotional piece detailing a difficult relationship from her past.
“Our stories are worth sharing because they’re all part of the bigger story, you know. Like I wrote my own bio, but like I said in my bio I like that creative nonfiction can take stories that are super personal but still by applied and spark change for big societal issues,” Cotner said.
Rita Beeman, lecturer, closed out the event with a fictional offering detailing a fantasy world of temperamental mermaids and mortal folly.
Beeman said the event was important to her because she wants people to remember the importance of literature.
“Well I think it’s important that people not have a sense that literature is a thing of antiquity, something for the past or people from another time. I feel that writing is part of our lives, even if it’s just text messages people are writers. And I feel that it’s important for everyone at every level to keep alive the idea that this is an ongoing art form and not something that’s just relegated to the past,” Beeman said.
