Written by Lena Roy, Head of Writopia Lab’s Creative Portfolio Program
Turning the Page (TtP) hosted a Virtual Cozy Crafts event this past Saturday afternoon while many of us in the Northeast were preparing for a snowstorm! TtP is a literary social justice committee started by members of the Creative Portfolio program in 2019, whose main purpose is to create an Anthology based around a certain theme touching on social justice. They are tasked with doing everything from promotion to reading and discussing submissions, to laying out the book. This year is being led by sophomore Sonali Browning and senior Emi Shapiro (Dartmouth ‘29) with twelve other Creative Portfolians — Sophia Alvarez, Emily Appleyard, Nola Brooks (UChicago, ‘29), Nell Choi, Rory Frasch (Bryn Mawr, ‘29), Thuy Holder-Vinh, Bee Kanofsky, Annika Lamberti, Serine Lee, Mai McKelvey-Pham, Berrit Nordlander-Borowski, Lili Sella, Margalo Teich—who contribute to our meetings every Tuesday night.
Turning the Page leaders are creating buzz for their upcoming annual Anthology called SPECTRA. They are looking for submissions (fiction, poetry, personal essay, art, photography, etc.) that have something to do with opposite ends of the spectrum and the dialectics around meeting in the middle. They are accepting submissions for SPECTRA through March 31st, 2025.
Sonali hosted Saturday’s event, and in attendance were Annika Lamberti, Robbie Kruger, Bee Kanofsky, Nola Brooks, Margaret Torrey, Emily Appleyard, Naomi Jeske, and Emi Shapiro. Sonali encouraged everyone to create a Moodboard (on shared Google Slides) to explore this idea of spectrum. Here are just a few of the plethora of spectrum guidelines that TtP came up with beforehand.
- Nostalgia (from past to present)
- Belief (from atheism to profound faith)
- Trust (from distrust to trust)
- Time (from past to future)
- Bias (from uninvolved to influenced)
- Visibility (from invisible to visible)
- Normality (from normal to unusual)
- Loneliness (from accompanied to alone)
- Comfort (from comfort to discomfort)
- Perspective (from narrow to open-minded)
- Freedom (from free to confined)
- Color (from monochrome to spectrum)
After sharing the moodboards, and deepening our discussion of ways to look at things from the perspective of a spectrum, Emi created a super fun game of Kahoot for the group, with all writerly/ Writopia questions. A wonderful time was had by all.