The Writing Elite

Here at Brentwood, students can aspire to be essentially anything they want. They can turn hobbies into pathways for future careers. An example of this is the Writing 12 program.  This is a class of a select ten students who are given prompts for various writing assignments - such as poetry, screenplays and short stories - who will then take their creative skills and incorporate them into these assignments.  Writing 12 is one of my favourite courses simply because it allows me to write; I can write about anything that comes to mind in my monthly free-write journals, and can turn a blank piece of paper into what I like to think of as a canvas filled with thoughts and emotions, characters and stories, past experiences and aspiring dreams.  Gifted writer, Grace L, enjoys writing because “I can express myself through writing in the most vulnerable way, and the same vulnerability that I try to hide in my daily life can actually turn into stories that people like.” Jaylynn B enjoys “Writing 12 because it is a self directed creative endeavour that allows you to expand your capacity for writing further than you thought you could.” Writing allows us to take one word out of thin air and turn it into something beautiful, something that inspires others.  Every month our Writing 12 teacher, Mr. Collis, assigns us prompts to use as inspiration for writing, allowing us the freedom to apply our personal writing skills to our assignments, whether that be rhetoric, character development, or any other skill that shows off each student’s writing style. In third term, Writing 12 students are given the task of coming up with their very own unique project, which can essentially be anything, such as a school-wide slam poetry night, seen in the photo above. Writing is a type of therapy for us, a way to escape from the real world for just one moment, and delve into the vast space of our minds. Ameera E, Allard ‘19