The English department has kept underclassman writing a priority with the journal Assayers.
“Assayers started about 16 years ago in 1992 … as a journal that featured the best writings from the freshman composition class,” said Dr. Doug Sonheim, department of English chair. “The essays are used in [the freshman composition] classes to be examples of good writing. That was the purpose and still is.”
This year, changes have been made to enhance the book and broaden its appeal. There is a photo competition for the front cover.
“By moving to a new publishing company we were able to include photos, so Mitch [Bettis] picked out six or seven of the best pictures from his Intro to Photography class and sent them to us to be ranked and put on the front cover,” Sonheim said. “Now, Assayers has become a joint effort to showcase students’ talents.”
Also, Assayers now accepts essays from upperclassmen.
“We now accept essays from other classes like Advanced Comp, which can produce more proficient writers,” Sonheim said. “A lot of this year’s entries came from Advanced Comp but one of the first place essays came from freshman comp.”
In this year’s competition, instead of a first and second place, there was a tie for first place between Liz Richardson’s essay, “Oxymoronica: Illuminating Love Without the Lover” and Zach Spark’s essay, “My Mother Has Mona Lisa’s Smile.”
Hannah Holmes’s essay “How Not to Get Famous on Youtube” recieved third place.
“Amy Sonhiem announced to our Advanced Comp class to submit all our essays to Assayers,” Holmes said. “So I literally did. I sent in like 10 essays, and four of them made it. I was pretty excited.”
Professors often encourage hopeful writers and other talented students to submit work to Assayers.
“I previously wrote the essay for a class, then I presented it for Scholars Day and Dr. Keck was the person who encouraged me to turn it in to the competition,” Richardson said. “I just went ahead and did it.”
Richardson and Holmes hope to one day write for a living, and they have been encouraged by the Assayers competition and the chance to be published.
“I love to write more than anything, and this kind of made me feel like I might be on the right track,” Holmes said. “I definitely want to write for a living, but I guess that’s not incredibly practical. If I could live off of my writing, I would be one seriously happy girl.”
“I really would love to write as a profession,” Richardson said, “and my dream job would be to travel and just write about what I encountered and found. I wouldn’t bank on doing that, but I would love to pursue that.”
