Jane E. Decker Endowed Libraries Student Support Fund

A 2018 recipient of the Jane E. Decker Award is Emily Oomen.   Emily attended the Hugo House Write-O-Rama and Submission Strategies class.

Attending Write-O-Rama was a wonderful experience. This event consisted of attending five workshop sessions (each an hour long) all in one afternoon. After each workshop, there was a bell rung to signal the end to one workshop and the start of the next. It was amazing and inspiring to be surrounded by so many writers who value the art of words. At this event some of the workshops I attended were Activism Writing, Character Building, Writing with Multiple Points of View, Submission Strategies, and Travel Writing. I learned a great amount from all of these classes, and stretched my thinking about what kind of writer I want to be. Some of the biggest areas of growth for me during these workshops was learning a technique to write from a different character's points of view in a scene; keeping track of my writing by making an Excel sheet of writing complete, writing that needs work, and writing that is not complete; and learning how therapeutic activism writing can be. I was invigorated with such excitement to write that I wanted to put the pen to page immediately after I left the event.

Because Write-O-Rama went so well, I thought it would be a great idea to attend the class Submission Strategies which I sampled at Write-O-Rama. This class is taught by a professional writer, and involves a small cohort of five other students who support one another in submitting our work. Each week we learn more about strategies to submit to publications. I am currently taking this class, and am learning a lot from it. This class is helping make the daunting overwhelmingness of publishing writing a lot less overwhelming. 

Overall, I am very grateful that I was awarded this award. I have been able to attend events and a class I would not have been able to attend otherwise. I look forward to applying all that I have learned from these workshops into my writing practice.