Group doesn’t want members ‘written off’

Budding playwrights, poets, songwriters, fiction and non-fiction writers at ETSU are uniting in a new organization on campus this fall to form a support network aimed at improving their writing and their chances of getting their work published.
The Written Off Literary Society, which meets at the Sherrod Library every Wednesday afternoon, was started by students as a campus organization to allow writers to meet and discuss their writing and the writing process.
Open to students, faculty and staff, writers can bring copies of a piece they are working on, read it out loud and get suggestions and feedback in addition to grammatical corrections.
“Everybody needs proofreaders, and everybody needs editors,” said senior English major Jasen Bacon, the society’s founder and president.
“We catch the grammatical stuff; then everyone gives feedback on what they liked about it and what could have been better.”
The group’s focus is to help writers improve their craft as well as explore different outlets for getting their material published.
The society is creating a running database of publications that will publish the writers’ work making it much easier for the average student with an interest in writing to get work published.
“The more writers we have, the more we can benefit from each other,” Bacon said. “I also think it makes it more interesting.”
Members are also challenging themselves with new writing activities, by sharing their work to the rest of the student body. A spooky story presentation is tentatively scheduled for Oct. 29 at the Sherrod Library along with a playwright competition for next semester.
“Writing workshops is not just about sharing one’s work but about having informed readers share their thoughts so that the writing can be revised and made stronger,” said Katherine Weiss, assistant professor of English and the group’s sponsor.
Anyone interested in joining Written Off can contact the group at writtenoffls@gmail.com or stop by a meeting, held every Wednesday in the library’s Quillen Conference Room from 2 p.m. until 4:30 p.m.