‘A Forgotten Art:’ UAlbany Writing Workshop Helps Teens Find Their Voice in the Age of AI
- NYS Writers Institute
- 1 day ago
- 5 min read
Capital Region teens hone their writing skills at the Discovering Your Voice workshop hosted by the Capital District Writing Project and NYS Writers Institute.
By Bethany Bump with photos by Patrick Dodson, University at Albany
Amishi Verma fell in love with writing when she was around 10 after her mom gave her a bunch of blank notebooks. She began filling them with poems and stories both real and imagined. In one story, she imagined a world before smartphones and iPads.
“I was in a bad place when I wrote it,” she said. “I wanted my life to be completely different, so I wrote this alternate reality where I was in 2005 and everything was supposed to be perfect.”
For Verma, now a 15-year-old rising sophomore at Niskayuna High School, writing became her safe space: “Through the hardest parts of my life, I resorted to writing. No matter what happened, I always kept on writing.”
A love of writing is what drew Verma and over a dozen teens from around the Capital Region to converge on UAlbany this summer for Discovering Your Voice, a creative writing workshop held July 13-17 and hosted by the Capital District Writing Project (CDWP), part of UAlbany’s School of Education, and the New York State Writers Institute (NYSWI).
Each morning, a different local author led a craft session on personal narrative, fiction, poetry and screenwriting, while afternoons were devoted to writing around campus. The workshop culminated in a Friday showcase where students read their work before family and friends.
“These students come in with their own experiences, backgrounds, writing styles and interests, said Nancy Czachor, who coordinates the Discovering Your Voice program. “Our facilitators build a safe space where students can develop their ideas, get feedback and develop their writing styles. It's so wild to see who they are on day one and who they are on day five. The transformation over the week is astonishing.”
‘A Forgotten Art’
Now in its fifth year, the program has become a safe space for the students who choose to attend. At a moment when attention spans both young and old are turning away from deep reading and writing and toward short-form videos and AI-generated content, these young writers are happy to engage in sustained dedication to their craft.
“There’s not a lot of people at my school who actually enjoy writing,” Verma acknowledged. “I feel it’s kind of a forgotten art.”
Getting together with like-minded peers is just one reason 15-year-old Avery Sloane was happy to return to the workshop for a third summer in a row.
“In school, it’s hard to find people who like to read and write,” she said. “And here, everybody loves writing and it's such a community.”
Sloane has loved to read and write for as long as she can remember. Her parents forbid social media when she was young, which is a major reason she feels she can sink into a book today without being distracted.
“I really like poetry and rhyme,” she said. "Words are my favorite thing and I like choosing them carefully, like yesterday I wrote a poem that mentioned a butterscotch sky.”
Discovery and Inspiration
The butterscotch sky appeared to Sloane the same day that wildfire smoke from Canada blanketed the Capital Region, casting a strange, surreal filter over the sky that turned the sun red. Fittingly, it was the same day students received a crash course in sci-fi writing from local author C.M. Waggoner.
The next day, students heard from writer, director, actor and playwright Aaron Moore, who walked them through an acting and monologue-writing exercise before releasing them for an afternoon of writing in the Performing Arts Center on campus.
Learning about a variety of genres was especially helpful to Joey Guillaudeu, a 17-year-old rising senior at Shenendehowa High School who's been working on a fantasy novel ever since an author spoke to his middle school homeroom.
“I’ve always been a very creative person but I’d never really had a good outlet,” he said. “So after that, I started creating a world of my own and writing it down.”
His working novel, The Great Islands, is the first in a planned fantasy series where each novel’s main character will come together for a big fight that takes place in the final book. He has 73,000 words so far and aims to finish by the time he graduates.
Back for his second workshop, Guillaudeu said this year's visit from Moore helped sharpen his sense of what makes a scene work: "Knowing how to make a scene exciting and inclusive of the backstory of why a character is doing what they're doing was helpful,” he said.
Emily Hass, one of three veteran high school English teachers who co-facilitate the workshops, said each year the students ask for more time to write. “I think they don't get that a lot during the traditional school year, so we really try to make this space an opportunity for that.”
Building Community
The workshop gives students confidence while helping them build a lasting community of friends and fellow writers, said Hass. “It’s an opportunity to meet like-minded writers and really build a community.”
The program attracts one to two dozen writers each summer, each of whom must apply and submit a writing sample along with a letter of recommendation. The program carries a cost for applicants, which CDWP and NYSWI help offset with scholarships.
CDWP also runs half-day Young Writers Workshops the same week for younger students starting in first grade, widening the program's reach beyond high school.
"We are finding that increasingly we have more requests for scholarships than we can fulfill," said CDWP Director Kelly Wissman, who is also an associate professor and co-chair of the Department of Literacy Teaching and Learning at UAlbany. "We are doing our best to raise awareness and hopefully raise funds for more scholarships for young writers."
Guillaudeu hopes the connections made with fellow writers and local authors at the summer workshops stay with him.
“I have a group chat with nearly all the kids from last year and I'm gonna make another one this year,” he said. “I hope it will keep inspiring us all to keep going and keep writing.”