By Jef Rietsma
Chris Laaksonen had a simple purpose when she established a writers’ club at Vicksburg Middle School 15 years ago.
“I started the club so that kids who like to write creatively could all be together. All the kids who come really enjoy writing; it’s just their thing,” Laaksonen said. “You don’t get that unanimous love for writing in a traditional classroom, of course, where maybe just three or four kids are really into it while the rest of the class is like, ‘How long does it have to be?’”
Laaksonen said she had no expectations of the club lasting as long as it has. In fact, she said it got its start with two students who called her bluff and showed up one day after school, fully intending and committing to writing. Laaksonen didn’t skip a beat when asked if she remembers the names of the club’s charter members.
“Reagen Tyre and Ayden Macomber, and they loved writing,” Laaksonen said. “They would come after school and ask me to give them a topic to write about. I would come up with things off the top of my head just to keep them busy so I could keep on doing whatever it was I was doing in the classroom.
“I thought they’d get bored with it but they continued to show up time after time,” Laaksonen added. “Eventually, I thought I should just make this a real club, so I did.”
As time has passed, Laaksonen said she has tweaked and more or less perfected the after-school, monthly club. Each session lasts about 90 minutes.
“When I started it, I was really gung-ho and thought I needed to have a topic and some sort of inspiration, but what I found as time went on was that the kids just wanted time to write and time to share,” she said. “So, it has evolved into the first half as a social and snack time, then they write, then we use the last 40 minutes or so to just read our writings.”
Laaksonen, who is in her 32nd year with Vicksburg Community Schools, said she loves hearing students share their work. In fact, Laaksonen said she keeps a stack of notes in hand and jots down positive, encouraging comments that emphasize the writer’s strengths. Fellow students then chime in and offer a meaningful response.
The focus of Writers’ Club is more on creativity and less on mechanics of writing. Laaksonen said participants seem to enjoy the freedom they are given, without the worries of being called out for misspellings, improper tense or other writing-related shortcomings, for example.
“Writers’ Club is more about celebrating the art of writing versus the science of writing because for some kids, this is their art, they are creating a picture in the readers’ mind with words, just like an artist might create it with oil paints,” Laaksonen said.
Laaksonen, who teaches seventh-grade English, said the club is open to the school’s sixth- through eighth-grade students. Club alumni sometimes return also.
The club, which typically meets the first Tuesday of the month, starts in October and lasts through May. Laaksonen said it averages up to a dozen people monthly.
For most of the 15 years she has overseen Writers’ Club, Laaksonen has done so on her own time. She recently was provided a stipend of a few hundred dollars, which she puts toward snacks.
“We always take a trip to Apple Knockers as our last meeting,” Laaksonen said. “Also, we’ve been so lucky to have partnered with Gilbert & Ivy (book store in downtown Vicksburg). They were able to get a $500 grant that was used for instructional books just for our Writers’ Club.”
