Creative writing students were recently given the opportunity of a lifetime when best-selling author Pam Houston joined them for two days to conduct a writing workshop. Students gathered in the media center on Feb. 25 and 26 while Ms. Houston gave them multiple prompts for writing in different mediums. Creative writing and English teacher Brittany Rigdon worked with Ms. Houston in the summer of 2015 at a writing workshop which she attended in the French Alps.

“I knew when I worked with her that her style of teaching was something that I wanted to share with my students,” Ms. Rigdon said. “I think it’s rare to find people who care about what they are doing as much as she does.”

Over the course of the workshop, Ms. Houston shared stories of her own and talked to the group about their work. The students got the opportunity to share their work aloud and have the author review it and tell them their strengths and weaknesses in each piece of writing.

“Basically she explained her writing process to us and gave us advice about how to have structure to help progress a story,” communications junior Chelsea Smith said. “For example, she told us that she has a process in which she uses things called ‘glimmers,’ or events that happened in her life that stood out to her. If you have glimmers, you can write them and then figure out how to string the story together and relate them.”

Ms. Houston also encouraged the group to leave their comfort zone while writing. This mostly dealt with point of view and tense, which many students admitted they did not experiment with much.

“I usually write in the first-person, but I’ve written second-person in the past and I really enjoyed it,” Smith said. “I never really went back to it though, because it was out of my comfort zone but [Houston] challenged us to not hold back, so I tried it again and found that I personally liked it a lot. She showed us different forums and structures that a story can take that we never considered before.”

Beyond the workshop, Ms. Houston hosted a question and answer session in the Brandt Box Theatre in Meyer Hall with a small crowd of English classes and varying students who came from their respective fourth periods. She also read some of her work aloud from her novel “Sight Hound,” and told a few stories about the glimmers of her life that stood out to her. Although she usually teaches groups of adults, Ms. Houston appreciated the opportunity to work and talk with young, hopeful writers.

“I think that kids who are inclined towards the arts tend to be more mature,” Ms. Houston said. “[The students I taught] were very open to trying new things and all of the possibilities in their writing, I felt genuinely inspired from being around them.”

Ms. Houston not only gave the group advice about their writing, she also talked to students one-on-one about things like college and publishing. Looking back on her own experience with the process, she has learned many things that she wishes she could have known when she was a teenager.

“I wish I hadn’t spent so much energy trying to please other people with my writing,” Ms. Houston said. “It’s still a process, but eventually through doing this you find something that you like and your own voice can emerge, you just have to stick with it.”