VANESSA SUGGS
reporter

NW student activities are pairing up with the Creative Writing Club in hosting a short story competition to celebrate Halloween.

Both will gather student submissions for a chance to win a grand prize and have their work read online on the student activities’ Blackboard page.

Participation in the event started off as a submission requirement of a science fiction short story to celebrate the month of October. However, both the Creative Writing Club and student activities decided to allow short stories of any type as well as other literary content from poems and plays to nonfiction. Students passionate about writing but not interested in science fiction or short stories will now not be excluded.

The original science fiction idea was pitched by the TCC student development coordinator Holden Childress after a late-night viewing of the film “The Vast of Night,” which he said was reminiscent of an old 1930s radio broadcast mixed with Rod Sterling’s storytelling in “The Twilight Zone.”

According to Childress, any TCC student can submit one piece of work they would like to be read.

“We have reached out to our theater department to recruit drama students interested in reading aloud the grand prize winner’s work in a virtual environment if the winner is comfortable with that,” Childress said.

Other than that, the grand prize is still in the works. Student Activities is known to serve students with engaging, entertaining, and educational events, so this collaboration was just one of many ideas to get students involved into “niche” subjects. This collaboration is the first that many have seen from Student Activities that there has been a literary based event that has the potential to benefit tremendously from the passion for the content.

“I took a creative writing class in high school, and I loved it,” student Deyuan Sanchez said. “I had no idea that TCC had a club just for that. It’s cool to see that student activities are helping spread awareness of other clubs.”

As time in the pandemic has gone by, Childress says “this has been unlike anything Student Activities has seen.” Student activities are said to have seen a stable increase in student involvement, where some events now yield higher attendance than on-campus events.

“We are using this virtual space to experiment with fresh ideas that we could see carried over upon return to campus,” Childress said.

So far, there are as many submissions as expected, however, both the Creative Writing club and Student Activities hope to see more toward the end of the month.

TCC student Iveth Villegas said, “With everything going on right now, it’s nice to see student activities pair up.