A club designed to provide a safe place to share and critique writing, The Anthologist Fair is now trying to reignite the spark started at the middle school level.

“I wanted a place where my friends and I could write stories and poems and then share them with each other and then, like, help edit and critique each other’s work,” club founder and president Luann Jung said. “So, I wanted there to be an actual organization where we could get together to do these things.”

With this in mind, several students approached special education teacher Carla Johnston and explained what they began in middle school.

“It was something that they wanted to continue in high school to have an avenue of formalized avenue for being able to gather during the school day or outside school and potentially raise funds because they will actually be publishing their work,” Johnston said.

Currently, though, The Anthologist Fair is attempting to gain members and to improve member involvement.

“I want lots of member involvement because I feel like the basis of this club is people getting together and actually working together for these kinds of writing things,” Jung said. “We are coming together as a writing community to work together and compile our work and help each other grow in terms of writing.”

Toward the end of the year, members plan to publish an anthology of their collective work that could include anything from essays to poetry and fiction.

“In the past, they have published, like, a volume anthology of their writing,” Johnston said. “So, they’re looking into different ways and different vendors that they can use to publish that.”

For communications officer Isaiah Glymour, the club has opened up new opportunities besides just improving his writing.

“I just think the people is really what makes it fun,” he said. “It’s a diverse group of students, and they give me connections to all sorts of different organizations and things outside of the club that I wouldn’t necessarily see in other cases.”

The club’s next meeting will be at six p.m. this Saturday at Varsity Donuts, and new members are welcomed.

“If anyone’s interested in writing at all,” Jung said, “whether reading someone else’s work or writing your own, either way, I feel like it would be nice to at least try it out because we want to try to embrace a lot of different people and how they write and how they like to read.”