Yesterday during fourth hour creative writing, published author Paul Vega visited the class to share his experience as a published creative writer.

“I hope [the presentation] just makes everybody, you know, more excited day-to-day to come into class and doing creative writing and they take it seriously,” Vega said.

As the class had just written flash fictions and brief short stories, Vega focused mainly on the genre.

“I hope they see the value in it,” he said. “Sometimes it’s hard when a teacher forces you to do the assignment to see it as valuable in a way outside of school, so, you know, I hope that they see my excitement for it and they see the journals and say ‘hey, people are doing this in the real world, and this is valuable.’”

Within his speech, Vega discussed his writing process.

“A lot of it was just reinforcement of what we’ve been doing,” Creative Writing teacher Judy McClendon said, “or what I’ve been saying, but he says it much more eloquently, and to know that, for example, a lot of my students don’t like to participate in workshops or don’t find them helpful, and he said that even at the grad level, even in the highest level courses, they would still use even workshop sheets, just general things.”

While talking to the class, Vega shared two of his own flash fictions, “Whiteout” and “Mantra.”

“[My favorite part was] probably how he was talking about how he watched ‘Castaway’ before he went on a fishing trip, and they had to chop up the fish, and he got all sad about it,” junior Jeremy Woolever said.

For students like Woolever, the session with Vega proved beneficial.

“I thought [Vega] was pretty good,” he said. “He spoke in a lot of detail and brought in a lot of experiences of his own and definitely a lot of background details was good. He was able to explain a lot more of the elements in [flash fiction].”