Red Clay
Red Clay is a student-run literary organization that seeks to foster an appreciation for the literary arts at Sweet Briar. Red Clay publishes student writing and artwork—online, in magazine format, in broadsides, in creative flyers, and even chalked on sidewalks around campus. Red Clay also organizes readings by area writers and sponsors trips to area colleges for readings and arranges poetry slams and student readings, including events that partner with students from nearby colleges. In addition, Red Clay coordinates a variety of other happenings of a literary nature, including the Poems and Pies Night, when students, faculty and staff gather to read aloud their favorite poems and enjoy a slice of pie from the famous Woodruff’s Café and Pie Shop.
Housed in Fletcher Hall, the staff of Red Clay meets weekly. For information, contact the editorial staff at redclay@sbc.edu.
The Mindful Writer
A part of our Women’s Leadership Core Curriculum, CORE 120: The Mindful Writer is a workshop-based course that helps students become confident and effective readers and writers. Using the New Yorker magazine as their text, students, primarily in their first year at Sweet Briar, read deeply and widely in the magazine that has become one of the leading voices in American letters. They learn to discern the form and tone of different kinds of writing and to understand the variety of rhetorical styles and choices practiced by writers. By reading and writing across a range of articles, they practice those styles, honing their skills as prose writers and learning how to use tools and strategies such as research, interviews, and first-person reporting to enhance their own work. They meanwhile practice writing with care, precision, and intellectual rigor, moving through successive drafts of every piece and discovering that writing—good writing—is a product as much of revision as inspiration. The diverse pieces are collected and published in The Mindful Writer, representing a necessary fraction of the many examples of work produced by students in sections of the class.