Welcome to the Creative Writing Governor's School web site! Here you will find multiple original literary works from our class. You will also find a photo gallery of our journeys in Governor's School at Mountain Empire.  Be sure to check out each of our pages for our individual works. Hope you enjoy!

About our class

On June 13, 2005, nine students from different high schools entered the Creative Writing classroom.  Our creative writing instructor was Rita Quillen, a professor at Mountain Empire Community College.  With her instruction, we learned about writing poetry, short stories, essays, and different works of fiction. We wrote poems about where we are from, coming-of-age stories, list poems, nature poems, object poems, a tribute essay to someone we look up to, and did several group activities such as a group story, poetry and story analysis.  We also took a trip to Overmountain Press in Johnson City, Tennessee, to see how books are published, edited, advertised, and printed. We made a short trip to the mall and we were on our way.  On June 21, we had our own poetry reading where we each read some of our poems.  Several of the staff and students of the Governor’s School program came to watch and visited with us at the reception following the reading.  On June 22, before we departed for our trip, we had our first class with our new teacher, Karen Carter, an instructor at Mountain Empire.  We left for our trip to Virginia Tech in Blacksburg and the University of Virginia in Charlottesville around 1:00pm that day.  We visited the campuses and the English and Marketing departments at each school.  After a weekend of rest and recuperation from our long journey, we continued our course, learning how to make and edit web pages. Mrs. Carter instructed us on making our web site to publish our works from class with Mrs. Quillen. We can’t forget Bethany Hall, our teaching assistant, who dutifully made sure we had lunch every day and a good time.  With seven of the nine students with whom we started class, we ended on July 1, 2005.

 We hope you enjoy our web site and our individual pages.  You will find some of our works of poetry, short stories, and essays on our personal pages.