Hello everyone!
Today I have an exciting post to share with you all. If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you might remember that I applied to a few summer writing programs this year. I applied to the Sewanee Young Writers’ Conference, the Kenyon Review Young Writers Workshop, The Adroit Journal’s Summer Mentorship Program, and the CSPA Cal Poly journalism program. If you’re interested in hearing my final results and how these programs are being impacted by COVID-19, keep on reading!
I want to get out the good news first. I am so happy and excited to say that I was accepted off of the waitlist to the Sewanee Young Writers’ Conference! I will be attending, and I got accepted into my first choice genre (poetry). The program has been moved online, so we will be having Zoom classes with breaks between classes to work on reading and writing assignments, as well as evening assignments. There are a couple works we’re supposed to read before the conference starts, and I believe they’ll be holding extra Zoom conferences before the program officially starts so we can get to know people and the amazing staff members. I am so, so grateful to get this opportunity to work on my writing.
I also got accepted into the CSPA journalism program held at Cal Poly. They were unsure of their plans regarding cancelling the conference or moving it online; at the time of acceptance, they were being optimistic and saying at the moment the plan was still to hold the conference in person as normal. They gave us the option to wait until May to send in our deposit, or to defer our acceptance to next year. I chose to defer my acceptance as I was still waiting to hear back about the Sewanee waitlist and the Adroit mentorship at that point, and it’s nice to know I already have a possible summer plan for next year!
The Kenyon Review Young Writers’ Workshop was completely canceled, and they did so before ever announcing decisions. I guess I’ll never know whether I would’ve gotten in or not, which is okay but kind of disappointing. I might end up applying again next year, as it’s such an amazing program and I would’ve loved to go. They offered a discount code on a subscription to the Kenyon Review literary magazine though, so I was happy to take advantage of that.
I got rejected from The Adroit Journal’s Summer Mentorship Program, but that was not exactly a surprise. Their program will continue to go on as normal since it’s always been completely remote/online and flexible, which was one of the things that drew me to it. They had a huge spike in applications this year- around 650 last year to over 1000 this year, and I believe the acceptance rate was around 5% or less as a result. I would be lying if I didn’t say I was disappointed to get rejected, but I knew that this would be the biggest stretch to try and get into. I’ll most likely try again next year for this one as well! I’ll definitely be looking out for the work that emerges from the no-doubt extremely talented writers who did make it into the program!
That pretty much sums up my experience with summer programs this year. As a sophomore, this was my first year trying to apply to programs like this, and I’m grateful I did. I cannot wait for Sewanee, and I will most definitely be blogging about the experience. If you applied to any summer programs, I hope you got in and are still able to participate somehow even with COVID-19 going on; I assume it’s pretty half-and-half between programs cancelling and programs moving to online instruction.
Let me know if you have any questions about these programs or anything else in the summer program/writing summer program realm! It’s not a guarantee that I’ll know the answer since I’m not an expert, but I’ll try my best to help. Stay safe and healthy!
Brooke
adventures of a typical high school student 