Career Week 2024 is underway and alumni from various decades are returning to The Storm King School to share their information, ideas, and inspiration with our students! This year, the program got off to a great start when 2020 alumna Sophia Grausso joined Dr. Rigg’s Creative Writing class.
Sophia, currently a senior and creative writer majoring in English at Fordham University, began by leading Dr. Rigg’s students through an engaging introductory exercise. The challenge was to write stories one sentence at a time. “Each student wrote a sentence and then handed the paper to the person on their left. That person wrote the next sentence and then handed it on again. This happened until the paper went all around the table, with each student adding a sentence each time. At the end, several students read the stories that were generated out loud. They were very good!”, explained Dr. Rigg.
Next, Sophia talked with the class about her own work and presented some of the zines she has worked on or is published in. Then, the students turned their focus to discussing several very short stories called ‘Flash Fiction.’ “I met with Sophia earlier this year to prepare for her visit. She recommended these short stories which I assigned as reading homework before she arrived,” explained Dr. Rigg. “We then read one of Sophia’s flash fictions together and asked her simply to listen while we discussed it. The students loved the story, and Sophia commented afterwards that it was a wonderful experience for her– the first time she had heard others discuss one of her works.”
At the end of class, the students were given time to work on their own flash fiction stories. “They will finish those for homework, and we will share them with Sophia, who has promised to give some feedback,” continued Dr. Rigg. “Overall, having Sophia with us was a very positive experience and I believe the class got a lot out of it. The highlight for me was having the opportunity to discuss one of her stories with her there in the room. My students were very excited to see an excellent writer just a few years older than they are, and who took English classes here at Storm King.”
Many thanks to Sophia for graciously volunteering her time and sharing her experiences with our students, and to Dr. Rigg and his class for welcoming Sophia so warmly into their classroom.
About Sophia Grausso ’20
Sophia Grausso is a 2020 graduate of The Storm King School. She is currently a senior at Fordham University in New York City who will graduate with a Bachelor of Arts in English and concentrations in Creative Writing and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. In both of these fields, Sophia has achieved high honors, including induction to Alpha Chi Omicron, Fordham’s chapter of Sigma Tau Delta, the International English Society.