Over quarantine, students have turned to a new medium to spark connection and creativity: writing. Freshman Irene Tsen founded the collaborative writing project The Prose Train to help students improve their writing in a non-competitive environment.

To Tsen, the core value in collaborative writing lies in the connections made while building off of others’ ideas. “It makes [the project] about actually improving your writing and having fun doing so,” she said.

Senior Nessa Kmetec, a participant in The Prose Train’s first project, felt that it was a different process than writing independently. “It definitely made me think of ways to integrate my writing with other people’s, which I hadn’t done before,” she said. “It was a new side of creativity.”

Freshman Fiona Li, another participant, noted that the project developed a part of her writing skills that her classes don’t usually address. “[When] writing creatively, there are just so many options, and I like that because you can take the story in a lot of directions,” she said.

Tsen hoped that the project would bring out a new side of Gunn’s student body. “As long as you’re interested, you should definitely join,” she said. “Gunn is a really STEM-centric school, and I hope that The Prose Train helps show that Gunn has a lot of writing talent, too.”