Miles pushes School of the Arts students to produce honest work

Face to face with student Monique Collins, Charleston County School of the Arts creative writing teacher Rene Bufo Miles shook her finger with vivacity and said, "I am going to love you into liking me."

Collins, 19, had admitted to her "hostile persona" when she entered School of the Arts, before she realized that teachers cared.

Since that day four years ago, Collins has joined 13 other students in her senior thesis class. Once students reach their senior year in the creative writing program, they embark on writing a thesis, which is a school-year-long process that involves 100 pages of thoroughly revised poetry or prose.

Mentors

For the thesis, the students work alongside mentors, a group of local writers who volunteer their time to help hone the young writers' talent. Collins' mentor was local novelist Josephine Humphreys, who is joined by many others, including South Carolina poet laureate, Marjory Wentworth, and Piccolo Spoleto featured poet Richard Garcia.

In the end, the class sees their writing emerge in the polished book form.

Collins wrote an ambitious novel based on the style of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "Chronicle of a Death Foretold." Collins' novel, "To Stir an Echo," tells of how a young wife and mother struggles to shed who she once was and start life anew.

The main character's struggle is one that Collins' life beautifully echoes: She has already overcome her fictional plight, to shed a past persona, with the help of Miles and the creative writing program.

Miles is also quick to defend her student's talent. She said, "I feel like my creative writers are more ambitious than the other majors because they actually produce the art, while some majors at the school simply interpret someone else's."

On Miles' wall hangs E.M. Forster's quote: "How do I know what I think until I see what I say?"

Another senior thesis student, Catie Donnelly, says the most powerful lesson Miles taught her was how to handle criticism. That lesson certainly helped Donnelly to write a fantasy novel, "The Nightmare Keepers," which focuses on how a person's culture defines who they are.

On stage

The thesis process ends with a reading in the school's Black Box Theatre, which happened last week. At the reading, all 14 students sat on stage, smiling, slipping hands around arms or shoulders to calm nerves and congratulate.

Student Dorothy Behre, author of "In Glass," and Sam Whitley, author of "Mind Crime," showed nerves, but both settled into their work, exhibited their true talent as novelists. Forrest Putnam ("The Rabbit Hole") and Raven Mariah Gadsden ("Beautiful?") exuded complete pride from the start.

Wilfred Rivers ("exposed.") and Aubrey Isaacson ("Jetties") stood out and commanded the attention of the audience with their confidence.

Other notables were Francisco Figueroa ("Between the Cracks"), Laura Kate Vinson ("A Song in Silence"), Lauren Hester ("Scales Like Feathers"), Shannon McNellis, ("The Secret of Apples"), Shanequa Nyia Sanders-West ("Silk and Ash") and Samantha Watson ("A Kaleidoscope View.")

All of the books, printed through local publishing company Booksurge, are available for purchase on Amazon.com.

Miles ends every year by doing what she asks of her students. She writes a poem for the class and reads to them on stage.

With tears in her eyes, she left an animated crowd and a stage of adoring students with a line that illustrated what she wanted for them all as they graduate: "Soaring is the legacy of my labor."