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Correction: This story has been modified from its original version. — "Sharing stories of hope and revelation," (CT, April 24) had a mistake. Bob Canter is an instructor in the English department. The Collegiate Times regrets this error.
While most students are struggling to prepare for final exams and culminating projects, freshman English major Lisa Minner is working on a project of her own that can't be found in any classroom on campus.
Intrigued by human experiences, Minner has devoted the past two weeks to gathering personal stories from people around campus to add to The Letter Project. Minner's efforts are in hopes of collecting personal stories of life-changing events, people or moments that somehow changed who they are as a person or how they see the world.
"I wanted to create a diary or catalogue of human experience with a bunch of difference voices attached to it," Minner said. "It's empowering to read how people look at things differently."
Minner first started the project two weeks ago by sending out a call for submissions over the English Department's e-mail list-serve. After gaining a few submissions from students and faculty, Minner started a website and a Facebook group to make her project more widespread. She will soon be posting submissions online for people to read and a place for others to post as well.
The stories are encouraged to come from people of all walks of life and can be positive or negative. One submission comes from senior English major Jeremy Baker, who for the first time put down in writing his description of his near death experience.
"I've never really written about it before so hearing about Lisa's project inspired me to put my thoughts down on paper," Baker said. "It was a really weird experience that I still don't know how to make of it at all, but maybe someone else will take something from it that they can use in their own lives. Or not. That's the beauty of it."
The stories are not required to be of extreme life-changing nature, but rather just a moment when something changed the way the writer looks at the world.
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