Creativity and Community on Full Display at the Raab Writing Fellows Showcase at UC Santa Barbara

In life and in writing, community is a powerful thing. Every year, the undergraduate students of the Raab Writing Fellowship prove the power of both in a culminating showcase at UC Santa Barbara. Last week, The 2024 Raab Fellows came together to highlight the creativity and insight of a group of writers who have worked together for the better part of a year.

The program, now in its eighth year, is funded by Dr. Diana Raab, a prominent writer, poet, and educator in Santa Barbara. In collaboration with UCSB’s Writing Program, a select number of undergraduates are given the opportunity to explore a writing project of their choosing under the mentorship of Writing Program faculty and in the company of their peers.

The program itself is made up of a year-long research seminar taught by Ljiljana Coklin, who directs the effort and also serves as one of its many student mentors. “There’s an interaction and exchange of ideas in the Raab Program that is really productive and very fruitful. They support each other,” she said. “They learn from each other’s projects and really contribute to each other’s growth. That’s the big advantage of this kind of undefined space in academia.” 

This year, the collaborative spirit of the fellowship lived on in the 20 students who pursued projects that ranged from academic research and critical analyses to poetry collections, memoirs, and video game design documents. Topics included “CTRL: A Critical Examination of the Wellness Industry” by Makenna Stark, “Understanding Why We Spin: The Disc Jockey Explained” by Fay Harvey, and “Growing with Glimpses: A Hybrid Graphic Novel” by Anissa Estrada.

“The community is the thing that stands out to me the most because it’s all these people who are doing these year-long projects that are very daunting and very scary and we all can tend to procrastinate,” said Amitha Bhat, a Raab Fellow who worked on a research project which analyzed perceptions of AI-generated creative writing. “You feel better when you’re procrastinating with someone versus when you’re alone.”

Bhat was one of five Fellows in the “Critical Media” group, where each student’s project similarly dissected and analyzed different facets of media. Each year, the cohort breaks into smaller groups based on broader themes that connect a number of their projects. Apart from critical media, this year’s cohort grouped projects surrounding community, identity, and memoir.

Also in the Critical Media group was Jasmine Liang, a fellow whose project “Elapse” took the form of a video game design document. The piece outlines Liang’s original video game idea that revolves around concepts of time. “I really wanted to make a Video Game Bible, because I’m hoping to go into the video game industry in the future for narrative and game design, and I wanted to develop my skills and demonstrate them in a product,” she said.

Sierra van der Brug, of the “Community Voices” group, produced a journalistic article about the experience of incarcerated women in the region, and in her presentation highlighted the commonalities of the projects in her group. “The interesting thing about all of our projects is that we were all speaking to different members of different communities and finding a way to tell their stories, whether it be blended with our own, or otherwise,” she said. “And so we all did a lot of interviewing and interacting with the community in order to come up with these pieces of writing.”

Projects in this group touched on a wide variety of community experiences in Santa Barbara, ranging from the region’s jazz scene, a project in the form of a multimedia website created by Leo Rubio, to those targeted by a Christian cult, the ICC, in Trinity Marrisett’s project, which was also a website.

The last two groups to present, “Exploring Facets of Our Past,” and “Identity Unearthed,” represented mostly introspective creative writing endeavors that delved into areas of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.

Maya Johnson, who presented with the “Exploring Facets of Our Past” group, self-published a memoir titled Searching For a Black Writer. “As someone who came to college, sort of running from my family situation, dealing with things about my truth and my sexuality, writing this project was really important to me in terms of facing things that I experienced during college,” she said.

For some, these projects represented an outlet for catharsis as students reflected on themes of family, identity, and the experiences that have shaped their lives. Olive Howden, also from the memoir group, wrote a zine about her experience of being born deaf and living with cochlear implants. “I’m sure everyone here has experienced feeling lost. And that’s how I feel a lot of the time. When I’m in a conversation and there’s a lot of background noise. When I listen to music or watch TV, I like to have the captions on so I can follow along,” she said. “And I just have done a lot of reflecting on that this past year, a lot of writing. It’s been very emotional.”

Josephine Yi, of the “Identity Unearthed” group, created a multimedia website to unpack her family’s emigration journey using interviews, photos, poems, and music. “This is connecting across time and generations, being able to know who I am because of my past,” she said. “And ultimately, just feeling really grateful for this life I get to live because I am a first-generation college student, and I get to be here and give voice to my parents and my stories and ultimately bring to light all these different things that they’ve gone through.”

Coklin called this year’s Fellows “spectacular,” saying, “It was really quality projects that they produced this year, there was a lot of ambition and just the sheer range of these projects from academic writing to very personal projects. It’s really kind of joyful to work with students who are so talented.”

To learn more about the 2024 Raab Writing Fellows’ projects, visit raabwritingfellows.com.