Meet this week’s Campus Celebrity, Anna Galachyan! She’s heavily involved with The Writer’s Den club on campus, which binds together all kinds of readers and writers in their common passion. She’s also organizing volunteer trips to local schools to teach creative writing to younger students.
What made you interested in taking part in The Writer’s Den?
The goat-related humor. There are probably logical reasons that I was interested in joining the Writer’s Den—the chance to make friends with people who were as passionate about writing as I was, for example, or the various literary(ish) events the club held. But what I remember most distinctly is walking into a meeting, hearing a bunch of weird kids making weird jokes about goats, and knowing that I’d somehow stumbled across my people. Completely illogical. And I promise that my other answers won’t be so schmaltzy!
TWD has a volunteer scheme. Can you tell us more about that and how readers can get involved?
Absolutely! Once a week (on Fridays) we visit a few classrooms throughout the city and take over their English lesson for the day. Though the curriculum varies a bit from school to school, we typically plan some sort of fun, interactive class activity that introduces students to some element of writing creatively. After we’ve worked with the classes for several months, we guide students through editing their favorite pieces of writing, and put together anthologies of each school’s work. At the end of the year, we bring students on a field trip to UCLA, where they receive published copies of the books they worked so hard on, then celebrate with a book release party (complete with signings and readings by student writers) and a tour of campus.
What’s your role in TWD? Any advice for people looking to get more involved?
I’m the Executive Director, which is a fancy way to say paperwork filler-outer. The best way to get more involved is to come to a meeting—every Tuesday at 7 in Ackerman 2408! Go ahead and sign up for our mailing list as well, and we’ll send you a weekly newsletter with a reminder about the upcoming meeting, plus some information about upcoming social events and other cool things. You can also check out our event calendar, which includes the dates + times for all of the events we have planned thus far. Finally, we love getting submissions to our blog, so please send over any creative writing, thoughts about creative writing, or fun writing activities that you want to share to thewritersden@ucla.edu.
Best tips for staying organized this quarter?
Write things down! I am extremely scatterbrained and get anxious that I will forget something important unless I write everything down, so in addition to my agenda and calendar, I make at least 2 or 3 to-do lists each day. It’s a little ridiculous, honestly. I also do really well with visual cues, so I like keeping a to-do list somewhere I can see it as I work—and cross things off as I go. So satisfying!
Favorite experience at UCLA so far?
This is tough—UCLA has been remarkably kind to me, so I have a lot of favorite experiences. I know I promised I wouldn’t be schmaltzy, but… The best part has been meeting all the cool people that I have—none of my favorite experiences would have been the same without them.
If anyone is interested in getting involved in The Writer’s Den and their volunteering opportunities, please send us an email at thewritersden@ucla.edu, and/or come to a meeting! Meetings are held every Tuesday at 7pm in Ackerman 2408.
LINKS:
Volunteering times: https://theuclawritersden.wordpress.com/volunteering/
Mailing list – https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1sX6AZnNt7P82fx_q00qyX1P_ro4nP3ePrTXGL894GkI/viewform
Event calendar – https://theuclawritersden.wordpress.com/event-calendar/