By On Thursday, Nov. 9, Carroll College hosted the Lucky Duck Literary Festival.
The annual event was an exciting congregation for literary enthusiasts of Carroll College and the local Helena community.
The event was hosted and organized by Carroll’s Senior English Capstone Seminar class. The four seniors, Julia Hackl, John Phillips, Ashtyn Reiners, and Keaton Pettis, managed the event, in which members of Carroll College and the Helena community entered their own original literary works.
Participants competed for the chance to present their works to the rest of the community as well as to win gift card prizes to the Montana Book Company.
“The Lit Fest is such a good opportunity for writers to share their work and for others to hear some creative ideas and literary works,” said Ashtyn Reiners, a senior Secondary English Education major from Spearfish, South Dakota.
“The Lit Fest was a very informative and enjoyable experience for me and my cohorts,” added John Phillips, a senior English major from Eagle, Idaho. “We had lots of fun in the process… In the end, it was reassuring to use all the things we had learned in our English classes in our papers because we could see the improvement in our writing with the physical words.”
On the day of the festival, winners of the competition presented their works to a live audience in the Lower Campus Center.
The winners of this year’s Lucky Duck Literary Festival were Millie Elbert, Lily Hoelscher, Kadee Melton, and Ethan Eades.
Lily Hoelscher, a fifth-year senior Theatre and Hispanic Studies double major from Baker City, Oregon, tied for second place in this year’s Literary Festival with her poems “My Own Worst Enemy,” “Softly,” and “Proud.”
Hoelscher decided to enter the Literary Festival for the opportunity to share her poems with her community.
“I had a wonderful time participating in the Lit Fest,” said Hoelscher. “The Senior Seminar members who were my contacts for the evening’s events were so kind and informative, and I felt the whole experience really gave me a new platform to start sharing my own personal writing voice.”
To Hoelscher, her poems mean much more than winning prizes.
“These works that I entered into the Fest are all very personal to me in one way or another, which is always what inspires me to write poetry,” said Hoelscher. “Poems, I feel, are very much an intimate expression of the writer themselves, and I often find myself creating poetry as opposed to prose whenever some deep emotion or profound occurrence in my life takes hold of me and demands some form of outlet.”
Hoelscher went on to add, “For me, poems are often my way of making sense of disorganized thoughts and feelings.”
