Writing for East End Students
(01/15/2009) Graduate writing students from Stony Brook
 Kate Maier
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Southampton will roll up their sleeves and get into middle school classrooms this semester with a new program aimed to teach creative writing in English language arts classes.
So far, Bridgehampton, Sag Harbor, Shelter Island, and Eastport-South Manor have signed on to the Young American Writers Project, which will begin this spring with a playwriting program.
Will Chandler, a screenwriter and former education director for the Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor, has been named the program director. “We’re going to go out into the schools,” in English classes, and teach “each one of these students that they have a voice and a unique point of view,” he said at a press conference on Monday.
At the end of the spring program, one play will be chosen from each school, and students will have an opportunity to produce and perform their work at the college’s newly renovated Avram Theater.
According to Robert Reeves, the director of Stony Brook Southampton’s master’s in writing program, “there is a nominal cost to the schools” for the program since it also has by individual, government, and corporate sponsorship as well as State University funding.
As the program expands, Mr. Reeves said, he expects to include high school students as well. They might even be eligible to earn college credit. In the meantime, “teachers who participate in this program as professional development will be eligible for academic credit.”
According to Darren Johnson, the college’s director of media relations, the East Hampton School District was not interested in the middle school program, but said it would consider joining one for high school students.
Emma Walton Hamilton, who co-founded the Bay Street Theatre with her husband, Stephen Hamilton, will act as the executive director of the program. She said it would give “school districts the opportunity to collaborate in a non-competitive way with each other.”
“Mostly out here, the individual school districts only cross-pollinate in an athletic kind of environment,” she said, and this will be an exception.
According to Mr. Reeves, the program will not only benefit young writers but also give M.F.A. students “the opportunity to get training and be compensated to make graduate studies more affordable.”
“We’re uniformly excited about it,” he said.
In other news, Stony Brook Southampton announced on Monday that it plans to expand its summer conference schedule once again, this time with help from the Hamiltons. A new playwriting conference will run concurrently with the conferences in children’s literature and screenwriting, as well as the original Southampton Writers Conference, this summer. The Hamiltons have been named directors of the playwriting component.