The Upper School activity Annie Writers stayed at a beach house in Sequim, Washington on September 21 and 22 for a writing retreat. Two women from a group called Young Women Empowered came to work with the students.

“I didn’t really know much about them and I was kind of taking a chance like ‘I hope this will be awesome, but I don’t really know. And it was awesome,” said Laura Barber, Upper School English teacher.

One of the women that worked with the girls at the writing workshop is a poet, so many of the writing exercises involved poetry as well as reflecting on their writing processes.

“We did some really interesting exercises. We also did oracular poetry. Basically you wrote a problem in your life, an unsolvable problem, and then you cut out every single word and gave all of those words to someone else and they took all of those words and made a poem out of it. It was really, really meaningful,” said Bailey Black, a 10th grade member of the activity.