Creative writing Senior Readings continue
Photo courtesy of Photo Editor, Faith Zatlukal
On Tuesday, Apr. 15, 2025, the Creative Writing Department’s senior students continued their capstone celebrations of their hard work over the last four years with more Senior Readings. These readings occurred from 2:30 PM to 4:00 PM in Doty 300, also known as the Tower Room, on Tuesday and Thursday throughout April. Here, senior-year students from the creative writing program are given the opportunity to perform fiction, creative nonfiction, and/or poetry for attending fellow students, staff, and faculty.
First to go on Tuesday was senior English (creative writing) major and Film Studies and Sustainability Studies dual minor Nathaniel D’Amato. D’Amato serves as the Editor-in-Chief of The Lamron and was the previous president of the Creative Writing Club. His performance was of a political satire piece titled “To Usher in Tradition’s Fulfillment” which commented on a notion of “Christian Nationalism,” and the rhetoric it pushes.
In this piece, D’Amato works to critique modern attitudes towards politics and religion, poking fun at those who work to conflate the two to a dangerous and absurd extreme. Through the caricatured persona of the essay’s narrator, D’Amato demonstrates the way that religious, conservative extremists use the Bible and its messages as a weapon against the progression of the world, and as a means to their wants end.
D’Amato’s reading highlights the hypocritical sentiments and attitudes perpetuated by those who peddle these narratives by telling lies that resemble truths while hyperbolically playing into the emotions of their intended audiences. It is an astute, humorous, and, at times, too real portrayal of how dogmatic rhetoric taints much of religion’s original purpose and is used as a weapon against a vulnerable world and the people who live in it; alongside a plethora of connections to his spiritual muses: Dante Alligheri and John Milton.
To follow his reading was a close friend of D’Amato’s and fellow Lamron devotee Kendall Cruise. Cruise has a double major in English (creative writing) and Adolescence Education with a Philosophy minor. They serve as the Managing Editor of The Lamron and a trainer for the Safe Zone program. She has been previously published in Gandy Dancer for both poetry and creative nonfiction and in Iris Magazine.
During her reading, Cruise performed four tota: two poems and two creative nonfiction essays. The writer’s first two pieces were interconnected, both being reflections on the passing of the writer’s grandmother in August 2022. During these pieces, the speaker explores how their grandmother’s religious background—which created early experiences of religion for the speaker—influenced their relationship with religion and the piece’s perspectives on death/dying. These two pieces were a longer poem called “My Grandma died” and a flash creative nonfiction essay titled “To My Grandma, Almost Three Years Later.”
After this, Cruise read a creative nonfiction piece titled “Raise the Dead” which worked to connect the events where the speaker falls into a creek as a child while playing with their siblings and some neighborhood boys, where her father ultimately comes to retrieve her from the water; then paralleled with an event that occurred almost forty years earlier, where the speaker’s uncle dies after falling in a creek during the winter— an event in which the speaker’s father is absent from, but irrevocably changed by. To close it off, was a short poem titled “Dream Where I Save my Father,” which explores themes of generational trauma.
The second section of Senior Readings took place on Thursday, Apr. 24, and included two other senior readers. The first reader for that afternoon was Kyra Drannbauer, a senior double major in English (creative writing) and Adolescence Education. They are a member of SUNY Geneseo’s a cappella group, Emmelodics, and the Musical Theatre Club (MTC).
For audiences, Drannbauer read a creative nonfiction essay succinctly titled “Empathy,” which covered the ways that the modern polarization of politics can and has caused very real effects between family members, with a focus on how the speaker and their mother’s more progressive and liberal ideas of politics has caused lasting rifts between the two and the speaker’s maternal grandparents. In this essay, Drannbauer utilizes their hallmark humor, combined with a confessional and emotive collection of scenes and reflections, to create an essay that is funny, ironic, angry, guilty, nuanced, and meta all at the same time.
Last, but certainly not least, to close out last week’s readings was senior English (creative writing) and Musicology (composition) double major Shamar McFarlane. This Bronx native is a self-published writer, often influenced in their work by their identity as a gay, nonbinary, Caribbean-American. The collection of poems read for the reading are part of a larger upcoming collection that combines both poetry and music to create an interconnected narrative which reflects on identity, silence/voices, and the natural world.
Poems heard included “First song,” “After sunrise,” “So I can sing,” “To Be Gay and Nonbinary in America,” “Plaintiff,” “I. Like crying,” “Assistance,” “To only breathe life,” and ended with “Happiness.” In this collection, McFarlane rejects the simplicity of how intersectionality manifests in the modern world, using the ideas of silence as both a freeing and empowering force, depending on whether it is by force or choice. They write about how the voices of minority groups should be amplified and encouraged by the public. In poem “Assistance,” McFarlane writes, “But I hope my waters remain / difficult to tread,” an astute and powerful statement on how it is not the oppressed group to make themselves “tolerable” to the general public, but rather to be embraced for the complex and special person they are, as everyone is.
In the reading’s final moments, McFarlane shares with the audience the middle movement for the upcoming collection’s musical component. Titled “Winter’s Breathe,” composed of a solo violin with a symphony orchestra. Though I certainly do not have enough knowledge of music composition to make an informed analysis of the song, it does not take expertise to feel how volume is used. The way that the orchestra almost bursts in on the solo violin at times caused a leaping in my heart as I listened; their use of tremolo throughout created a dissonant and textured effect on the song’s sound.
These various readings were an absolute pleasure to witness, and the range in genre, topics, tone, and elements made such a unique, emotive, and lovely experience for audience members. It was such a pleasure to watch my fellow students showcase their plethora of talents and be vulnerable and astute at the podium through the page (and song!).