Parents and students gathered at the 22 Tappan Theater on Thursday Oct. 13 to hear a paper reading from some of the high school’s most invested writers.

The Whipple Writing Fellowship is a paid writing fellowship over the summer for students at the high school. The fellowship is named after an alumnus who passed away at the young age of twenty five: David Whipple. His love for writing inspired his family to donate money and eventually share the art of writing with the high school community.

Evan Mousseau, freshman English teacher and teacher leader of the fellowship, explained what the program entails.

“The Whipple Fellowship encompasses a few different things now as it’s grown over the years,” Mousseau said. “But it’s ultimately a fellowship program for students who are interested in and really love writing [and] to pursue writing projects of their independent interest.”

Mousseau said David Whipple was a talented student and writer.

“They [the Whipple family] wanted to do something in his memory here at the school, and he was a big writer. He won the Curtin prize when he was a student in Jen Martin’s class. He loved, loved, loved the written word,” Mousseau said.

The Whipple family started the program in collaboration with School Within a School (SWS) teachers Ben Berman and Jen Martin in 2020. Berman stepped down this year which left room for Mousseau and sophomore English teacher, Emma Siver, to lead the fellowship.

“The Whipple fellowship is an intensive research and writing exploration program that kids apply to, and they have coursework at the end of June and all throughout July. This year, the genre was creative nonfiction narrative writing, and they get paid to be there,” Siver said.

Over the summer, students in the fellowship were prompted to write a creative nonfiction piece, Silver said.

“When we began this process, we had to ensure our fellows knew what it meant to actually construct narrative nonfiction, as a genre,” Silver said. “Creative nonfiction remains at its core a means of storytelling, taking various forms and structures and may blend poetry, testimonial anecdotes and data that help a writer tell or retell a true story.”

At the event, students delivered brief summaries of the nonfiction stories they wrote. Some writers wrote about greenwashing, the practice companies do to seem more environmentally friendly. Others wrote about the Muslim experience post-9/11..

Junior Stella Charbonneau wrote her paper on beauty standards for women of color and she said that she wanted to tell the story of them.

“A lot of the stories I heard about femininity and girls tend to lean more towards white women instead of women of color, whose stories were often untold and ignored,” Charbonneau said.

Applications for new fellows will be open in late winter of 2023. This fellowship is something Mousseau said he believes can open up writers’ imagination.

“The [applicants] presented writing samples reflecting on experiences working in groups, and offered ideas on what topics they might be interested in exploring,” Mousseau said. “Some of them ended up pursuing topics far from what they ever imagined.”