"Big things are happening."

The English Club, in its fourth year of existence, is beginning to tap into the creative spirit here at SHU. Also known as "The Literati," the English club was founded three years ago by senior Chris Crutchfield (Somers).

"I started it with Sabine Auguste," said Crutchfield, "to provide an intellectual medium for English majors and like-minded individuals to co-exist. Oftentimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. Despite this, for me it has been and will always be a success. Through the group I have made friends and forged relationships with people I otherwise would have never met."

Meetings are held every Thursday at 4 p.m. in the Mahogany room. It is a place for people with any form of creativity in the arts; whether it is in music, art, dance, drawing, painting or writing.

"We need everyone," said Brad Holland (Vernon, B.C.), current Literati president. "We need writers, musicians, artists, web designers, poets, actors, playwrights and cartoonists. We want everyone here at SHU to get together and share their talents, in order to get new ideas out into the University."

Holland said, "This is a revolution. We want to develop new ideas and new forms of creative and imaginative writing. We need everyone we can, all the talented people here at SHU to come together to build something bigger than all of us."

He also believes the group will be good for mental well being. "Open discussion is healthy," he says. "It gives you an upper hand and keeps you on edge; it keeps the mind and spirit going, it is food for your intellect."

In addition to sharing ideas and establishing a place for discussion, students can go to get help from other students by having their work revised, corrected and improved. Each month the group plans to host paper sharing nights, where courageous souls go to read their papers and submit themselves to interpretation from the group.

"We aren't here to tear anyone down though," said Robinson. "We're here to build."

Criticism is integral to the creative process; it takes flat pieces of work and fleshes them out. Criticism also allows a person to view a regular piece from different points of view, just as Picasso did with his profiles. It gets the creative juices flowing.

The question is, where is all of this work going to go? "Well," said Robinson, anyone who writes wants to publish. So...the book is the hook."

The book he speaks of is the annual publication Horizons. Each spring Dr. Sandra Young, English professor here at SHU, collects and publishes the best creative writing and artwork from the course of the year. Young and her selection committee choose the finest, original and most stylistic pieces of literature from anyone in the University.

Horizons includes: poems, drawings, stories, artwork, musical lyrics, essays; anything original, innovative and creative.

By fusing together many different angles and viewpoints, students will have the basis to turn their work into masterpieces. The group intends to submit these "masterpieces" to the SHU creative writing journal Horizons at the end of the year.

"And Horizons isn't even the end of it," Robinson said. "In fact, it's only the beginning," he said, and smiled. "Big things are happening."

Dr. Rich Magee, the faculty advisor for the English Club hopes many students will come to voice their opinions.

"I think one of the biggest benefits of the English Club is to introduce SHU English students to what it's like to be an English major," said Dr. Magee. "This is exactly what being an English major is all about."

"I mean, you know what your classes are like, you know what writing a paper is all about, and you know how to read and interpret...but what are the bigger things out there? There is public relations work, teaching, grad school, literary theory, law school...The way I see it, the English Club is sort of this mesh that connects all of your other classes and experiences together, and helps to put them in some sort of context."

"It will give you a new way to think about what being an English major is all about," he said.