Students Unveil Locher Scholarship Work

Four Reed students presented artistic work to the college community on October 25,2005. It was the culmination of projects they pursued last summer as recipients of the Kaspar T. Locher Summer Creative Scholarships.

Bronwyn North-Reist ’07 of Penpack, New Jersey, presented a staged reading from the opening of her one-woman show, It’s Been A Pleasure. “This is a play about coming to terms with the past,” North-Reist explained, “and with those who are no longer with us, while at the same time celebrating life and the memories we make each day.”

Katherine Rutledge-Jaffe ’06 of Seattle read her short story My Father’s Kidney, one of four stories she wrote over the summer under the working title, A Family Photo Album. The stories challenge the notion of an ideal nuclear family. “Each story, in the genre of creative nonfiction, is composed of several small vignettes that stem from the memories of the central characters,” said Rutledge-Jaffe. “I addressed each of the memories as though it were a snapshot in a photo album, and wove them together in hopes of creating a more credible and emotive ‘album’ of vignettes. Each snapshot depicts an average moment or an obscure epiphany, the likes of which make up a human character and form the foundation of families.”

 

Ethan Rafal ’07 of Morristown, New Jersey, created the exhibit Children of the Night: Images from a Forgotten Genocide, a series of large photographs shot primarily in Pabbo, a refugee camp in northern Uganda (“Seeing the World in More Than Black and White”). The photographs were on display in Reed’s Feldenheimer Gallery this past fall.

Chalcedony Wilding ’06 of New York read several of her poems from a larger series entitled, Jawbones to Earlobes: Persona Poems from Avoca. “Out of three months of microfiche, history books, dictionaries, maps, and road dust, I produced 15 new persona poems about life for a 13-year old in small-town Iowa, circa 1952,” she said.

The Locher Summer Creative Scholarships competition is held each spring to fund independent summer projects in the arts. The four $1,750 scholarships are provided by the endowed Locher Fund and by matching student body funds. The competition is open to all students who are returning the following fall. This year the selection committee received 30 proposals for projects and interviewed nine applicants before deciding on the awards. Committee members were Leila Falk (music), Michael Knutson (art), Peter Rock (creative writing), Crystal Williams (creative writing), Pat Wong (dance), and Kathleen Worley (theatre).