Texas Book Festival

The first ever creative writing department with freshmen to seniors. (Photo: Maty Ellynne Williams)

Recently, the creative writing department at HSPVA took a field trip to Austin, where they attended the 18th annual Texas Book Festival to bond with each other, take a (very temporary) reprieve from school, and get inspired by the 250+ authors who attended the event. However, the trip wasn’t all about the book festival. The department stopped by McKinney Falls State Park along with the Museum of the Weird to further enhance comprehension of nature, people, and literature.

At HSPVA, it’s rather fair to say we’re not the most athletic group of people (other than the Dance Department), and when the teachers of the Creative Writing department surprise us with a one mile hike that’s supposed to be taken at a state park, more than half the department turned white as a sheet.

Seokhyun Baek attempts to “become one with nature.” Photo credit: Mitchell Watson

Keep in mind this is the school that forces an online PE class upon its students (excluding the Dance Department), and simply going up a flight of stars is justification to take a breather. Luckily, the writing department managed to avoid the daunting hike by enjoying the waterhole and the surrounding environment for two hours instead. 

The next location was the Museum of the Weird, and for the sake of conserving the reader’s stomach, I will only mention that the department watched a sideshow, causing several to bail out of the room where it was held complaining of symptoms that can typically found in a “side effects may include…” section of a drug commercial.

With all our energy spent and gone, the department went to one of the many food truck parks in Austin, the name which cannot be remembered by the author mainly because the author doesn’t think there was a name for the park.

And with that, everyone headed for the hotel and collapsed into their beds.