Kelly Bowers Has Found the Words

Kelly Bowers recently shared her writing with the public for the first time.

Bowers, 16, has always enjoyed writing as a hobby, but she is very careful not to leave any of her pieces lying around. Having other people read her work terrifies Bowers.

“I guess it is because I just don’t feel it is good enough,” Bowers admits.

However, Bowers had the courage to read two of her sonnets and a short story at MAD’s Coffee House last month. Bowers wrote all three pieces for her English class, inspired by a writing and acting workshop lead by Celia McBride.

Bowers explained to me that her short story had come out of a writing exercise in which all the students wrote ideas for plot, setting and character traits onto little slips of paper.

Bowers picked five of these paper slips out of a hat and retrieved the following: Making pancakes, a cheerful person, a house, a tragedy and someone who is always grumpy. These tidbits of information proved to be the exact combination of ingredients Bowers needed to concoct her “surprising” short story.

“Twists are fun,” Bowers laughs, “but most of what I write is pretty cliché.”

She finds inspiration for her writing in everything she does. The things her friends do and say often find their way to the tip of Bowers’ pen and crawl out onto her page disguised as fiction.

Bowers has never really considered writing as a possible career choice, but when asked she quickly agrees that she would like to attempt a novel or, at least, a longer piece in her lifetime. Still, Bowers says she would not want to get it published and she would only share it with close friends and family.

Bowers loves to read. She believes most of her writing techniques have come from this favourite pastime as opposed to something she learned in school.

“It would be easier to tell you the books that I hate rather then the books that I love because there’s just too many of them,” Bowers smiles and shakes her head.

Although Bowers had her doubts, she really did enjoy reading her works aloud for the coffee house. Bowers finds it easier to read her pieces to people than actually letting them read it themselves.

I ask Bowers if she would let other actors and performers read her pieces for an audience and she replies without delay, “They would have to spend about 16,000 hours with me and I’d be telling them exactly what to say and when to say it!”

Lately, Bowers has been doing more writing than she ever has before. Bowers has always liked constructing things, but most of her creations prior to this year involved craft supplies and glue guns.

In fact, she was drawn to the MAD program by the promise that she would be able to build and paint sets and create props. Now in her second year in MAD, Bowers assures me that she has done a lot of this and the “creating part” of MAD is by far her favourite aspect of the program. Bowers now regards words as more handy supplies for her craft making.

PHOTOS: HEIDI LOOS

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