WRIT Large is an annual journal of undergraduate research and writing at DU. Begun in the winter of 2012, WRIT Large serves as a resource and teaching tool for our faculty, as well as a source of inspiration for students. Each year, DU students produce an exemplary array of academic writing across disciplines, and WRIT Large gives some of them an audience beyond their instructors and classmates. We are consistently impressed by the variety we see in student writing at DU: variety in the methods they employ, the theories that ground and prompt their thinking, the creativity they display in finding new ways to write about familiar and not-so-familiar topics.

My parents recently retired to Monte Vista, Colorado, in the San Luis Valley, and when I visit them, I drive through the small mining town of Walsenburg. Everything I know about Walsenburg I learned from Alice Major, whose essay “Souvenir” recounts the history of the mining strike that led to the Ludlow Massacre of 1914. Major writes that “we don’t face the complexity of our stories because it would bring up questions, and uncomfortable ones. We’d be forced to truly remember our past.”

Writing about events half a world and four decades away, Kate Norris explores the lives and legacies of a group of women who served as freedom fighters in the Algerian War. In “Breaking Tradition,” Norris notes that despite their endurance, “very few of the[se] women received national praise or recognition”; a larger patriarchal culture did not value their efforts or their sacrifices.

Finally, Katie Beisel Hollenback focuses on a moment defined not by strike or sacrifice but by friendship, detailing the close relationship of Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy and Heinrich and Carl Bärmann, 19^th-century German musicians. In “Great Duet for Sweet Dumplings,” Hollenback concludes that it “is sometimes easy to forget that one of the greatest joys in music is using it to connect with other people.”

In fact, all three writers in this last issue of the WRIT Large retrospective show us moments of connection, moments where readers are led to connect with the past. These essays remind us that each new generation of college students encounters and engages with the past in acts of writing; and each individual writer teaches us to re-see the past—the towns we drive through, the history we read, the music we listen to—through their eyes and their words.

— Juli Parrish
Teaching Professor
University Writing Program

When a group of DU Writing Program faculty conceived of publishing WRIT Large in the fall of 2011, we envisioned a space to celebrate undergraduate writing and research, both from our own WRIT classes and in the writing students engage in across campus and beyond. Over the last 7 years and 7 volumes of WRIT Large, the faculty editors have worked with 63 student authors and 19 student editors in our efforts to make student writing more visible on the DU campus. In the process, we have collectively created a robust archive of outstanding student work, mostly in the form of a print journal.

This year, we want to reflect back and call attention to some of our favorite writing from the volumes we’ve published so far. In the coming months, we will showcase a trio of essays focusing on a theme we saw emerging from our pages.

April Chapman-Ludwig, Teaching Assistant Professor
David J. Daniels, Teaching Professor
Megan J. Kelly, Teaching Associate Professor
Heather N. Martin, Teaching Professor
Juli Parrish, Teaching Professor
LP Picard, Teaching Associate Professor

From the University Writing Program