Flintridge Prep Shares Literary Dialogue at Regional Conference

The purpose of an education is not to give our students answers, but a path to finding answers. In that spirit, the recent “Literature &” cross-curricular literary conference, sponsored and hosted by Archer School for Girls, offered a profound opportunity for students at several LA-area independent schools to extend that spirit of inquiry beyond their own campuses.

Five seniors joined four students from Polytechnic, along with students from Crossroads, Milken, Buckley, Marlborough, Pilgrim, and Archer School for the conference, which was organized by Archer English teacher, Genevieve Morgan. The conference was conceived six years ago by Tyke O’Brien, a former teacher at Archer who now teaches at Flintridge Prep and is the school’s 12th grade dean.

More than 30 students participated in this year’s event. Students’ papers and presentations are nominated by their teachers. Once a student is accepted, he or she is placed on one of six thematic panels: Creative Writers Tell Their Stories, Poetic License, LA Stories, Gender Trouble, Women on Shakespeare, and Shadows and Fog.

Faculty members from Archer and from participating schools act as panel moderators. After presenting individually, members of the panel take questions from the audience, leading to interesting conversations among students who have never met before about the commonalities and differences in the presentations. These dialogues are what it’s all about--“Literature &” exists to give students free reign over their ideas and to intersect content and analysis. Very little is off-limits.

In fact, spontaneity, creativity, and the use of multimedia are encouraged in presentations. According to Morgan, “Literature &” encourages a wide variety of presentation styles. “As such,” she instructs students, “you might wish to display images, play music, or project film clips.”

Presentations range from creative work (poetry and spoken word) to analyses of novels and films. At this year’s conference, a creative work was used to analyze a novel when Asher Levy of Milken performed a self-penned Celtic-inspired folksong that imagined what Rochester would have sung to Jane in a key scene of Jane Eyre.  

Prep's Presentations

Riana Lo Bu, a senior at Flintridge Prep, spoke early in the day about a paper called “The Struggle of Mankind in King Lear,” in which she employed Jungian and Freudian analysis of Lear’s development over the course of the play. Two Poly students participated in a creative writing panel. Junior Joseph Bohlinger shared a piece that imagines a day in the life of writer J.D. Salinger, and senior Harry Hodgkins read a nonfiction story about teaching his nephew to ride a bike.

Three Flintridge Prep seniors comprised a panel called “LA Stories.” On that panel, Katie Eiler presented a paper called “Geography of Despair: The Crossing Paths of Isolated Angelenos.” Katie discussed two books, Less Than Zero and Ask the Dust. In these two books, locations and landmarks act as characters, shaping the protagonists.

“The city is their foil, nemesis, ally, and sounding board,” she said.

Ellie Redding presented a paper called “To All Infinity: Life over Entropy in Less Than Zero and Ask the Dust.” In her discussion, Ellie refers to Edward Abbey’s assertion that in the desert the best that can be expected is equilibrium between life and entropy in describing how the two protagonists interact with the desert landscape.

Andrew Mahoney presented a paper called “Anonymity, Authenticity, and Self Discovery: LA in 21st Century Neo-Noir,” in which he analyzed camera angles and images of the city in two contemporary films.

In a panel called Gender Trouble, Flintridge Prep senior Shelby Wax discussed her study of feminist noir filmmaker named Ida Lupino, who turns the typical conception of a femme fatale on its ear. She was matched with two Poly students, Connor McKnight and Lina Vadlamani, who took slightly different approaches to the feminist issues raised in Palace Walk. Conner explored gender rights and the treatment of women in the Middle East, while Lina explored how patriarchy puts men into confining roles.

All of the students came away from the conference excited by the benefits of sharing their work in an academic and supportive atmosphere. Connor McKnight described how incredible it was to see the extent of the quality of writers across all of the schools: “It’s one thing to go to a school with really good writers, but it’s another to go to a conference to know that these writers are ubiquitous across other campuses,” he said.

Lina Vadlamani said that “the conference left [her] inspired by both the quality of the writing and the amazing depth of thought and perception.”

Editor's Note: Grace Hamilton of Pasadena Polytechnic contributed to this article.