Graphic by Lauren Leese ’23.
By Arianna Peña ’25
Staff Writer
At 7 p.m. on Thursday, April 21, a crowd of roughly 50 students gathered around Mary Lyon’s grave to witness a brand-new, one-time-only show, “Going Places I Shouldn’t be Going.”
Performed by members of the Write Here, Write Now creative writing club, this satirical one-act followed ex-actor Timothée Chalamet as a new professor at Mount Holyoke College. After his career takes a drastic turn for the worse, Chalamet lectures at a college where he is mistreated and gawked at. There, he wonders why the school founder is buried on school grounds and why the Film, Media Theater department is led by the same woman who chairs the German studies major. Chalamet is then transported back in time by Jorge, who seeks to generally terrify and torture him, to the early days of Mount Holyoke, when Mary Lyon was still president. Now in the year 1847, Chalamet manages to show the young women of the seminary there is more to life than the Bible. Along the way, he falls in love with the College president. Eventually, Chalamet returns to the present day, heartbroken that he has been separated from his true love, but determined to carry on her legacy as a professor at the school.
“I think this was born out of Zoom insanity,” Olivia Wilson ’24, the writer and director of “Going Places I Shouldn’t be Going,” said. “It was at the end of our second meeting on Zoom, I remember this very vividly, and we were talking about bad fan-fiction — as you do in a creative writing club — and we were playing this little game of ‘What is the worst thing we can come up with?’ And we landed on Timothée Chalamet and Mary Lyon.”
“We kind of got to talking about it more and said, ‘Oh my god, wouldn’t it be so funny if we put on a play?’ … I remember saying, ‘I have directing experience and playwriting experience, so if you guys work with me to put it on, I will write it,’” Wilson said.
And they did. Wilson, along with many other members of the club, helped create the production. Everything, from the costumes to the live violin player to the various promotional posters plastered around campus, was done by members of Write Here, Write Now.
Lauren Leese ’23, co-president of Write Here, Write Now and the Narrator of “Going Places I Shouldn’t be Going,” is no stranger to building creative outlets for students.
“[In] my freshman year, my friend Rebecca [Kilroy ’23] and I met each other at orientation and we went to the involvement fair to try and find writing-related clubs because we both loved creative writing. And there was Mount Holyoke News, I think at the time there was a poetry society, but there was no creative writing club. And so we said, ‘Well then, we’ll make one,’” Leese said.
While Leese and Kilroy — the other co-president and founder — tried to finalize the club’s official founding, their plans were derailed when the pandemic hit in 2020, and the club remained both small and unofficial for a year. However, in 2021 the current juniors were able to secure Student Government Association Ways and Means funding to make Write Here, Write Now an official club at the College. They aimed to give students who enjoy non-academic writing a space to write freely and creatively with no judgment and full support.
“When you’re in college, it’s really hard to write creatively, especially if you’re working on a long-term project or if you’re just trying to be consistent about it. That can make you feel really guilty, that you’re putting other things above your creative expression. So, we thought that having a set meeting time every week where we set a timer for 30 minutes and everybody [gets] to work on the creative project they couldn’t get to earlier in the week, that’s the kind of thing we think creative writers on this campus really need, so that’s what we want to provide,” Leese said.
“[That’s] the core of what we are, a place where people can write when they don’t have time the rest of the week,” Leese added.
While Write Here, Write Now seeks to give students the space that they need to write whatever they desire. Wilson believes there is something almost cathartic that comes with putting effort into something “bad.”
“I find it really liberating … [writing] ‘bad’ fanfiction, and not caring about quality or the nitty-gritty and just being like ‘How can I tell this crazy story in 15 minutes? … How can I make people laugh [and] how can I torture my fellow board members?’” Wilson said.
Samantha Pittman ’23, who played Jorge, agreed that there is relief that comes with being creative simply for the sake of being creative. “It’s super easy [to be] dragged down by all the work you have to do [at the end of the semester,] but to have an hour or half an hour where you are just goofing off and doing this silly amazing fanfiction, … it was a great break mentally,” Pittman said.
While there are no promises that Write Here, Write Now will put on another Timothée Chalamet-themed production in the future, the leaders of the organization seek to support writers who have a passion to create.
Editor’s note: Olivia Wilson ’24 and Lauren Leese ’23 are members of Mount Holyoke News.