I recently attended the closing event for Salt Lake Community College’s Creative Writing Center (CWC), and it is hard to put into words what that experience felt like. We celebrated with the release of the final anthology, Everyone Can Write.

The publication serves as both a celebration of the community the CWC built and a lasting record of the voices it supported over the years. For many of us, the CWC was never just a program. It was a place where people found their voice, tested their ideas, and built real creative community. Seeing it come to an official close brought together a room full of people who understood exactly what was being lost.

Being part of this final chapter felt significant to me in a very personal way. My poem, “Obituary for a Dying Art,” which responds directly to this moment, reflects on the loss of creative spaces like the CWC and the impact those spaces have on the people who rely on them.

In addition to my poem, I also have two visual art pieces published in the anthology. Eat Your Heart Out and Bury It are linocut prints created on obituary paper, featuring skeletal imagery. The artwork paired naturally with my written work. Seeing both my visual and written pieces live together in the CWC’s final publication felt especially meaningful, as if they were speaking to each other across mediums.

A Room Full of Stories

The most powerful part of the evening was hearing from the people who made the Center what it was.

Colleagues, students, and fellow authors shared stories about how the CWC shaped their work and, in many cases, their sense of identity. There were moments of humor, moments of gratitude, and moments that felt almost too heavy to sit with. It was clear that this space had changed lives.

Grief showed up in the smallest details, too. Over the years, I’ve held onto a shirt and a mug from the CWC that say, “I write stuff.” At the closing event, they passed out shirts that read, “We wrote stuff.” It was simple, a little playful, and somehow said everything. Pride, nostalgia, and a quiet kind of grief all at once.

The leadership team and members of the governing board also spoke, offering their perspective on both the closure and the path that led to it. There was honesty in those reflections that made the event feel less like a formal goodbye and more like a real conversation.

Naming the Complicated Truths

One of the things I did not expect, but deeply respected, was how openly some speakers addressed the systems that shaped the CWC over time.

With much of the leadership team made up of women, there were candid conversations about how patriarchy and misogyny had influenced the way things operated in the past. Not in a way that erased the good that the CWC did, but in a way that acknowledged that even meaningful spaces are not immune to larger cultural patterns.

Those moments stood out because they pushed the conversation beyond nostalgia. They asked us to think critically about what we want creative spaces to look like moving forward and who they should truly serve.

An Ending That Opens Something New

Of course, there is real loss here. The CWC has faced budget cuts forcing it to close, and that has lasting impact.

At the same time, there was a quiet sense of possibility in the room.

Without the structure of the institution, there is now space to rethink what this community could become. There is an opportunity to build something that is more inclusive, more equitable, and more reflective of the people who make it up.

It left me wondering if this ending might also be a new beginning.

Not an easy or welcome one, but one that gives us the chance to create something new without the same constraints.

Carrying It Forward

From a marketing perspective, I spend a lot of time thinking about storytelling and community. This experience reminded me that while institutions can give structure to a community, they are not what sustain it.

People do.

The CWC may be gone in its original form, but the relationships, confidence, and creative energy it sparked are still very much alive. Those things do not disappear when a program closes.

They move with the people who carry them.

A Personal Reflection

Being part of this final chapter felt significant to me in a very personal way. The note on which things ended feels less like a closing milestone and more like a personal responsibility.

To keep writing.
To keep showing up for creative communities.
To help build what comes next.

Because if the closing event made anything clear, it is this: the CWC was never just a place. It was a network of people who believed in each other’s voices.

And that is something worth rebuilding.

xoxo,

Michaela Rae