Erin Reaney’s love for telling stories started when she was young. Even before she could write, she would scribble gibberish on a piece of paper, and read it out loud to her parents, other family or just about anyone who would listen. During her childhood, Erin’s love for writing continued to grow as she wrote all types of stories.
In her diaries, she could transform her feelings into words. Notebook pages filled with stories and paragraphs of her daily life. As she grew into adolescence, she discovered a new kind of writing: poetry.
Sylvia Plath and Emily Dickinson have become some of her inspirations. She has written over a hundred poems that she hopes to one day publish as a collection. Erin is a senior at Reynolds High School with an immense passion for writing and a special place in her heart for poetry.
It all started with one notebook, filled with poems about what she’s going through, observing life and then writing beautiful poetry on the lined pages. She sees poetry as an escape. “I bleed emotions through my poetry,” Erin said.
A goal she hopes to accomplish with her writing is helping people. She was hooked on the idea of becoming a journalist, allowing her to make a living out of her first love in writing. Her dream is to write travel stories, which she discovered by reading National Geographic magazines.
Erin hopes to capture important world issues, and how they affect the quality of life of people in her articles. Yet she is able and willing to write about anything, from nature to sports. What she really wants is to make a difference with her writing — to change the world one article at a time.
She hopes to attend the University of Oregon after graduating high school and study in their school of journalism. She said she’s been wanting to go there ever since she got a glimpse into the school itself. She was misty eyed the first time she saw the newsroom, as she knew she’d found the place where her dreams could come true.
Erin’s school does not have a journalism class, club or a newspaper, so her first step to make a difference is by creating a writing club next year. This would be a place where everyone interested in writing is welcome, where any type of writing is encouraged and accepted. She plans to provide a prompt that people can elaborate more if they don’t know exactly what to write, and if the participants are comfortable, share what they wrote out loud to the club.
“There must be more people that like writing and don’t have a community so I’d figure I’d make the community,” she said. Erin is looking forward to becoming a professional journalist and a published poet. Then, it will be more than the toddler-level scribbles that she read aloud to her family members.
She wants her hard work to make a difference in the world..
