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Like many children, though a considerably small percentage in the scheme of things, Andrew was born in Dunkirk, New York, a town squatting roughly an hour’s drive south of Buffalo. His earliest memories from there follow like so: drawing pirates while watching Blue’s Clues at his small daycare; assembling pirate ships out of upturned Fisher Price tables and toy boxes, cardboard wrapping paper tubes and stuffed animals (his crew); waking up in a new home in Williamsville one morning a few years later.
Andrew’s interest in writing came late. He went to St. Christopher’s school in Tonawanda where he preferred science courses to English and composition. The appeal wasn’t the dense and cold mathematics of it all but the applications from imagination. He participated in solar car races and Future City competitions, imagining sprawling cityscapes in Antarctica or on Mars and conceiving life in Post-Apocalyptia after the ice caps melted and the world fled to the Himalayas to found Sheng Tian, a city in the sky. At graduation, he inexplicably received the religion award.
In the Fall of 2006, he went to Canisius High School, where he and science had a falling out. In secondary biology, chemistry, and physics classes, science lost its magic. It wasn’t about explosions and hover machines, or fear and love, or an animated earth anymore – it was chemical, biological, and evolutionary. There were charts and proofs, and everything was cogs. His interests shifted to what? It was about this time that he wrote what is probably his first honestly literary pieces: a historically subjunctive piece about the Iliad. In the margins, his teacher, Janet McNally, a professor at Canisius College, wrote encouragement, and he took it. Late that year, he wrote a poem that won third place in the poetry contest hosted by his high school’s literary magazine The Chanticleer. By the time he graduated in 2010, Andrew had decided that if he wouldn’t be a pirate, he would write.
Andrew enrolled at SUNY Geneseo, excited for the romance of a literary career in the way of the New England Aesthetes in the barely populated college town – the Quiet and the Long Walks to Nowhere in Particular (which turned out to be the Sears on Route 20). His experiment at his Walden in the Genesee Valley failed, though. A peculiar sort of misery took hold there: he stopped developing as a creator, and the lack of motion choked him. He stopped writing.
Fortunately for him, Andrew made the decision to transfer. Looking for a college where he could grow in an environment of support and innovation, he was drawn to Canisius College. The frequent readings he had attended in high school, the working and warm faculty he had briefly met, and the city he had lived in for most of his life appealed to him, and Andrew reapplied to Canisius College for the spring semester. Dr. Mick Cochrane, the head of the mint creative writing program at the college, took an interest in Andrew and supported him through the process. Under the most generous circumstances, the college took the lost boy in.
Andrew is now a second year creative writing and classics student. He works as the life and arts editor of Canisius’ newspaper The Griffin and is a contributor to The Quadrangle literary magazine. Again with the encouragement of those closest to him, he has quit lying about submitting to national literary magazines and has actually started to send out a handful of his work. Looking out with everything that is behind him on the sea of opportunity before him, Andrew sits with a little kid’s smile.
Favorite Quotations:
“Now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates.” - Mark Twain
“I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Born and bred in South Buffalo, Caitie McAneney has a taste for all things Irish, most especially Ireland’s great emphasis on the fine art of storytelling. Growing up as an only child, she began writing and reading for fun as soon as she discovered enough words to do so, despite the facts that her handwriting was atrocious and her gift for illustration was nonexistent. After moving to West Seneca, she attended West Seneca West Senior High School where she realized that her niche was in writing, often walking up and down the English Department hallway to chat with the teachers and other students about it. In her junior year, after realizing that she couldn’t sing or act very well and who was she kidding and after winning honorable mention in the Write to be Heard playwriting contest, she found that playwriting was her place in the theater. This led her to Canisius College where she settled on English— which, even though she went back and forth between history and botany and zoology and more, was the only major that really made sense.
During her first few years at Canisius, Caitie fell in with just the right crowd— the creative writers. They were a group of wonderfully mismatched socks in a drawer, a handful of jelly beans that weren’t very much alike in anything except their passion but were perfect because of it. She had the opportunity to be the managing editor of the Courier during the year that they hoped would be transformative and a fiction editor for the Quadrangle. She also had the opportunity to be the student assistant to the Creative Writing Program, which allowed her to connect with prospective and current students and plan events for them, hoping to create a greater sense of community. She firmly believes that writing is more of a social art than most people think. She was also able to write a children’s middle-grade book for an internship with a local series creator. And for her senior year at Canisius, Caitie will be the editor-in-chief of the Quadrangle in its 60th year, something that she couldn’t have even imagined when she was just a hopeful underclassman. All of these opportunities led her to believe that the Creative Writing Program at Canisius— even more than Disney World— is the place where dreams come true.
In her free time, Caitie enjoys playing guitar, whittling birds, picking up new and odd hobbies, and spending time with her friends and family. She has two raging addictions— ice cream and John Steinbeck’s novels. Her favorite kind of literature is 20th century American and contemporary. She’s become an English and Creative Writing dual major with minors in Psychology and Theater Arts. She hopes to be a Young Adult novelist someday— believing that what young people read shapes who they are and eventually the state of our world— and is working on a full-length YA novel as her thesis and her ticket out of Canisius. She has no other plans for her future except to write as much as she can, live as much as she can, and to leave a mark on the world, albeit a small one, before she has to leave it.
Favorite Quote: “Love the writing, love the writing, love the writing… the rest will follow.” – Jane Yolen
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Although born a New Yorker, Marie has spent the last thirteen years living in Ohio and New Jersey, which, while not easy at times, allowed her horizons to expand considerably in the literary world.
Marie began reading about as soon as she could pick up a book and hasn’t put one down since. She often has more than one novel going at the same time, which she sees as her own special style of multi-tasking. Her desire to write was also discovered at an early age and she spent her childhood stapling together ‘books’ about animals and her friends. More often than not, the animals talked and the friends were just innocent bystanders of crazy schemes and purple hair.
After a few years of teenage indecision, she realized her dream all along was to write. And after having a couple of pieces published in anthologies and newspapers, she wholeheartedly admits to being bitten by the writing bug, which is how she ended up looking into Canisius’ Creative Writing major. And although she has no concrete career path in mind, a large part of her hopes to work someday as an editor or at a publishing company in New York City, one of her favorite places in the world. Her favorite style to write in is fiction, preferably novel-length stories about real life challenges and situations.
When not throwing moody fits over dialogue or scene description, Marie loves to play volleyball, fiddle around with the piano, and hang out with her dog, Jack. Her favorite authors include YA novelists Sarah Dessen, Suzanne Collins, and Richelle Mead as well as some of the older classics such as Charlotte Bronte and Charles Dickens. She’ll read just about any genre—actually, she’ll pretty much read anything with words—but her absolute favorites are fantasy and historical fiction. She hopes that some day she will be the one putting the magic words onto paper instead of only reading them.
“People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet for some there is an exception to this annihilation. For in the books they write they continue to exist. We can rediscover them. Their humor, their tone of voice, their moods. Through the written word they can anger you or make you happy. They can comfort you. They can perplex you. They can alter you. All this, even though they are dead. Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in the ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic.” — Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale
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Aidan Ryan was born and raised in Buffalo, and although he dabbled in writing throughout his youth and completely ruined his eyesight reading Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and Redwall books at all hours of the day, it was not until high school, at St. Joseph's Collegiate Institute, that he discovered he wanted to make writing his career.
In his sophomore year of high school, Aidan's mind was blown apart upon coming into contact with the scathing wit of Voltaire, the madness of Rushdie, and the dark absurdity of Kafka and Camus. It was around this time that Aidan decided to become a writer, and, powered by a writer's ego if nothing else, sent off a handful of poems to The New Yorker, at least half-expecting them to be published. When, after several months, he was perplexed to receive a brief letter of rejection, he decided that perhaps he should try a novel instead. When several agents rejected this, Aidan thought it might be time to rethink his worldview and find out just what this writing thing was all about.
Since then, after the legendary Jack Kenny gave him a lesson in humility, he has had short fiction published in Full of Crow Quarterly, Grey Sparrow Journal, and twice in Jersey Devil Press, and has had poetry published in the local and now-defunct Tangent. Meanwhile, he has fallen in love with the prose of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jonathan Franzen, Gary Shteyngart, and Tom Wolfe, as well as the authors mentioned above and too many more to list. He has also developed an insatiable appetite for the poetry of William Shakespeare, William Wordsworth, John Keats, W.B. Yeats, Miles Davis, and John Coltrane, and he dares anyone to argue that Davis and Coltrane aren't poets.
When asked why he writes, Aidan will say that the only real things in the world are truth, beauty, and love, and writing, being a combination of all three, then must be a noble and worthwhile pursuit - or something similarly pompous. Either that or he'll simply go mad if he doesn't write, which would be more of an embarrassment to his parents than having an English/Creative Writing double-major for a son.
When not writing, Aidan enjoys playing the drums with a bunch of cats in the North Buffalo area, occasionally paints, and attempts to have a social life.
"Stories may well be lies, but they are good lies that say true things, and which can sometimes pay the rent." - Neil Gaiman
"Don't play what's there, play what's not there." - Miles Davis
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Born in Buffalo and raised in nearby Hamburg, Sam Stahl is a creative writing major because, put simply, books are his life — a condition derived largely from his mother, an educator and writer, and his father, a singer-songwriter. He credits whatever high-minded impulses he might have to a lifetime of vacations spent reading on the beach, along with a generally intellectual household. In love with the printed page since reading The Egypt Game and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone in first and second grade, respectively, his tastes have since varied considerably, from an early love of fantasy and science fiction, to more literary works, and finally to his present and presumably abiding passion, theology and spirituality.
Sam was educated at a variety of private and public grammar schools before coming to rest in the bosom of St. Francis High School, where books once again recaptured the focus of his affections after a long and turbulent love affair with music. It was during this time that he first read Kurt Vonnegut, Charles Bukowski, Walt Whitman, James Joyce, and (most significantly) Beat generation writers Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs.
These last three awakened a long-dormant religious impulse in him, leading him to consider various eastern faiths in the course of his journey back to the Christianity of his youth. While these authors will always hold a special place in his heart, he feels the most kinship with more recent reads, namely Thomas Merton, Saints Augustine, Paul, and John the Evangelist, Flannery O'Connor, and Soren Kierkegaard. In their works he found the synthesis of the aesthetic and the spiritual which has always been the driving current of his interest in writing; that is, the deeper significance of physical reality, be it music, nature, or most especially language.
Sam spends his days reading fiction, poetry and theology, and especially loves to read (rather ineptly) religious works in the original Greek. He might enter the priesthood, but then again he might just as well not. He doesn't see any gain to be had in rushing the matter. Regardless of his career path, however, he knows it will involve writing—largely theology, although he prefers not to make too sharp a distinction between this and more self-consciously literary enterprises, knowing the great works of the genre (Merton, Augustine, Von Balthasar, the Bible itself) to be perfectly proportioned fusions of style and content. He knows, for instance, of no poem more beautiful than book ten of the Confessions, or chapter thirteen of First Corinthians. Without further fanfare, here are a pair of quotes on writing—Sam will not say that they are his favorites, because to his rather obsessive compulsive mind such distinctions are arbitrary and, furthermore, subject to constant fluctuation. He does, however, like them very much.
“The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural; and he may well be forced to take ever more violent means to get his vision across to this hostile audience. When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock; to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.” — Flannery O'Connor
“Altogether, I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn't shake us awake like a blow on the skull, why bother reading in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it? What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is what I believe.” — Franz Kafka