Amidst all the caroling and cookie-decorating, the Creative Nonfiction class observes a different winter tradition: book binding. Creative Nonfiction, taught by English faculty member Cynde Moore, is a semester-long elective focusing on memoir writing.  At the end of every fall semester, members of the class gather eight of their favorite works, print them on cotton watermarked paper, and hand-bind them into books with the help of local professional Mita Saldaña of Against the Grain Bookbinders.

The process takes about two hours and involves carefully gluing book cloth and decorative cover paper to book boards, drilling holes for the binding, and sewing it all together in the Japanese four-hole punch style. Each student buys decorative paper for the cover of his or her own book in the weeks leading up to the binding workshop, so each book has a unique pattern and color scheme. “It binds the literary arts with the visual arts,” Moore said.

For students, the books are especially rewarding to complete because they are the culmination of a semester’s worth of work. “I think [Creative Nonfiction] is a great class as it is, but when we do this project at the end, I think it’s just a beautiful little cap on the whole process,” Blythe Johnston ’15 said. From a teacher’s perspective, the project provides students with a different and more memorable approach to completing their work than what they might have experienced in other writing classes and allows them to produce something of which they can truly be proud of. “It’s just a wonderful keepsake,” Moore said. “They’ve got their own original material inside the book, and they’ve made the outside of the book themselves….[I]t’s just become a fabulous tradition.”