Bear hunt serves as backdrop for winning entry in OU-C writing contest

Writing contest winner Tracy Pederson is shown with OU-C Dean Richard Bebee.

Tracy Pederson bagged the OU-C Fall Quarter Writing Contest prize for her descriptive narrative piece, “The Great Bear Hunt.” The contest is sponsored each quarter by the campus’ Writing Center to encourage exceptional writing and showcase the literary talents of OU-C students. Pederson’s story takes the reader along for a bear hunt in the forests of Canada. With visual and other imagery that connect with the reader, she describes the thrill of the hunt, the physical demands of the venture and the challenges of being a woman hunter while pursuing her prize. “My grandfather and uncle used to bear-hunt in Canada, and they used to talk about those experiences, which had a lot of influence on the story,” said Pederson, 36, a mother of two daughters and a nursing student at OU-C. “Some of the writing is based on stories I heard from them and part of the story is from my own imagination. Also, I used to work construction, pouring basement walls, so I am familiar with working outdoors, how cold it is and how a person feels in those conditions.” Pederson won a gift certificate to the OU-C bookstore for her prize-winning composition. Writing has been a lifelong passion for the Waverly resident. “I always liked to write. Through the years it has been an outlet for me and a way to relieve stress from the everyday demands of life,” she said. Her interest in writing was rekindled by a rhetoric class she took at the Chillicothe Campus with faculty member Michael Ryan. “My final paper for the class dealt with a bear-hunting story, so I decided to build upon it for this contest,” she explained. The quarterly Writing Center contest is achieving its goal of encouraging creativity through the written word and further building a sense of community on campus through intellectual pursuits. “More students, across the curriculum, are discovering themselves as writers, that they can indeed write, and that there is a certain amount of pleasure in writing, as evidenced by the fact that Tracy is a nursing student,” OU-C Writing Center Coordinator Debra Nickles said. “This particular essay was written as a personal narrative for an English composition class assignment and just had a great sense of voice and a good amount of vivid details. Her thoughtful perspective in regards to bear hunting from a rugged female’s point of view provided a fun twist to this local tradition and met the ‘Turning Points’ theme of the fall quarter writing contest.” “This fall, the Writing Center had a new role in the contest,” Nickles explained. “Instead of submitting an entry to the contest themselves, tutors were urged to help critique and judge the entries. This presented tutors with an exciting new collaborative opportunity to view OU-C’s creative approaches to the theme and to thoughtfully consider what it means to judge ‘good writing.’ I moderated the judging contest, and tutors read for content, quality, voice and theme.” Information on the winter quarter writing contest will be forthcoming.