Capstone Spotlight: Sarah Hooton

4/5/2017

Over the next few weeks, we will have special blog posts focusing on Senior Capstone Projects. The Capstone cirriculum is unique in that the students design their own course of study. Developed as a way for Grade 12 students to delve deeper into a unit of study, these students go above and beyond what is expected of them in the classroom. They learn discipline, creative thinking, and strategic planning while they brainstorm a project idea, turn their idea into a concrete plan with deadlines and submissions, and execute the project in time for the Capstone Presentation.

Sarah Hooton, an aspiring lawyer and writer, is almost finished with her first novella as part of her year-long Capstone program. Sarah organized her year into four quarters, with quarter one devoted to an exploration of writing styles and genres, quarters two and three all about writing, and quarter four focused on editing and polishing. During quarter one, she drew upon all of the styles and authors she had read at Ensworth and jumped into the world of literature. She then wrote for an hour a day for quarters two and three. Now, she is working on polishing and editing her novella so that she can end the school year with a rough draft that is ready to read.

After earning an Academic Enrichment Grant from Ensworth to study creative writing and art history in Paris, Sarah was inspired to write a story that is set in Paris and involves art. In her novella, Sarah creates a world where a young woman sets out on a quest to save art from destruction. The main character is a young woman who has never traveled before, and goes to stay with her worldly and sophisticated Aunt for the summer in Paris. Upon their first visit to the Louvre, Venus de Milo comes to life and sends the young woman on a quest to seek, and save, art in Paris.

Sarah’s novella includes a group of people who have marked art to be destroyed - her take on modern terrorism as a threat to individualism. “Through the harkness table, I learned to connect writing to the world at large. This experience helped me express a world-wide problem, terrorism, through a story about art,” Sarah explains.

For Sarah, the hardest part about writing this novella was establishing the rules and guidelines for when the art comes to life. “One of my favorite pieces is ‘Winged Victory of Samothrace’ and she doesn’t have a head, so it was difficult to figure out what that would look like if she came to life. How does abstract art come to life? When art comes to life, does the model talk, or the person who is meant to be depicted? These kinds of questions came up when defining the rules for this world, and it was tricky to think through them, “ Sarah explains. It was also challenging to write enough content for a novella. “With papers,” Sarah says, “you always know where it will start at end. Here, there was so much content and so much art, that it was difficult to be consistent and continue writing. My novella ended up being about 50 pages single-spaced, which equates to around 100 book pages. It was difficult to stay consistent through it all."

While her book is not ready to hit the shelves yet, Sarah Hooton will present an excerpt from her novella on Thursday, April 6th at 6 p.m. in the Ensworth Black Box theater. Once her novella has been finished, edited, and polished, she will self-publish it. We can’t wait to read it, Sarah!

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