The English department’s student ambassador Ben Ahlrichs is an English and creative writing major on the publishing track. He shared formative experiences with his writing, ranging from leading writing groups at the University of Iowa to an eye-opening exploration of the natural world in Alaska.
The Daily Iowan: How did you become an ambassador for the English department? What does the position require of you?
Ahlrichs: I was in a small writing group my freshman year with only three other people besides our group leader. It’s not an application process — it works through recommendations. My group leader recommended me to Kate Torno because he thought I’d be interested. As an ambassador, I meet with prospective high school students, and we also speak at panels. It’s also common for us to lead a writing group.
Last year, I led a fiction writing group that liked workshopping, and that’s what we did almost the entire semester. The group I am leading this year is focused on poetry, and we decided to dedicate our meetings to more writing time. There’s a lot of community-building, and I especially like this group because poetry is the main thing I enjoy. I bring poems I’ve written or read in class and prompts that have been given to me in class.
We want participants to learn how to talk about other people’s work and how to talk about poetry. Some of the work brought into the creative writing spaces I’ve been in is vulnerable. These groups become a place of tenderness, and I want to pass that on to others. I also want to make sure people know what is okay to say and what is not okay to say. A lot of it is preparing the students
for workshopping.
What are your goals with creative writing?
I plan on applying to MFA programs in poetry this upcoming year. The long-term goal, though, is to teach literature. As for current projects, I spent a summer in Alaska. This semester, I am writing a collection of about 25 poems about that experience.
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How was this experience in Alaska formative to your writing?
I’ve always had an interest in the natural world, and so being in one area with different images of the natural world was very important to me. The place I was in is called Juneau, and it has the largest temperate rainforest, and it also has an ocean and wildlife like whales. It was also the first time I had been on my own. I’m from Iowa, so many people from my hometown came here, but this was my own space, and I could be my own person. It was important for me to see my voice kind of cut through that space and see my identity form in the natural world. I was studying and interested in queer ecology, which looks at humans and animals not in a hierarchy but as existing together and alongside each other.
I recently wrote a poem titled “Why Birds Fly.” Lately, I’ve been focusing on making my writing more associative and intentional, and there are a lot of images in there that I love, like birds and whales. It’s me reaching to understand queer ecology and the natural world, and it acts as a culmination of all my interests and efforts.