Kathryn Hamlet, better known as Katie, scrolls through her files on her laptop and counts the number of writing ideas she has for future stories.
She is up to 43 new ideas.
“I come up with ideas that are very complicated that need world building,” said Hamlet, a senior english major and creative writing minor.
Hamlet, like many college students, has big goals post graduation. She likes to write and read and has dreams of being published one day.
“I want to write novels, I can’t come up with ideas that could be fleshed out into a short story” said Hamlet.
Her favorite books include the Percy Jackson series and The Hunger Games, both of which influence Hamlet’s love for fantasy and the young adult genre. Authors such as J.K Rowling and Cassandra Clare inspire her as well.
“I don’t need to be the next J.K Rowling but it would be awesome to see a book that I wrote adapted into a movie like Harry Potter was or to have such a great fan base like that,” said Hamlet.
Describing herself as an extrovert Hamlet would also love to feature on screen.
“If my book were to get adapted into a movie I would love to have a cameo in it like Stephenie Meyer did with Twilight.”
Although she has a love for the fantasy young adult genre, her ideas also come from real life.
Hamlet was the winner of the Sigma Tau Deltas Bad Valentine poetry contest. The contest featured an open mic where students read work from others and their own. Her poem “Purple Love ” was inspired from her own life as a member of the LGBTQ+ community.
“Before I took classes here at Austin Peay, I didn’t write a lot of poetry. The assignments I took from class inspired my own ideas. I wrote ‘Purple Love’ for that class.”
The poem, written in the colors of the rainbow, expressed Hamlet’s personality and her own idea of two women being together. Purple Love also stemmed from the classic rhyme of roses are red violets are blue.
‘I’ll be the roses red you’ll be the violets blue’, represent two women who are each of the colors explained Hamlet. When the women come together they make purple referencing the question ‘You want to make purple? Yes, I do too.’
Hamlet hopes her poem shares a message to all students that it’s important to stay true to yourself and be who you are.
“I’m the kind of person who is going to be who I am and if you have a problem with it then that’s your problem. I like to be loud, I like to be very open about who I am,” said Hamlet.
