While most high school students are still questioning what they want to do with their future, sophomore Juliana Conyer already knows that she wants to be a writer. Her passion for creative writing, including poetry and her own realistic fiction novel she is currently working on, feeds into her dream to one day become a novelist.

Conyer is inspired to write through both her own and other people’s personal stories and experiences. She takes occurrences in her life and internal emotions and turns them into meaningful stories and poems. Conyer explains that she uses creative writing as a coping mechanism to lighten her mood on stressful days.

“I like being able to take experiences or emotions that I’ve had and turn them into something that isn’t as real. Or, if there are issues that I am really passionate about going on in the world or in my community, I will turn that into writing,” Conyer said.

Because she has spent plenty of time exploring the creative writing field through her many projects, Conyer already has an idea of what she wants her future in creative writing to look like. She recognizes that it is difficult to become a novelist, so she anticipates studying creative writing and journalism in college and plans to further her writing career from there.

“When I graduate college, I would like to be a journalist until I get my foot in the door with creative writing,” Conyer said.

Though she is early to decide what she wants to do in her life, Conyer knew it was her calling. This urge to be a writer comes from her lifelong love for reading and writing. Conyer smiled as she explained that her mom used to take her books away from her as a punishment in her childhood.

“From third to fifth grade I wanted to be a marine biologist, but I feel like I always knew that I was going to want to be a writer eventually because a teacher would tell us to write a short story in class and make it a page, and I would take it home and write eight, nine, ten pages,” Conyer said.

While many students face challenges in math or science, Conyer enjoys challenging herself through literature as well. Her favorite genre to read is mystery because she likes to try to decipher and solve the mystery herself before the author explicitly states it. Conyer also tackled the task of reading an advanced literary classic, “Pride and Prejudice” by Jane Austen, in eighth grade.

“When I first started reading the book, I was honestly just reading it because I was like ‘OK, I’m in eighth grade. I feel like I should read this,’ but then I just couldn’t put it down because it turned into something that was really enjoyable,” Conyer said.

Conyer is a member of the speech team, which gave her another outlet to further her passion for liberal arts. Last year she competed in oratory, which she described as a persuasive speech in which you can choose a topic to argue about. She also did poetry, which consists of taking several different poems from different authors and melding them together.

“I love the freedom that you have when performing the poetry to express yourself in any way that you want. Some people, when they performed and I was watching, just touched me so much,” Conyer said.

Conyer writes poetry and chapters of her book in her free time, reads a lot and plans to be a part of the speech team again this school year.