Students volunteered to read essays they wrote to an audience during “The Ghosts of the Riders Present” reading in the 7th Street Underground Wednesday.

Students of the Advanced Creative Non-Fiction class volunteered to read one of the essays they have worked on in class during the semester, with topics ranging from technology, to customer service.

Charlotte Pence, an assistant English professor, said her class is a fairly large class but she gave her students the choice to perform or submit an essay they worked on.

“Everyone had to do something that made them work out of the classroom into the world,” Pence said. “They could choose to read here or they could submit to a journal.”

Pence said seven students volunteered to read during the event, which Pence said worked out perfectly.

The students choose which essay or short story they wanted to read to the audience. Some topics were more serious, while others made people laugh.

Andrew McCue, a senior English major, read his essay about a time when he was young ad he thought his boom-box was rebel against him.

“I tried to keep it as accurate as possible,” McCue said. “Theres only one area I was a little sketchy on and that was trying to remember what song I was going to play, but that was back in 7th grade.”

McCue said he had worked on the story for about two and a half months and concluded the story before Thanksgiving break.

He also said that he knew he wanted to read this story during the reading Wednesday.

“Other essays I had worked on just didn’t fit the format as well for presentation,” McCue said.

Mariah Flaishans, a senior accounting major, said she liked that she could tell that everybody had emotion towards the content they were writing about.

“There’s a way to read it where you have no feelings but everybody seemed really invested in what they wrote,” Flashians said.

McCue said that when he writes a story like the one he read that he tries to put more of a personal voice into the story.

“I tend to put a lot more personal voice in by using small asides or sarcastic humor or dry humor, and personal details,” McCue said. “Sometimes they’re generic so other people can relate to them and other times they’re super personal.”

McCue said that being able to perform stories gives a chance to leave it less up to interpretation and more to imagination.

“Instead of people trying to understand what I could mean by what I wrote, its how I mean it by how I say it,” McCue said.

Flaishans said she liked listening to the story Lisa Rhodes, an English major, read about customer service.

“I worked at Menard’d for probably three cumulative years and I understand the concept of the store taking the customer first,” Flaishans said.

McCue said he wanted to write stories that were real, but were also about moments where you are not totally sure what happened in that situation.

“You make the stronger details stand out and the ones that you don’t know get kind of shrouded in mystery that way,” McCue said. “It brings a personal experience to a bunch of other people.”

Mackenzie Freund can be reached at 581-2812 or at mgfreund@eiu.edu.