It’s August, freshman move-in day, and Western Carolina University is welcoming a new class of freshmen to campus. It’s what WCU Chancellor David Belcher calls a “huge day.”

“We’ve got students coming in right and left,” says Belcher. 

One of those students is Kailey Spencer. She plans to study forensics and is looking forward to the lab work. 

The latest development to throw down a stake in Cullowhee intends to build a 488-bed student housing complex on a two-lane stretch of road across from the community garden and near the Tuckasegee River.

It’s a place where students can “thrive” while enjoying “a much more robust amenity package.”

The North Carolina Center for the Advancement of Teaching is sweating out the legislative short session. Gov. Pat McCrory didn’t include any funding for the Cullowhee-based center in his proposed budget, and unless legislators carve out a place in the final budget, the center will close June 30. 

Now celebrating its third season, Cullowhee Mountain ARTS will be hosting creative writing workshops, taught by nationally recognized writers, as part of the 2014 Summer ARTS Series of artists’ workshops, presentations and youth art camps. 

The Summer ARTS Series is held at Western Carolina University in the Bardo Fine and Performing Arts Center from June 15 to July 26. The artist and writer workshops/retreats will be May 18-23 and Sept. 15-21 at the Lake Logan Retreat Center in Canton.

Don Kostelec stood in front of a flip pad in the cafeteria of Cullowhee Valley Elementary School. He asked for it all. Hold nothing back.

Alumni Tower is enjoying a late-semester afternoon on the Western Carolina University campus. Its clock keeps watch over students as they hustle between exams or toss a Frisbee on the grass.

A short walk from the tower, a fountain has attracted two sophomores and a puppy named Emma. 

Western Carolina University will hold a trio of commencement ceremonies over a two-day period – Friday and Saturday, May 9-10 – to recognize the academic achievements of what is expected to be a record-breaking spring class.

Cullowhee is awash in new developments. Specifically, the community is buzzing with the construction of high-density developments aimed at housing Western Carolina University’s growing student population. 

Western Carolina University is expected to get the go-ahead this month to place development of the Millennial Campus under the control of WCU’s endowment fund. 

University officials believe the endowment fund would serve as a better vehicle to foster the public-private initiatives envisioned for Millennial Campus, according to the proposal.

A writer looking at a blank page is a like a painter staring at a fresh canvas, a sculptor facing a block of clay or a woodworker holding a chunk of wood. The desire to grab words from thin air and construct them into sentences, notions and ideas comes from an internal fire to describe human emotion and situation. It is a calling, one that picks its creators when the time and place is prime. Writers are messengers, connecting the unknown cosmos to an everyday modern reality.

SEE ALSO: Wordsmiths converge on WCU for Spring Literary Festival

Western Carolina University will be once again play host to an array of writers during the 12th annual Spring Literary Festival, which runs March 31 through April 4. The event is a celebration of the written word, where finely-aged veterans intermingle with the young faces of future generations eager to find their voice. It is a bountiful cross-pollination, one crucial to the perpetuation of the craft.