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The Last Writer’s Club is a nonprofit organization collaborating with Three Oaks Hospice and led by undergraduate students at The University of Texas at Dallas. For the fall 2023 and spring 2024 semesters, we were able to lead an official class called ARHM 3342: Last Writer’s Project with the help of Dr. Pamela Gossin and a team of eight students. The goal of the class was to mentor students through writing a memoir for a hospice patient/family.
Students enrolled in the class were sorted either into groups or as a solo writer and assigned a patient at Three Oaks Hospice in Richardson. They met with this patient either at the patient’s home, at an assisted living facility or virtually to conduct interviews throughout the semester, ideally meeting their patient/family weekly or bi-weekly. The interviews were then used to create a memoir about the life of the hospice patient outside of their diagnosis and family members were also encouraged to collaborate by sharing their stories about the patient or writing letters that they might want to see included.
The officers of the club were in charge of making calls at the Three Oaks Hospice office to recruit patients and making forms to recruit students. The officers also prepared weekly lectures for the class, graded assignments and had one-on-one sessions with students giving advice on how to write the memoir. The lectures included a range of topics from cultural competency, end-of-life care, medical humanities to technological advancements in medicine. The curriculum was discussion-focused and the rest of the time was used for actual writing of the memoirs.
The funds from this fundraiser will be used for publishing, printing and shipping memoirs for the current and future semesters. Each memoir comes out to around $7-$16 depending on its length and each hospice patient receives one as well as each student who helped to write the memoir. We also pay a graphic designer $20 for each cover design, so that the memoirs can more vividly reflect the lives of their patient. The goal of our fundraising will be $1,200 in order to prepare for the fall 2025 and spring 2026 cohort of students, officers and patients. Having these funds early on will allow the team to calculate how many students and patients they can accommodate next year and put their full focus on the content of the class, recruiting participants and quality of the memoirs.
We had 12 distinct memoirs created and shipped for the fall 2023 cohort, which came out to $591.76 for all copies on B&N press without tax-exemption and the graphic designer was paid $240 for the 12 memoirs. We have 13 memoirs from the spring 24 cohort, which are coming out to $480 in publishing/ordering/shipping for all copies through B&N press and the graphic designer was paid $260 for her designs. We are grateful to UTD administration and SOC for helping us to find funding for spring 2024, but we would like to fundraise for future years to avoid any delays in printing. This will be a wonderful opportunity for us to explain our organization’s goals, operations and impact on the Dallas community.
Our Instagram is @Lastwritersutd.