College is a place not only for young adults to learn and grow after high school, but for many, it is also a way for them to get that much closer to reaching their goals. One such student is James Frederick Trent, a Sophomore here at Concord University, who recently had one of his short stories published on Amazon: “One for Another.”
“It’s about a guy […] who gets into a car wreck and wakes up in the hospital the next morning. It’s a lot of a character study,” Trent explains, “It deals with a lot of his stay in the hospital and the after-effects.”
As a student, Trent got involved in Reflexes, the student-led creative writing magazine, after Dr. Delilah O’Haynes brought the topic up to students in her creative writing class. He expressed an interest in the magazine to her and she offered him the position of editor. “I submitted something to it when it got restarted in 2014, I think. But in terms of actually working on the paper, it’s just been this semester.” Reflexes is available next semester as a one-credit hour workshop class.
The story that was published, however, was a personal project of his that he had been working on over the summer, not a submission or piece for Reflexes. He decided to have it published as a means of getting his feet wet in the literary world. “I can’t brag about it too much, since Amazon has free publishing. But it’s been doing fairly well for me having no name. I decided that, when I was really having a lot of fun with it – it was gonna be a short story from the get-go – I’ll just throw it out there, see what comes back.”
Trent aspires to be an author, and his short story, “One for Another,” can be purchased for $0.99 in the Amazon Kindle Store under the pen-name Frederick Trent.