August 14, 2025 by Whitney Collins, fiction faculty Back in the 1900s, when my friends and I were growing up relatively unplugged and easily entertained, we often played Mad Libs, a word game that prompted players to fill in the blanks of a half-completed story with random nouns, verbs, and adjectives. The result was always a creative and non-sensical tale that illustrated the power of word choice and surprise. Fast-forward to the early 21st century, when I was no longer playing Mad Libs but
