EmersonWRITES Anthology 2013-14

emerson

the

WRITES

A ntholog y

2013–2014

Volum e 4

A selection of original work by the students of emersonWRITES

emerson WRITES

is a free creative writing program for students in Boston Public Schools, co-sponsored by the First-Year Writing Program and the Enrollment Office at Emerson College.

EmersonWRITES is guided by the principle that writing is essential to intellectual engagement, self-representation, and access to opportunity.

In college-style courses held on Emerson’s campus, emersonWRITES students practice writing and critical thinking skills. They form a community of young writers whose individual voices respond to the world through the written word.

our FACULTY

are practicing writers and devoted teachers.

Having come to Emerson College to pursue their Masters of Fine Arts degrees in creative writing, they understand the impact writing can make within communities large and small. They bring the expertise of their own craft into the classroom and have been trained by Emerson’s First-Year Writing Program to teach college writing. emersonWRITES is a collaboration between the First-Year Writing Program in the Department of Writing, Literature and Publishing and Enrollment Management at Emerson College.

The emersonWRITES anthology is published annually by emersonWRITES, Emerson College, 120 Boylston Street, Boston MA 02116.

Vol. 4, 2013-14 published February 2014.

Anthology & Layout Editor: Abby Travis Cover Design: Corey Byrnes Cover Photo: Kevin Kovaleski

our STUDENTS

come from all over the Boston area and represent a diverse range of high schools and communities. They speak and write in Creole, Spanish, French, English, Shanghaiese, Russian, Italian, Vietamese, and Kinyarwanda. Some have only recently started calling the United States home. All share a passion for creative writing. Over the course of 12 Saturday sessions, they meet and collaborate with other writers they may not have otherwise known. This anthology showcases their hard work and their voices: their poems, their stories, their essays, their scripts, and even a collaborative slam poem. We invite you to enjoy their words and to experience each of their worlds.

Welcome from the Curriculum Coordinator “It is often in life that a reflection on an experience exposes to us more reality than the experience itself.” So opens our 2013-2014 anthology, with the wise-beyond-her-years words of Abigail Fisk, one of our emersonWRITES students. I can’t think of a more perfect opening to this collection of diverse voices.

For the past eleven weekends, the second floor of the Ansin building has been home to a community of writers who sought out time in their overscheduled high school lives to reflect on their experiences, to contemplate the reality in which they find themselves daily, to share ideas, to create new worlds, to revise, and to come back and do it all again a week later.

The students gathering in emersonWRITES’ classrooms come from many different worlds. Some have only recently arrived in the US; some have never experienced winter before; some first learned to write in languages other than English; some are avid sports fans, others musicians; some want to be doctors, others want to write the next great classic novel.

But on every Saturday morning since October, each of these diverse voices and lives came together because of a shared passion for writing. They took the time to reflect and examine their realities and decided, as writers do, to try and make sense of them with their words.

The results of those efforts—of drafting, revision, peer review, workshop, reflection, and starting all over again—in a process shared by students and their writer-teachers, can be found on the pages of this fourth annual anthology.

I am amazed at what can happen during these Saturday sessions, at how the boundaries of geography and language and race and socioeconomics can be challenged as each member of our emersonWRITES community takes on the common identity of writer, with the common purpose of helping each other’s singular voices be heard more clearly. What follows here are those voices, preserved and celebrated. Congratulations, students and teachers, on another amazing year!

—Mary Kovaleski Byrnes

Table of

Contents

COURSES Creative Nonfiction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 7 Fiction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 27 Literary Journalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 53 Poetry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 79 Scriptwriting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 97

WORKSHOP Slam Poetry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page xx

Creative Nonfiction

Voices in the Digital Age

In this creative nonfiction course, we began by questioning our identities and, specifically, our online identities: How do we present ourselves in this modern, digital age? How accurately do those ubiquitous online profiles represent who we actually are? In our writing and conversations, we researched what compels us to publicly project often superficial versions of ourselves. From there, we explored several forms of online writing that allow us to delve deeper into our lives and relationships with others. We wrote confessions, commentaries, memoir, and personal essays of introspection and growth.

We were a diverse class of homeschoolers, professional dancers and choreographers, newspaper editors, illness-conquerors, multilingual world travelers, and talented writers with a passion for introspection and connecting our unique experiences to the world beyond. No matter how personal the topic, we strove to connect our stories to the larger issues at stake for our global audience.

In the following pages, we chose to share our final project, a memoir of our expertise. We began by narrating a specific moment in which we were irrevocably changed, and then transformed it into an opportunity for reflection. That experience of intimate, world-shifting change, we realized, left us with some insight we wanted to share with each other, with something our readers could learn from, and with something through which we could present a true representation of our selves beyond the mere surface.

Instructors

Dymon Lewis is a first-time emersonWrites instructor and a first-generation American.

She is an MFA candidate in fiction at Emerson and is torn between writing a novel about a dysfunctional family or a linked-story collection contrasting the northeast and the south for her thesis. Dymon’s work is voice-driven, typically starring firstperson narrators with attitude. She has been previously published in the online literary magazine Fickle Muses.

Abby Travis has been on the faculty of emersonWRITES for nearly four years. She received her nonfiction MFA in 2013 and serves as part-time faculty in the First-Year Writing Program, Arts Operations Assistant for the School of the Arts, and Editorial Assistant for Ploughshares at Emerson College. Her work appears in Rain Taxi Review of Books, The Rectangle, on the Ploughshares Blog, Powell’s Books’ Review-a-Day, and is forthcoming in the Crab Orchard Review as a finalist for the John Guyon Literary Nonfiction Prize. She is writing a memoir about training competition horses and the ethical and philosophical implications of expectations, ambition, and miscommunication.

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Abigail Fisk

Mystic Valley Regional Charter School, Grade 11

Throughout my experience at EmersonWRITES, I learned a lot about revising and re-wording my sentences to further develop imagery, which I worked on in this piece with the use of similes, metaphors, and elaborate description.

Finding the Figurative Light

It is often in life that a reflection on an experience exposes to us more reality than the experience itself. Sometimes it is our most troubling and challenging experiences that truly redefine who we are. Reflections have the ability to reshape our outlooks and visions so that we gain full consciousness of a situation and make decisions from a point of such consciousness. I came to this realization when looking back upon the troublesome threeyear diagnostic process of my chronic illnesses. Those three years changed everything that I had previously believed in.

Prior to my troubles, I had lived a normal and carefree childhood in a safety-bubble of a loving family who protected me from all that was bad in the world. My previous feelings of happiness and feeling of invincibility came to an unfortunate halt in 8th grade when a chronic nervous system disorder was triggered by a bout of Fifths disease I had suffered through during the previous year. Due to the persistence of the subsequent inflictions, I spent most of 8th and 9th grade switching and moving: doctor to doctor, hospital to hospital, specialist to specialist—all with little-to-no answers and endless amounts of recovery plans that continuously proved themselves useless to the specific problem I was dealing with. I missed more school than I had thought I could possibly make up for, and I was socially disconnected from my peers. When I was able to go back to school, my friends were distant, my grades stunk, and I lost most of my motivation.

I saw success as an impossibility. In my newly pessimistic perspective, there 8

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was no light at the end of the tunnel. Every possible glimpse of brightness that could have been this figurative light just seemed to be the train coming right at me—full of overdue assignments and useless medications.

It wasn’t until the summer between 9th and 10th grade that I realized that hopelessly wallowing in the negative facets of my life, no matter how life-altering or irritating, was ultimately what was ruining my future—far more than any indefinitely-named, ongoing affliction ever could. While wallowing in discomfort was paradoxically comforting to me, I realized that I was preventing further growth in what could be a positive direction in my life. Upon this realization that my life was, indeed, not “over”, I decided to spend that summer making up work, going to physical therapy, and reconnecting with my childhood friends. Each had been fighting their own personal battles of teenagedom—all drastically different from mine though still problematic. Catching up with them offered me further insight and inspired perseverance within me—despite how different our struggles were in both subjectivity and magnitude. In these newer reflections, I realized that the events leading up to this were very much like plant fertilizer—they felt like crap, but they would help me grow.

The beginning of 10th grade marked a great change for the better.

While some of my fellow classmates were suffering a “sophomore slump”, I experienced a “sophomore skyrocket”. I tried my hardest each day to wake up, go to school, and get all of my work in—even when I felt as though I could not, resorting to crutches both physical and figurative. Each day was a struggle masked in a smile. These forced smiles, which were composed of hard work, long nights and determination, turned into very real ones, as my grades went up, giving me a newfound sense of victory over my pain.

Finally, we received a verdict per my rheumatologist, and we were able to find a better treatment path for the pain amplification and nervous system disorder that I had been dealing with. With a better plan, I was on the way to becoming my old self again. Keeping relatively acceptable attendance and maintaining honor roll throughout my sophomore year of high school was probably the greatest accomplishment I have made in my life thus far. Through reflection and closure, I had regained my life, along with my ambitions and goals for my future.

In the heat of the moment, we are never able to see the full picture.

You often miss what is surrounding you while focusing on a single negative aspect of your life, causing frustrations and temporary (yet seemingly endless) losses of hope—until you reflect, and upon that, attempt a better Creative Nonfiction

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understanding of the entire situation, including the often ignored outlying events surrounding the issue. Looking back, it was my greatest struggle that provided me with my new goals and visions for my future, including my dream of becoming a medical researcher. Although those years were nothing but confusion and misery in the short-run, reflection has provided me the ability to alternately label those years as the most critically definitive of my life.

Abigail Fisk is a junior at Mystic Valley Regional Charter School and the social media editor of the school’s newspaper. With contrasting dreams of either becoming a biomedical engineer or a concept artist at PIXAR animation studios, Abigail takes pride in her skills in research as well as painting, and is determined to keep both in her life no matter what the future shall bring her.

Calvin Gil

Homeschooled, Grade 11 Throughout my time in emersonWRITES, I have learned, among other things, how to weave together a story from a personal experience. This is the main feat I have accomplished with this piece; I was able to take an experience of mine and transform it into a narrative of sorts, complete with a climactic crisis and an underlying lesson. I hope you enjoy reading this piece as much as I enjoyed writing it.

Rising Through The Pennon I began writing for my school newspaper, The Pennon, in 2011, when I was fourteen years old. I started off doing simple video game reviews, due mainly to the fact that I was an avid gamer at the time. I continued writing these pieces for a while, sending in a new review each month. After several months of doing this, several staff members urged me to write more serious pieces, so I began to write articles with more substance than mere video game reviews, mainly articles that detailed news and events. Eventually, I really leaped outside of my comfort zone and began to interview members of the school staff for The Pennon. As time moved on, I became progressively more dedicated to the paper, steadily moving up through its ranks. I started off as a writer, then became an editor, and eventually became a senior editor under the leadership of a newly appointed editor-in-chief. It was around this time that The Pennon began to break down.

Towards the end of the 2012 semester, the new editor-in-chief unexpectedly resigned, stating that the job was thankless and that they found the work to be too much to handle. The whole paper fell apart.

Communications became an absolute mess, the monthly meetings came to an abrupt halt, and none of the staff were able to receive any of the emails sent to them. I tried to keep in contact with the other staff during this period, but to no avail; communications were too scrambled. Eventually, the school staff recognized that the paper was in significant turmoil and hired a former editor to come in and piece things back together. He set up

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an initial meeting to talk about what was going to happen next with the paper, but as it turns out I was the only one to attend. Surprisingly, I ended up having a really good one-on-one talk with the new advisor, discussing my future with the paper, maintaining my status as senior editor, and what I could do to help with the next issue. As the year went on, I tried my best to stay dedicated to the paper and show my worth in that time of need, trying to put in a couple of articles every month. While I’ll admit that I did slip up a couple of times due to academic obligations, I made sure that I maintained my office hours and kept in constant contact with the advisor, explaining myself and keeping in good standing with him.

Early this year, the editor-in-chief position became vacant. I was friends with the advisor, and had shown him my dedication, which I hoped would help my chances and being appointed to the position. After we engaged in some brief correspondence and Chris explained the responsibilities and duties the job entailed, I was ultimately chosen to become the next editorin-chief. After I took the position, I realized I had a lot to learn. Chris was a great mentor and taught me much of what I know now. It took me a while, but I managed to do it and these lessons helped prepare me for Chris’s own departure, which happened recently. I am now alone, for the time being, and must put the paper together all on my own.

Now that I am working alone, I fully understand why dedication to the paper is so important. There are times that I have to be in the office until late at night to finish the paper by the deadline, and I have to be in the office to work on the paper on a regular basis. I spend a great deal of my time there, suffice to say. If I fail to get things done in time, the paper doesn’t come out. It is a large responsibility, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything; my experience with The Pennon has taught me much about how a publication works and is ultimately an invaluable learning experience.

This is Calvin’s f irst year as a student in emersonWRITES. He is homeschooled, and began taking classes at North Shore Community College, home of The Pennon, when he was thirteen. He hopes to one day enter the f ield of Computer Science. In his free time, he enjoys reading, writing, and gaming.

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Bridget McQuillan

Archbishop Williams High School, Grade 12

In this class I have learned the importance of adding vividness to your writing and connecting with larger issues. Therefore in this piece I worked to set a visual scene and connect to the larger issues of friendship and trust.

Secrets over South Park My friend Jenna and I were in my basement-turned-in-home-Irishpub sitting in the wooden chairs with our feet up on the bar. We were watching South Park and eating some pretty great ice cream in our ugly school uniforms. The ceiling lights were dimmed so the television illuminated our silver spoons and laughing faces. It was the spring of my freshman year of high school, and I met Jenna that fall after signing up for the awful volleyball team manager positions. We hated school, we hated volleyball, and it was pretty safe to say we bonded over hating life. But don’t be alarmed, just because Jenna and I had our negative tendencies doesn’t mean we weren’t fun to be around.

She was offensively hilarious, didn’t give a crap about what people thought of her, and lived her life for herself while being the most thoughtful person I knew. Not to mention she was insanely smart and was in all the high honors classes that I failed to score into. Yet, there was no fooling me that there was something kind of off about Jenna. Not “off ” in a bad way, but off in a way that she just wasn’t like most of the other kids I went to school with. It was in my basement where Jenna and I really became best friends, where she finally shared something with me that made us have more in common besides love-hating the volleyball coach Ms. McDonald.

“Yeah, so actually we haven’t really talked about this kind of stuff before, but I have some problems I kind of wanted to tell you about.,” Creative Nonfiction

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said Jenna. This was about as serious as we have ever talked, ever. The only other time I could think about us being this serious was over our adoration for Sacha Baron Cohen.

“What kind of problems, like, what do you mean?” I replied.

“I have PTSD and major depression...yeah. I actually spent a few months in the looney-bin back in middle school for a while.” she said.

“No way!” I said straightening myself up in my seat, kind of excited in an odd way. I wasn’t happy over the fact that she was struggling, just happy that we had a lot more in common than we originally thought.

Jenna looked confused. That probably wasn’t the reaction that she was looking for. I explained to her that she was a friend who could finally understand and relate to me. I had been diagnosed with a mood disorder earlier that year and hadn’t talked about it with anyone outside of my immediate famil. I really had no one to talk to or relate to when it came to my new life with a diagnosis, so I wasn’t used to it. I couldn’t help but feel some apprehension over this conversation, but a bit of hope too. She was stunned and I reached for the clicker and shut off South Park, now wasn’t the time for Cartman’s voice to be reverberating through the room.

As we slowly uncovered our past histories with mental health, we laughed and laughed about the dysfunction that was our lives. It was apparent that Jenna had many more years under her belt when it came to this stuff, which made me feel sort of relieved that she knew what she was talking about, but upset that her adolescence was plagued with all of this. She was basically one of my new best friends—and now my part time mental health guru.

The real point of this is that before Jenna and her problems came along, I was really, really struggling alone with my diagnosis. I was struggling in school and with my family and friends, and exhibiting, for lack of a better word, really crazy behavior on God only knows what day or hour. You tend to feel pretty lonely when life gives you these “slaps” in the face so when you have an actual friend who can understand you it’s like striking gold. I didn’t feel comfortable talking to even my current therapist on most days, but I trusted Jenna. The fact alone that she told me about her hardships when we only knew each other for roughly 6 months proves that she trusted me as well. And that trust alone created the most hilarious Seroquel-sharing duo ever.

Jenna and I are still great friends to this day. We have grown up and changed a lot since our meek years of being freshman in high school, but we 14

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still enjoy our dose of offensive comedy and making hate-speeches about our high school. Through the past four years I have had my ridiculous ups and downs, and so has Jenna. Yet, the big difference this time around is that we had each other to talk to the whole time, through the really, really good parts and the frightening, bad parts. Trust in friendship is something that has to be built over time, but I’m a firm believer that Jenna and I built our whole wall of trust on that day in my basement, in one sitting. I run by every major decision I make with Jenna nowadays, and would truly trust my life in her hands if it came down to it. She would probably call me a very inappropriate expletive for even saying that . . . but I know deep down she would say the exact same.

Bridget McQuillan is a senior at Archbishop Williams High School setting her sights on colleges around Boston, with a focus on studying child and adolescent psychology. When she’s not painting or cooking, you can f ind her drinking some tea or snuggling up to watch a scary movie.

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Martha Pham

Quincy High School, Grade 12

“Voices in the Digital Age” has taught me a variety of techniques to improve my writing voice and sentence structure. Through this class, I’ve learned how to connect my mundane, everyday experiences to larger issues that can reach a wider audience.

Bite Your Tongue for the Cookies My government and politics teacher made it a point to have her first lesson be, “politics don’t have a place at the dinner table.” I sometimes ignore that little bit when in conversations with my dad, because, well, even if we don’t agree, he’ll still be my dad. If it isn’t over politics, it’ll be over how late I can stay out. But other than that, I do keep politics out of social conversations, because it’s awkward when you don’t agree with someone, and often you’ll be turned off by someone you could have otherwise gotten along with swimmingly… I’m afraid I learned that the hard way when I left Starbucks crying after my best friend told me he didn’t “get feminism.”

Maybe I overreacted, or maybe he’s just stupid. The point is, though, that I became aware of my sensitivity to the subject. It’s easy to hate-watch Fox News, but when I’m confronted by a real-life person who even questions feminism I’m practically brought to tears by frustration.

One not-very-particular Friday night, my girlfriends and I are over our friend Augusta’s house watching a movie and eating pizza. Somewhere upstairs her brothers are reenacting Peter Pan’s battle with Hook while her mom, Noreen, is baking cookies in the kitchen. The house is small and mildly hectic, but it’s warm and comforting—like how you would imagine the nuclear family’s house back in the ’50s or something (minus the flat screen TV and the Apple laptop lying on top of the untuned piano.)

After the movie, Noreen joins our hot coco sippin’ gossip sesh—only 16

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she doesn’t really come to gossip—she just audits and occasionally offers adultly moral advice and the like. And it’s not the advice you roll your eyes at, because Noreen’s pretty funny. She’s a cool mom. We all love her. As we’re all talking and laughing, I’m wondering what it’s like to have such a cool relationship with one’s mom. It’s not that my mother and I aren’t on good terms or anything, but it’s been clear since the beginning that she’s my mother and I’m her daughter—she’s in charge and I’m not. It works out just fine for me and my mom, but we’re not friends. We don’t talk about school or boys the way Noreen does with us.

When I tune back in, Noreen is saying, “What is feminism? These women are out there burning bras and scaring away men, and they expect the rest of us to be on board with it!” Wait, what? “They want all these really high positions, but the truth is, women are just catty by nature. They don’t want to see other women succeed, and they just want to be on top. ” I make an effort to keep my jaw in check and to make sure my mouth isn’t hanging wide open, guffawing at the idiocy of what I just heard. I get this intense urge to shake her by the shoulders and say, “Do you even know what feminism is? Have you bothered to know what it stands for and what it’s done for women? How do you have your own job? How were you allowed to go to college? How are you able to own this house just as much as your husband?”

But instead, I shrug and keep my mouth shut as she goes on. “We might as well just let the men keep their positions, they can actually handle it.” I notice that a few of my friends glance at me quickly and look away (probably not to make it so obvious that I would be the one to take offense… Then I would really have to suffer Noreen asking me something rhetorical like, “Well, don’t you agree?”).

We’re saved by a phone call reminding her she has a dentist appointment tomorrow at 3pm. As soon as she leaves there’s an awkward silence and then we all burst out laughing. One of my friends goes, “Martha, I thought you were going to shrink and disappear into the couch.”

To that I tell her I thought I was going to, too.

Noreen comes back with batch of cookies and some iced tea this time.

“In case you girls were getting sick of hot cocoa! So what were we talking about?” Someone says they forget and instead turns the subject to prom.

For the rest of the night we talk about themes and dresses and limos.

When it’s time to go home, Noreen walks each and every one of us to the door with a goodie bag of cookies and a hug goodnight. Noreen is Creative Nonfiction

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not a bad person, as evidenced by her shower of deliciously baked goods and overbearing hugs. She just has a really bad misconception of what feminism is. While I do stand by my beliefs, it’s difficult not to plead ignorance on her behalf. It’s difficult for anyone to undo their upbringing entirely, and that ought to excuse the ignorance part, at least for a little while. There’s a difference between preaching to a room full of strangers on women empowerment, and fighting with your best friend’s mom under her roof right after she’s just fed you. One’s empowering, while the other is just, well, really awkward.

There can be small steps to changes, and not every one of them has to start with making everyone in the room recant all their beliefs in one hour. It’s easy to take offense, but it’s hard to consider where the person comes from and why they believe what they do. Somewhere along the way, feminism became hate-reading, hate-watching, and hate-blogging the patriarchy without considering the side effects of so much hate for too many people in one movement. Resentment here is justified, but the hate that comes along with it needs to stay in check. It’s easy to go full force and push these ideas that are (unfortunately) radical to many people (even in 21st century). But maybe the reason it’s taking so long to get the message across is because so many people are startled by the amount of pressure to be and do something entirely different than what they’re used to.

It’s hard to know that there is a kinder, gentler way to go about proposing ideas to help women know and recognize their potential. Isn’t feminism, after all, letting these women know that they have the power to be who they want to be, and not reinforcement that they are mistakeridden creatures who don’t know what they’re doing ever? Making women feel bad about themselves for whatever reason seems counterproductive, and anyone would get defensive, whether we believe they’re wrong or right.

Sometimes a little patience can make all the difference.

Martha is an avid fan of cupcakes and tea. She enjoys binge-watching TV shows that are at least two seasons in, and plans on one day becoming a travelling writer-dentist as a volunteer with Doctors Without Borders.

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Andy Rondon

Cristo Rey Boston High School, Grade 11

In our nonf iction emersonWRITES class, we discussed and worked on many topics and ideas, but the one that I felt I had to work on most was putting a bit more of me in each piece so that the audience could envisage what type of person I am through my writing. Aside from the course itself, I was also trying to learn how to open up a bit more for the public.

Finding a Social Middleway It was around seven in the evening with a dark sky, a few clouds, and a lack of buzz on my phone. I was geared up to find this sorry excuse of a friend who I was sure was dead by now. I mean, to me, that was the only logical reason for why he hadn’t texted me back about something so important.

It took me 1 minute to get out the door. Blood boiling. Hands clenched.

Mind racing. 2 minutes to actually start walking to the train station. Rain drips. Pacing turns to fast walking. Fast walking isn’t fast enough! This guy must be dead! Then, my phone buzzed. It took me less than 3 seconds to read the text that claimed his phone had been dead… Sure it was, I thought. And I can fly on a unicorn named Bob! Right?

Actually, let me try this again. This is how I figured out that I was a social addict without the drugs to satisfy my necessity: I got home after spending some time with my friends, you know, how usual teenagers do. I got home at around 4pm and changed into some sweats and a wife beater, and during the process I texted my friend about a previous performance we’d done. The text read, and I quote, “You remember that time at the performance where we had to do some contemporary song?” At the time I sent it, I thought the text seemed to be meaningless. But that was mistake number 1.

After that it was mistake after mistake. As the clock started to tick Creative Nonfiction

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that meaningless text started to gain meaning. Thanks to that “meaningless text,” I began imagining every possible reason my friend would be taking so long to respond, every negative event that could’ve happened to my friend. I imagine him getting shot, I imagine him falling down the stairs…

Oh look a broken a skull. Or, I imagine my friend being careless while trying to text me back and then BOOM! A crash happens, a dog with rabies bites him, or he just discovered that he’s gonna get no money this year, or any other situation that is completely absurd. Three hours later I get ready to find this sorry excuse of a friend and… well, you know what happened next.

Speaking in terms of my social life: I have none. Literally, I don’t, so if I get any speck of social acceptance I tend to become pretty attached to that one person, but what happens if it’s not reciprocated? Well, ask that guy who didn’t text me right away how many days I went without even making the slightest eye contact with him. Actually let me answer that: it was 3 days. I lasted 3 days, and those days almost killed me, because going cold turkey on a social addiction might as well have been like going cold turkey on a nicotine addiction. But, nonetheless it gave me 3 days of pure reflection on this “small” addiction.

I realized I tend to react with two extremes: Either I will unmistakably take a nerf bullet to the eye for you or I don’t give one about your existence as a whole. See any problems? I do now, but at the time, I honestly couldn’t see the problem. After those days I mended the friendship and kept filling my social anorexia. Don’t get me wrong, I had people to talk to that made my days quite socially gluttonous, but I also had people that I gave the I don’t give one face to and had recently cut out of my social bubble for no solid reason. I hit a day where I knew that this type of behavior was not healthy. I mean, it even got to the point where I almost excluded my sister from my social circle… Long story short, if talking to people were an addiction, talking to my sister was my drug of choice. Overthinking social interactions almost brought me to my downfall. Maybe I wouldn’t have needed to worry about this downfall if I hadn’t exaggerated how important my social life is in the first place. And maybe I wouldn’t have to worry about finding a middle road between extremes if I had a social life with a plentiful quantity of people who I could really talk to! And maybe—I think my mind is gonna drown with so many thoughts. I might just be overthinking this, too.

Whatever. How am I doing now, you ask? Eh, I’m doing a little 20

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better. If you don’t text me back I won’t try and take the train to see if you’re fine. I won’t shut you out. I know that people don’t get bitten by dogs with rabies on a day to day basis. It’s a small intervention for a small addiction. I’m not talking too much with people and I’m fine with it, but when I do talk to someone I expect they give me the same level of intrigue in return. I feel a little deprived, but this is my Middle Way. Just not caring too much or too little about my social life. I still haven’t worked it all out, but lets just say I’m arriving at a social Enlightenment now. I don’t care if you don’t care about my story, but if that’s the case, please step out of my social bubble look back at this: *insert I don’t give one face here*.

Andy Rondon is an average teenager who just questions way too many things.

He likes to write to show people new insight on ideas or maybe even on events.

He’s passionate about the art of dance, writing as a whole, machinery, and extreme sports. If you describe him in a word it should be unicorn.

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Sonia Rugwiza

Boston International High School, Grade 12

This year, I really enjoyed getting to know my instructors. In this essay, I focused on exploring myself as a person and as a friend.

Unexpected I was too young to be at the wedding after party—only seventeen--but I snuck in anyway to hang out with my older cousin Francesca. Francesca and I were hanging out on the steps with a group of boys who kept flirting with her. This random guy kept walking by us weirdly not saying anything.

I assumed he was shy. Finally he decided to sit down with us.

He was quiet and charming, I was impressed by his attitude but that didn’t stop me from being loud, noisy and joking around with the other after-party guests. I may enjoy talking too much. After a little bit he opened up to me and engaged me in conversation. All of a sudden, it was 4 am, everyone left and it was just he and I. That’s how I met Pac. In that first conversation I discovered Pac and I had a lot in common.

We both loved basketball—even though he rooted for the Celtics and I was a Lakers’ fan. We shared a favorite soccer team, Chelsea F.C. Like me, Pac was a caregiver. We both liked kids. He was passionate about his work at a daycare. As we became better friends every time I saw him he was taking care of a child. I was impressed by what he had accomplished and by the goals he set for himself. He was a junior at Eastern Nazarene College on a full scholarship. He was also committed to his R&B singing. But what I really enjoyed was talking to him in our shared language—Kinyarwanda— for hours on end. It’s easy to meet people but hard to connect with them.

I connected with Pac immediately and left that party knowing I had made a friend.

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But my family members that knew Pac had a really negative opinion of him—especially my Godmother Maria’s kids. They all firmly believed that he would be a negative influence on me and warned me against spending time with him. They warned me that Pac was a player. Which didn’t matter to me since I wasn’t interested in him that way. They made fun of his singing and said he had no talent. This criticism also meant nothing to me since I had listened to Pac sing my own two ears and thought he had talent.

But most damning was the fact that Pac and his younger brother Patrick did drugs and weren’t ashamed to admit it.

Drugs are especially looked down upon in Rwandan culture.

Essentially if you do drugs you are assumed to have no goals in life. My family is firm in this belief. But I don’t agree with that idea. Pac is an average college student. And some college students do drugs. Though I don’t drugs I understand the need for experimentation and self-discovery.

For Pac that time is now and that time is during his college years.

I’ve never been one to accept other people’s opinions. My greatest strength has always been seeing beyond the negative. I am the friend that brings the unknown amazing qualities of a person to the forefront. Pac was a good friend and I wouldn’t allow naysayers make me give up a friendship that I cared about. I even managed to set up Pac and one of my aunts and they dated for a little while. And my aunt has great taste in people!

I’m proud of being a welcoming and understanding person. It’s easy to look down at people. I choose to highlight the positives in a person.

Sonia is a senior at Boston International High School. She was born in Rwanda and moved to the U.S. in November 2010. She plans to major in biology in college. Sonia’s favorite show is Ridiculousness on MTV.

Creative Nonfiction

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Buddy Taylor

Quincy College, Freshman

This year was my f irst year in emersonWRITES. During this class, I enjoyed learning about how to write nonf iction stories. In this piece, I practiced the skill of giving a story an important meaning.

Love Interest When I turned 13, I became a diehard romantic. I dreamed, daydreamed, and wrote about the day when I would meet a girl who would be my special someone and spend all her time with me. I was young, so I didn’t realize how unrealistic my expectations were. This led to a lot of frustration when girls would treat me like their male-girlfriend because I spent all of my time with them. Instead of finding me to be a potential love interest, the girls I knew constantly chased after the six feet tall, three feet wide, bad boys who weren’t interested in them and didn’t treat them as well as I would have. No one found me attractive. I was confused, alone, and discouraged that anyone would ever be interested in me. So, for the next two years, I watched from the sidelines as nearly everyone I knew had their first kiss and entered their first relationships.

Then, in the fall of 2012, when I was 15, I met a girl in a group of friends at MIT. (I would tell you her name, but, to respect her I’ll just call her “Juliet.” Or maybe I’ll just call her Julie; Juliet feels a little too Shakespearean for my taste.) Julie and I treated each other like normal friends at first, but eventually we started walking together, separated from our group, only interested in each other. I found her attractive, but I was scared that admitting it would make history repeat itself, so I refrained from saying anything too flirtatious. But toward the end of the school year, I started to feel a change of heart.

I was worried because, without having school as an excuse to be 24

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around each other, I would have to try harder to hang out with Julie. And with my past unfortunate experiences of meeting friends outside of class, I didn’t trust that we could find the time to hang out. So I wrote her a message on Facebook (of course), telling her that I found her attractive but was too scared to admit it. I was scared, all of the previous times that I have sent confessional messages to others, they just rejected me and we barely hang out afterwards. I didn’t want to go through that again, but not sending Julie a message felt like a worse decision. I wrote and rewrote the message. I must have gone over it five times before I considered it finished.

But even though I saw it as finished, my hand didn’t want to press the “send” button. I was still scared of sending Julie the message. My heart was racing; my arms and legs were going numb. I told myself to send the message before I could scare myself into deleting it. So I hastily pressed the “send” button before I could tell my hand not to. Surprisingly, sending the message calmed me down. The deed was done and there was nothing I could do about it. So I prepared myself for the rejection.

Then, I waited for a reply.

Diddl-a-ding!

A reply!

Slowly, timidly, I read her message…

It turned out that she found me attractive as well. To make things better, she knew how I felt without me having to tell her.

“Could this be it?” I thought to myself. “Have I actually found someone who likes me back?”

With this newfound familiarity that grew between us, Julie and I spent the next few weeks talking about the things that we would do. Eventually, I found out a homeschooling social group I was associated with was hosting a prom. Immediately, I asked Julie.

Prom with Julie went relatively well. We danced, we talked, I sang to her, and, in the lounge room, surrounded by our friends, Julie gave me my first kiss. It was encouraged by our friends and, after she kissed me, I sat there, lost in excitement.

After prom, Julie and I hung out once more at my sixteenth birthday party. I wanted to take my time and get to really know her. So, instead of jumping straight to constantly hugging and kissing her, I asked her questions about herself. Her reaction to my questions was less than spectacular. She blandly answered my questions and she didn’t really try to think of new conversation topics. I tried the best open-ended questions but Creative Nonfiction

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nothing seemed to spark her interest. For the rest of the party, it was quiet between us. No laughing, teasing, flirtatious glances—nothing.

Something tells me I should’ve tried cuddling and kissing her.

A year passed without much interaction between us. We didn’t talk or send messages to each other. We just casually liked each other’s Facebook statuses and profile pictures. Then one day, she messaged me on Facebook with a single word, “Mew.” I was surprised to receive a message from Julie. I thought she completely moved on, so I did as well. It was great to talk to her again though. She and I hadn’t changed much since we first met, so I felt a little nostalgic of the days when we were at MIT together.

After a couple weeks of chatting, I asked Julie if I could ask her a personal question. She consented. So I asked, “what do you think of me as boyfriend material? I’m not saying that we should be in a relationship, I know you’re in a relationship right now and I hope the best for you, I just want your personal opinion.” Her reply was really touching. Julie said that she had always seen me as a sweet and polite person who she would love to be in a relationship with. She then explained the reason why she hadn’t pursued a relationship with me. According to her, I’m a committed lover and while she’s a promiscuous lover, so a relationship between us could end up hurting me, which she didn’t want to have happen.

Julie’s honesty gave me a sense of hope and acceptance, and it taught me something very important: Everybody has different ways to love. If someone doesn’t love me, it doesn’t mean I’m an unlovable person. And the fact that I have not found anybody who loves the way I do means that my kind of love is hard to come by.

I still don’t know exactly how I love and it’s depressing to think about how alone I am, but I find great joy in asking myself what my love would look like in a relationship. So, let me ask you, how do you love?

Buddy Taylor has been homeschooled all of his life. Now he is aiming to get an associate’s degree at Quincy College. Buddy enjoys playing music, writing songs, and being outdoors. When he isn’t doing those things, he is usually eating or dreaming that he’s in an action movie.

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Fiction

From Inspiration to Endings

Perhaps the hardest part of writing anything is starting with a blank page. Whether we’re typing up a new entry on Tumblr or sitting at a typewriter, we’re starting from scratch almost every time. The prospect can be daunting. So, we began our class with the question, “Where do stories come from?”

From taking in our surroundings—and fending off curious squirrels—on the Boston Common, to asking what a character would do with an inflatable palm tree in the sewer, we worked to discover the stories around us and sought inspiration in things large and small, and even the silly. We looked to one another, sharing tales of mini golf disasters and suitcase mishaps, and we looked to the writers we admire, exploring the techniques used in the stories we read together. Through weekly writing activities and exercises, we worked to better understand the building blocks of stories with the shared goal of making our work stronger.

Through character exercises, dialogue lessons, plot discussions, and revision strategies, we transformed our ideas—that first inspiration—into finished stories. We faced the blank page and came out victorious, and we can’t wait to do it again.

Instructors

Jamie Burke is a second-time instructor with emersonWRITES and is a third-year fiction MFA candidate at Emerson. By day, Jamie works as a creative copywriter and by night, she is finishing her graduate thesis project—a collection of short stories. Her writing has appeared in Pachinko!, Toasted Cheese, B.U.R.N. Magazine, and Postcard Shorts, and her story “7-11” was a finalist in the 2013 Lascaux Flash Contest. She has a cat and hopes she will soon achieve her lifelong dream to appear as a contestant on The Price is Right.

Sarah Sassone is a first-time instructor with emersonWRITES and is a second-year fiction MFA candidate at Emerson. Sarah writes both short and long works of fiction and believes that the art of writing is in revision. When she is not writing or teaching, Sarah likes to read quirky novels, watch Scandal, go to the movies, and sing with the Backstreet Boys at karaoke clubs around Boston.

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Nicayla Arzola

Everett High School, Grade 11

I loved emersonWRITES. I learned so many new tricks to writing and prompts that made me really think of good idea. Yet they could were a little on the weird side, that’s what made them so interesting.

Running From Life Of course, once they saw the cops…they ran and split up and dropped anything valuable to give them more time in jail.

One with the blood money went North to find the best place to stash it until things cooled down before they needed to pay their dealer back.

One with the drugs ran to the darkest alleyway dark enough to keep him hidden. Where the overflowing garbage cans won’t attract the dogs to the strong odor whispering it’s way out of his many layers. And the one going west thrown out his hand knife that was stained with a few drops of blood that could endanger him with a few decades locked up. Like all the rest of them.

The cops would be on their trail for as long as they could find a clue.

With handcuffs disposable at anytime. With warrants long enough make a book upon it. With a premonition that no matter if or when they are in court they will be seen only as guilty. All because they ran from a small misdemeanor that would result in giving them a few weeks with bail.

But that’s not why they would keep running. Running’s all they’ve known. From their families. From the friends who ran as well. From life.

Running has blinded their thoughts and blended its way in them. They can run until their legs are simply useless but that’s not the problem.

The problem is that even when their legs can keep up with their racing thoughts anymore they’re mind still tells them to keep going. Run! They would rather crawl with bleeding knees and scraped elbows 28

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before they are ever willing to be dragged to what’s right!

The problem with their mind isn’t their choices more than their motives. Their motives give them life because the one they had left them years ago. The life that made them innocent. The same life that gave them options to do better but was pushed aside from another person’s version on what’s a better choice. Maybe they run to find it again or hide to somehow spot it hiding in the same alley ready to give them another chance.

That’s the worst part: life doesn’t give second chances to runners.

Or criminals.

Either way, life didn’t make them run. Life didn’t shove it’s way into that person’s guts with the knife and ending his life. Maybe because that same killer didn’t have one to lose. Or maybe they blamed life so much for making them like this they became numb to the wrong and afraid how to do right. All those maybes and options get left get hidden when they run.

They can’t see that when their eyes only see hidden spots and dark alleyway.

They can’t think straight from their lungs needing more attention than their lost life and failed future dreams. The dreams they had going for them but running made them go another direction.

It’s running that keeps them from seeing, that the life they need, has only been right where they left them. When they saw the cops.

Nicayla says she is a typical high school student that just wants leave her mother’s nest and fly…really really far. She gets stressed out almost every week from procrastination that seems to make her lazy and that really she would rather go on Tumblr or have a life, but she enjoys writing.

Fiction

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Isabel Griffith-Gorgati The Winsor School, Grade 9

This is an excerpt from a story I’ve worked on during my time at emersonWRITES this year. In this piece, I wanted to experiment with different character points of view in order to see how different points of view can contribute to the voice and story of a character.

Untitled Groups of people mill around you on the train platform, squinting against the glares of their phone screens, glancing up at the arrival board overhead.

The air steams with sweat and humidity, made even more stifling by the thick silence in the room. You make a beeline toward an empty bench that crouches a few feet away from the yellow warning strip, bumping unapologetically past sweaty limbs and business jackets, but a young woman slides in before you. She shoves her heavy tote bag onto the space next to her without glancing up, forcing you to squeeze into the cramped space next to it.

The bench’s cool stone surface is a relief from the heat. You rub at your stiff interview clothing restlessly and re-pin the halo of curly fly-aways around your face, the cramped toes of your feet tapping out fast seconds on the stained floor tiles. Someone walks up to stand next to the girl with the tote bag and starts speaking, rushed, breathless, and annoyed. The young woman responds, and her voice is familiar. But you don’t turn your head to look at her, any more than her head of dark curls moves to acknowledge her companion.

A glimpse of yellow lights approaching down the tunnel turns into the train that barrels down the tracks in front of you, stirring up hot air.

For a moment it’s as if it’s going to speed right past the crowds standing in a suspension of time, but it comes to a halt abruptly, and you jump to your feet, joining the swarm of people that choke the train entrances before 30

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they’ve had a chance to open.

Getting into the train is a short process of shoving and being shoved forward through the doors, followed by the sweaty confirmation that the heat in the train is, in fact, considerably worse than the station itself.

Your hand flings out and latches onto the first metal bar it makes contact with, but the car is nonetheless a sway of human bodies struggling to find purchase as the floor staggers beneath their feet.

At the next stop, a delay announcement wheezes out of the speakers, and a few of the more impatient commuters empty out of the car. You slide, relieved, into a relinquished seat and glance up. Two figures stand a few feet to your left, one holding a large green tote bag pressed to her side. She moves to adjust it on her shoulder, and her face turns a moment in your direction.

You blink against the flies suddenly swarming your head and vision.

— Her face has changed, so much so that I can see it trembling on the brink of unfamiliarity in a way that a sister’s face never should. Somehow she looks smaller as a young woman than she did when she was still a teenager.

She stares passively at the remnants of spilled coffee sliding along the train floor as her hands clench and unclench against the horizontal metal railing she’s leaning against. An older woman next to her gestures to two vacant seats diagonal to mine, and my stomach recoils against my spine as my sister turns and pushes across the crowded space to sit down. I notice that her curly hair tangles down to her elbows now. Her knees knock against each other as the train’s sudden movement pushes her down into the hard seat. Her companion follows her gracefully, perching on the edge of the seat next to her in a way that makes the older woman seem taller, although I saw that she is actually rather small. Her light hair cuts off a little past her shoulders, and her face is hard and composed. Everything about her is unfamiliar.

I stare tensely down at my hands in my lap as the train starts up again with an accusatory screech. I wince but don’t glance up again until we roll into the next stop, and I hear the two make as if to get up. I blurt out my the only name I know out of the two of them and her head turns toward me, eyes gasping in recognition. She makes as if to say something. Train doors slide open and her companion gives her a light push at the small of Fiction

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Meghan Kenneally

her back. My sister’s feet begin to shuffle forward. I say something, like has she come to visit us, or stay finally, and she stops looking at me. The woman grabs her elbow, and my sister jerks away, glancing fury at her companion, then down at the water-clogged watch on her wrist, then at the empty soda bottle rolling behind my feet. “No. I didn’t.”

Isabel attends the Winsor School in Boston and is in 9th grade. This is her second year with emersonWRITES.

Marshfield High School, Grade 12

Meghan has been writing f iction since she was old enough to annoy her family with endless tailes of fantastic worlds and mysterious circumstances. She has also worked hard to develop her writing over time and believes that her ability has improved despite the dozens of unf inished Word documents found on her laptop.

His Indigo Ballet There was a man that danced with the dead.

He danced with ghosts every morning of his life.

Not every morning. But most.

And through his sunrises filled with waltzes and tangos, he slowly began to realize things about the ghosts.

They did not seem to notice the living, aside from himself. As a child, he had once tried to show his ghosts a human friend he had made. Neither side took any interest in the other, though the friend grew bored of ‘playing pretend’ after a half hour and left. The ghosts could not see nor touch most of the living. The man still did not understand this.

But they could touch the man. They traced blue fingertips over his face and arms. All ghosts were blue.

The touch of the dead was like damp, clinging clothing; it leeched the warmth from his skin and gave him the chills. Many doctors had been puzzled when a worried mother carried her stone-cold child to the emergency room one bright morning. They muttered of poor circulation.

Then in the evening they glared in confusion as he warmed to the touch.

They sent the two home.

That had been many years ago and the man had never been warm in the light of dawn. The ghosts did not seem to appreciate the cold or the dark- They huddled around him in bed, the pressure of ghostly hands 32

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covering his skin, no matter how tightly the covers were pulled. He did not ask them to stop. That would be cruel.

We know that humans grow. We are not foolish, we understand because we lived through the pain of age and the dangerous caress of time. So we have watched the boy become lean and tall. We have seen the lengthening of his features and the devilish evidence of maturity that curls onto his face as a sparse facial hair. We realized, as soon as we saw him that we could not allow him to continue to age. We cannot tell him our plans, he does not understand. We believe we must simply go about this business without his awareness. He has been a kind creature, the delightful beacon of warmth to our long evenings and nights. He cannot be allowed to die. We will not allow it.

The man, his name is Garfield, has learned from the ghosts over time.

They teach him different dances and he remembers which movements are well-liked by which ghosts. He has had years to determine the differences between the individuals in the small crowd and he knows them by heart.

Each ghost was a different shade of blue. He gave them names, of course, they needed them.

The ghosts could communicate with him through gestures and expressions, though words seemed beyond their capabilities. None of them could communicate names to him; they did not seem to remember any.

They did not seem upset by this. The ghosts were only ever upset when the man did not dance.

When he was fifteen, there were only six ghosts. Ten years after that, there had been eleven. And as he turned thirty today, there were thirteen quiet, blue companions.

Garfield had found names for all thirteen of his companions, through his old newspaper method and sometimes from strangers on the street.

Jacqueline Carson had been the name of his manager when he had worked at Target for two months- The palest of the ghosts had taken a distinct interest in the name, even stealing the woman’s name tag.

The man had always been late for morning appointments. Dancing down the hall on the way to class or on the sidewalk to work was never good enough. The ghosts demanded his full attention for each round of dance, 34

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but each dance was only a few moments and he didn’t mind. On particularly chilled mornings, the specters were often lethargic and move through their dances as sleepwalkers might. But they still asked for the dance.

Garfield had actually taken to using an Ouija Board to communicate with the ghosts. It was endlessly amusing—one or two would roll their eyes and kick the indicator from the board. But it was effective, if not a bit slow.

Ghosts could push all they wanted though they were not very strong. The man had watched one of them shove at a large box, only to unintentionally slide to the side, like water around a stone. It was interesting. The ghosts could not pull anything, they were unable to maintain a tight grip long enough- Garfield assumed there was something poetic in that, but he was neither a poet nor a physicist.

The ghosts told him that there were others, they told him that the living were never truly alone. Much to the chagrin of Mamie Peters and Erin Guzman- two of the more outspoken ghosts, in their own completely silent way- he would gather them all to watch Celebrity Ghost Stories in the late weekend evenings. They would scoff at the reenactments and mimic the motions of chatter amongst themselves.

The ghosts could still feel. They experience emotions casually, like the faint regret of stepping through Garfield’s foot during an unusually fastpaced tango. The man had never asked, but it could be felt through the air.

He supposed it made sense that such incorporeal forms could not keep their emotion properly bottled. The ghosts never seemed to emit despair, though. The primary emotion was a soft glow of affection and in the cool morning hours, the power of thirteen waves of emotion burned like a mental brand.

Of all the things the man failed to understand, he could never fathom why time had begun to feel so sluggish. His interactions with the world remained similar and he still couldn’t hold down a steady job—but each moment felt longer and it wasn’t because he worked the graveyard shift at CVS too often.

Garfield never questioned the ghosts on this phenomenon. He was content to allow the moments to pass, so long as his dances with the dead remained uninterrupted.

Meghan Kenneally is currently attending Marshf ield High School. She has a blind and deaf cat and enjoys watching cartoons while playing children’s video games and wearing a Snuggie.

Fiction

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Molly Kimber

Dighton-Rehobeth Regional High, Grade 10

I originally had no intentions of submitting this piece into the emersonWRITES anthology. I started this short story in class for our dialogue exercise and from there it grew into something more complex and elaborate. Unlike some stories where the problem is put before the reader, I choose to leave the reader in the dark until they could f igure out the problem for themselves. I thought this would make the reader more interested in the story.

The Man “What are we going to do?”

“I don’t know,” breathed Matt.

“What are we going to do?”

“I don’t know—you haven’t given me a chance to think!”

“Oh.” While Matt paced in thought, John sat down on the damp forest floor, hugging his knees to his chest. He tried to process what he and his friend saw and experienced in the last couple of hours.

“We can go to the cops.”

“No, we can’t. If they fail in capturing him then he’ll come after us,” argued John.

“Okay. Then we can pretend that nothing happened.”

“That’s easier said than done.”

“We could run away and change our names.”

“No we can’t, what are about our families.”

“Okay Homer! What do YOU think we should do?! I would love to hear it,” bellowed Matt, angry with John and everything that happened that day.

“I don’t know.”

“Then shut up and at least consider my ideas before you turn them down!”

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“I’m trying! But I’m scared that one might go wrong and we end up dead in a gutter.

I don’t even know what we did to tick him off but he’s out for blood, our blood. It’s just you and me in the woods, and him. We don’t even know where he is at the moment. He could be behind that tree waiting to jump on us! And then what,” John said oblivious to the tears that were running down his cheeks.

Both the boys looked over at the tree with frightened eyes and beating hearts.

“Oh God! I think I’m going to be sick.”

Before Matt could say it was just nerves and he’ll be fine, John puked.

Matt kneeled down next to his friend who was on his hands and knees and rubbed his back to sooth him. When John was done Matt pulled his friend up to his feet.

“I think for starters we should keep walking until morning. Then we can climb a tree or find a cave to hide in till nightfall,” suggested Matt in a whisper.

John nodded. It was hours before the sun began to rise and the friends found a place to hide. They agreed on the cave, which they hid from view with bushes and leaves. As soon as they sat down they fell asleep. Matt’s head on John’s shoulder and a sharpened stick between them.

Later in the morning the boys were wakened by a sudden sound that was not a bird or an animal.

“Did you hear that?”

“Yea, it sounded like a car.”

In a blink of an eye John and Matt were up and running toward the sound, making as much noise as they could to capture the drivers’ attention.

Past some trees and on the side of a road was a blue truck. Happy to see an escape route Matt and John ran to it.

Giddy with relief, Matt poked his head in the open window to talk with the non-existing driver. He turned his confused face to John who was just as perplexed.

“Where did the driver go?”

John just shrugged his shoulders. They waited five minuets listening for any sound in the woods to revel the missing driver. After awhile Matt began to yell ‘hello’ which worried John. A scary thought occurred to him as Matt continued to yell.

Acting on instinct John placed his hand over Matt’s mouth, stopping Fiction

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him in mid yell, when he thought he heard the sound of crushing leaves and tackled him to the ground beside the truck.

“Keep quite,” ordered John before he took his hand off Matt’s mouth.

“But why?”

“What normal person stops in middle of the woods?”

In realization of what John was saying the color in his cheeks drained and his blue eyes widened, grateful for his friend’s common sense. His heart that was already beating with relief started beating faster with fear and regret.

Jacquelyn Jarnagin

Chelmsford High School, Grade 12

My piece is told in second person point-of-view, and it tells the story of a shy girl who tries to make it her goal to attend prom with a guy she’s known for a while, with some unexpected results. This is Chapter 3.

Molly Kimber is a sophomore at Dighton-Rehoboth Regional High School.

Step 3: Think About It The first Friday in March, a few days later, you are in—dramatic music cued—the school library. You aren’t being anti-social, you just have a *BLEEP*-load of work to do. Which makes no sense at all, considering the circumstances: You took those godforsaken SAT’s twice, ALL of your college nonsense has been shipped in, and for Oz’s sake, you’re getting out in two months! You think the administration would take it easy on y’all, but noooooo! It’s book report after physics project, math test after history exam. In the immortal words of Beavis and Butthead, “This sucks!”

You look up from the article you are trying to edit for the school newspaper, frustrated. The article is titled “Homecoming Happiness,” which would sound nice if Homecoming hadn’t already happened—in November! Plus, it’s not even a full paragraph. It’s four sentences long, and there’s not even any photos attached. You knew that being the co-editorin-chief of the newspaper was going to be a big responsibility, but how can you tell someone that they just aren’t good (in the nicest way possible)? *Sigh* it’s not that easy being queen.

You see someone very familiar sitting next to you. You’d know that shaggy brown hairdo and the big brown eyes like yours anywhere. It’s Aaron Bennett, That really geek chic boy from your Media Internships Course. Aaron was the one who always put a smile on your face on those cold nights filming the school’s football games for the local access channel.

Aaron was the one who didn’t seem to be bothered by the fact that you 38

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weren’t the best camera operator in the group. Aaron was the one who you couldn’t seem to stop thinking about.

“Jackie!” He addresses you in his happy-go-lucky tone. “How’s it going?”

“Not much, just thinking,” You whisper as you blush and look down for a second. LOOK AT HIM GODDAMNIT! “About...?” Aaron questions.

“Everything! Just work, the paper, graduation—ugh. I am so done. I really just wish that prom was here already.”

“I hear ya,” Says Aaron. “Do you have a date yet?”

Your eyes pop up for a split second but then you regain composure.

“Don’t appear to eager,” You hear Andrew Carnegie’s words whispered in your ear.

“Err...” You stutter. “Still fishing.”

“Ah, I see.” Aaron puts his hand on your shoulder, and it’s all you can do to keep yourself from having a hot flash. “I’m sure someone will ask you.

Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but someday soon.”

You tilt your head sideways and bat your eyelashes twice. “You think?”

You say in the flirtatious tone you’ve been working on for a while.

“No doubt,” Aaron says cheekily. “Any guy would consider himself lucky to be with you for the night.”

“Aaron,” You look him in the eye carefully. “You always make me feel better.”

“Just doing my job.” He states proudly as he gets up to leave. “Keep your chin up!” He salutes to you as he heads off.

“I will!” You call back.

A thought occurs to you as you head to AP English: Will he? Perhaps?

What if...?

Jacquelyn Jarnagin is a senior at Chelmsford High School in Chelmsford, Massachusetts. Her hobbies include reading, writing, and scrapbooking on occasion.

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Alani Okyere

Cristo Rey Boston High School, Grade 12 When I entered emersonWRITES, I was an okay writer, but once leaving I was a better writer. Going to the program/classes has taught me how in-depth I can go into a story, that no story is bad that it just needs work, and that writing well is all about what you envision. My style has evolved in my time at emersonWRITES. Before I just wrote, now I write what I like to call realistic urban f iction. I write what I imagine could possibly be real. Emerson has helped in the development of the writer I hope and dream to be, so thank you, emersonWRITES.

One Girl’s Problem I smiled for all the people in front of me. Although I didn’t want to be here, I have to keep the promises I’ve made. Lucky this is the last one. The last one before I go back to be a plain old Jane. Oh how much I would love that. I’ve done something’s, things I need to fix. I looked out at the people before me and began.

“Everyone one thinks they know me, when they don’t know me for the speck of dirt on the bottom of their feet. I am person that doesn’t even know them self. So why do I have everyone trying to be my best friend?

Mama says they’re just jealous, but I just say they’re some haters. People, that since they can’t be me, will try to put me down. Mama calls me strong willed and smart, but I am just a normal girl trying get through what I call hell but everyone else calls life. Life is filled with people that will love me and people that will never understand me. I just want to be me without all the drama, which in my mind is just so over played. Mama raised me right, like the classy young lady I am, but she also taught me that if needed words come second.”

Hands raised to ask questions and I chose one from the crowd. They stood, and I got a glimpse of who they really were. They stood calmly, showing no sign of emotion on the smooth caramel colored skin. I stared into the hazel eyes that now bore into me. I felt a little nervous now, but I Fiction

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tried not to let that affect me now.

“You’re a brat. You know that? I use to stand up for you. I use to respect you. I befriended you. But look at you now. You think you’re someone special?”

Someone else jumped up and said, “Right! You get just a little bit of money, and now your miss all that. Please! You are the same pathetic little girl you were a year ago. Don’t try to act brand new! We know you!”

I looked at the two faces of the people I use to know. The people that I used to love to death more than myself. I then looked for the one face I wanted to see the most. Of the one I hurt. But they aren’t there. I place my hands on the podium in front of me, with my head down, and my eyes shut.

This was not how my life was supposed to go. I squeeze my eyes tighter, even know it hurts I don’t stop. I can feel the burning of tears, as they threaten to fall from my already puffy eyes.

“You have to finish,” someone says from behind me.

But I don’t want to finish. I don’t want to go on. My life. My life was over. I screwed everything all up. I took a deep breathe that I felt move through my entire body. I looked back out at the sea of people and continued.

“I’ve hurt a lot of people in my time as I have risen to fame. I have hurt the people that mattered, I’ve become a celebrity that I use to judge and make fun of. I have acted out of character and changed into a female that I no longer can say I respect or like.” I looked down again and laughed a little. Look back up I wore a slight smile. “When I was a little girl, I wanted to do was sing. Singing was my life. I ate, breathed, slept, and lived singing.

To become overnight sensation at the age of 17 has become a dream come true for me. But I can’t do it anymore. I’ve lost sight of what my dream was.

I called this press conference to let the world know, that I am leaving the music world.”

There were gasps among the crowd. Reporters and on lookers besides themselves. One asked if I will come back to the industry.

“Maybe one day. When I develop myself more. When I have a grip on what life is like, and who I am. Right now. It’s time to be a kid while I have time. Go to college and learn something. The music industry can wait.”

I smile as best I can, and walk away. But I don’t get far when I hear the word, ‘wait’, yelled after me. That voice. I know it. I stop. I’m frozen in my place. It can’t be. I turn, and there he is. The burning tears finally fall. He walked towards me. I couldn’t move. He stood before me.

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“One last question. Are you sorry?”

“More sorry than you will ever know. I changed on the people I should have pulled closed, not away. I left you. I hurt you. I hurt myself. For that I’ll be sorry for ever.”

He wiped my tears away, and pulled me close. “Just don’t ever do it again. I love you Angel King.”

“I Love you too, Shawn Wright.”

Alani Okyere is a senior at Cristo Rey Boston High School. This is her f irst year with emersonWRITES.

Fiction

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Evan Phillips

Melrose High School, Grade 12

My story follows a young girl moments after she has given birth.

Daughter “Everything’s gonna be all right,” my mother said, wiping my hair to the side of my sweaty forehead. “You can say a few words to her if you’d like.”

With that my mother exited, saying she wanted to give me some time alone with you. It’s supposed to be cathartic, or something. Normally, this is when I’d take you in my arms and coo over you, you’d gentle nuzzle into my loving embrace. You would stir a little bit, at first, but calm down quickly. I would present you my breast and provide you the nourishment you need. I would have protected you; I should have been able to, to raise you. My only job in this world was to protect you.

I pick you up for the first time. You are engulfed in a pure white blanket, not the normal pink one that they give baby girls. I hold you as I am supposed too, arms beneath you, supporting the head. I press you into my body, hoping to hear your heartbeat, or a breath, or even a cry. I want to cry. Well, at least one of us should. But I cannot make anything come out.

You father would have wanted to see me cry.

The room is almost all white, with small amounts of beige thrown in for decoration. There is a mirror on the wall next to me, but do I dare look at it. Do I want to see what we look like? I turn. I am presented with the image of us; mother and child. It is not the normal image of strong maternal beauty, flaunting her femininity as she clutches her newborn, ready to face the world. I see us. We are pale, gaunt almost. We are exhausted, as I am still panting from the ordeal. You look surprisingly well rested, beautiful even. I look back up at the room surrounding us. The emptiness is killing me. I look down at you and, for the first time, I speak to you. “We need to 44

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get out of this room.”

I put you back in your crib for now and stand up out of my bed. I remove the hospital gown and throw it on the floor. I grab the old sweat pants and sweatshirt I had come in wearing. I don’t bother with shoes; I’ll just go bare foot. I pick you back up. You feel so small and light. We leave hospital together. Thank God it’s the night shift, so no one saw us leave.

We walk the streets of my city together. There is a certain energy that, or lack there of, that cities have in the early hours of the day. The areas that are usually so busy are now empty, lifeless.

You certainly have taken your toll on my body. Nine months of carrying you has weakened me. Each step I take is more difficult than the last, but it’s worth it to be out of that room.

God, it really has been nine months. Nine months since you were created. Nine months since your father bent me over, my chest pressed painfully into the ground beneath me, my legs spread to an uncomfortable distance, his cock slid into me with the feeling that it didn’t belong. It had been two months before that when I had first felt the soft, silky skin of fist slam into my cheek. The fleshy back of his hand drag from one side of my face to the other. His strong grip wraps itself around my arm. I had to wear long-sleeved shirts to hide the marks. We fucked in the woods, and that’s where we’re going.

The woods may be lovely, dark, and deep, but I have nothing to fear in it. I’ve already lived through my fears. I see the spot where it happened.

The spot where you were created. The spot where I was left. There is a small ditch next to us; it looks like the perfect spot. I place you in it, among the dirt and damp leaves. You look beautiful.

I cannot imagine what are lives would have been like had you lived.

Would we have had a normal mother and daughter relationship? I would have loved you no matter what. But, in your death, you brought an end to your father and me. My last connection to that man has been severed, and I am free.

I feel I should cry as I deliver your sole eulogy, and I wish I could, but I have spent my entire life crying, and I am drained. I need to fix my life, cause, Lord, it sure has been messed up.

Evan Phillips is a senior at Melrose High School. He enjoys writing and watching movies.

Fiction

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Samantha Ryan

Whitman-Hanson Regional High School, Grade 12

This is an excerpt from my short story, which revolves around a young woman and her very young boy who travel the open road in the dystopian, corrupt world where they live. Told in f irst-person point of view by the young woman, the story is about the ever-lasting bond between a mother and child, and to what extent a mother would go in order to protect that child. I would like to thank the emersonWRITES program, and my incredibly talented instructors, for not only making me a better writer, but for giving me a voice. Thank you for an amazing experience! Enjoy!

from Sunshine I was in the winter of my life, and the boy by my side was my only summer.

At night I fell asleep with visions of dancing and laughing with him, but upon an unfortunate series of events saw those dreams dashed and divided like a million stars in the night sky, that I wished on over and over again.

Five years down the line of being on an endless road. No compass pointing us due North, just an inner indecisiveness that was as wide and as wavering as the ocean.

Where are we going?

Home.

Are we going the right way?

Yes. None of this was true of course. I had no clue where we were, where we were going, or what would happen. I was unsure of every path we took, but he believed in me.

You trust me?

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And I did everything to keep it that way.

Our home was wherever we laid our head. Most nights it was in a vacant motel room, where we’d lie side by side, littering the sheets with crumbs and candy wrappers. Until, I’d leave him at the window with nothing but kiss on the cheek and a promise to come back. And he’d watch me disappear into the dark, as if he knew what I was doing, as if he knew it was the only thing keeping him alive. And that very fact terrified me, pushed me to a point of madness that both dazzled and dizzied me. He was too aware.

I always kept my promise. I always came back. My body sore, my skin stained. And there he’d be at the window, right where I left him. I didn’t deserve him. He knew what a long night was, and at times I forgot that. I forgot that a long night for me was a long night for him.

So we’d hop into bed, sliding under the sheets, as I began our little lullaby.

You are my sunshine, My only sunshine.

You make me happy, When skies are gray.

You’ll never know dear, How much I love you.

Please don’t take My sunshine Away.

I left him to his dreams, as he closed his eyes tight, and drifted off into a deep sleep, I stroked his head, with whispers in the air singing, You are my sunshine, My only sunshine.

We slept unafraid of tomorrow.

Samantha Ryan is a senior at Whitman-Hanson Regional High School (Whoo!

Class of 2014!). She is the founder and captain of her school’s Ultimate Frisbee team, and is currently enrolled in Mandarin classes in Chinatown of Boston, which she loves. She also, of course, loves writing!

Fiction

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Amy Solov

Oliver Ames High School, Grade 11

This story is important to me because it is the f irst time I’m able to share my work with others. I’m so thankful for the opportunities that emersonWrites has given me, and the friends I have made along the way.

Haunted

The man always woke up before he reached the upstairs bedrooms.

Somehow, his mind had blocked out every action and every emotion that began when he reached the top of that staircase and realized he was alone.

He felt nothing, and the numbness that overtook his body pushed him to leave that beautiful home in Brookline that haunted his dreams. A new family, loving and oblivious, had long since moved into that expensive brick home. The man, bitter and alone, had moved onto Washington Street in Boston.

The man lived a monotonous life. Every day was the exact same—ride the train, buy a six inch turkey sub for $2.50, get back on the train, ride it to the alley, and settle onto a newspaper bed until the following morning. On this day, the man felt a void heavier than usual in his heart. The moment he opened his eyes to the piercing sun, he knew it was the one year anniversary of that day. He walked over to the train. This was it. This was his last ride.

He bought a one way ticket and wrung his hands six times out of necessity before settling deeply down into his favorite spot, the fifth one on the right. He had been anticipating this day for months now, and he finally felt ready. He was to ride the train through the entire city of Boston. His city.

Each stop held a different memory that he wanted to relive one last time.

Memories of his wife and Hazel at Faneuil Hall, just as they were captured in a snapshot he carried everywhere with him. Memories of him dancing with his wife to True Companion by Marc Cohen at the Hatch Shell, the one night in the longest time they had ceased bickering and loved each 48

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other. Memories of Hazel’s love for butterflies and carefree laughter. And, most of all, memories that the man could immerse himself in of the times before his beautiful family was killed.

After riding his route and feeling the raw emotions of what used to be, there was no desire stronger than the man’s to get off the train. He hopped off at the next stop, making his way quickly to the narrow alley he called home. It was dingy and unwelcoming, but home nonetheless. He made his way further and further until he reached his favorite resting place, which had newspapers laid down from sleeping there the night before. He lowered his body down tentatively, and then began to rummage in the trash bag for his bottle of pills he carried with him. They were the pills the man relied too heavily on for much too long. He curled on his side, attempting to get comfortable, as he began to swallow the pills. Nine... Ten... Eleven.

That was the end of the bottle. He closed his eyes in a Romeoesque style, attempting to picture the wife and daughter he would soon see. It was a death of of passion, they would say, how very romantic. Time passed. Seconds, minutes, he wasn’t sure how long. He focused intently.

Suddenly a memory flashed into his mind.

— He’s downstairs, getting a drink of water in the middle of the night. No, he is not getting water. He is reaching into the drawer next to the refrigerator.

What is he reaching for? He pulls his hand out, and there is a silver pistol in it. Did the man own a gun? No, he is drinking water while staring at Hazel’s artistic interpretation of a butterfly. Water, clear glass, purple bleeding butterfly. Bleeding. He dashes up the stairs, he makes his way to the top this time, and there’s definitely something shiny and silver in his right hand. Shiny, cold, and silver. Water. He bursts into his wife’s room, perhaps to warn her that there is somebody in the house trying to hurt them. He feels no presence of an intruder, just his own rapid heart.

His wife is breathing melodically, in and out, in and out. Suddenly, his arm is raised and he lets his finger go. Deafening bang. He sprints to his daughter’s room. He must be going to protect her, must be, must be. He completes a similar action, the arm raise and release of an index finger.

Why is that associated with a bang again? Why is he running? Running, running out of the house, running from his family. He can’t stop running.

— Fiction

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The man felt like a coward, and his stomach twisted in knots. He tried to get up and run, because running from his fears seemed like the right thing to do. But the pills, they weighed him down like a rock. His legs were so wobbly that he couldn’t stand, and the entire alley spun. It was so cold. He slipped in and out of the blackness, but he was no longer ready to go. His mind began running, trying to interpret the lies and the blank spots from the underlying truths. There was nobody to hate but himself. And then he slipped further into the darkness, and he forgot to ask for forgiveness, but forgiveness from what? And forgiveness from whom? And then his mind couldn’t convince him where he was going, and then, just like the pull of the trigger, he was gone.

Jesse Tuttle

Swampscott High School, Grade 12

My story revolves around a man and his wife who get stranded in the vacant streets of Boston when the man’s wife suddenly goes into labor. Noticing a nearby horse, the couple soon realize they have to ride their way to victory. The most fun and interesting part for me was matching the gritty 1st person narration with the overall silly concept of the story.

Amy Solov is a junior at Oliver Ames High School in Easton. She loves reading, writing, music, and singing in the shower. Her dream is to become a famous writer.

from Ride So there we were. The three of us staring at one another, with only the faint sound of distressed breathing to break the silence.

I looked at her and knew exactly what had happened. It’s funny really.

After you spend enough time with a person, you generally don’t need words to communicate with them. You spend your time with someone and unintentionally begin to follow every movement, mannerism, and trait they carry. I had spent four wonderful years with my wife, Michelle, and words definitely weren’t needed to understand what had just happened.

I was having a baby.

Well actually, Michelle was having my baby more specifically. But even still, this moment was bigger than anything I had ever experienced. This must be the rush that adrenaline junkies and heroin addicts pay millions of dollars for.

The doctor had said spicy food was one of the quickest ways to initiate early labor and he was right. We had been stuck in our apartment for four months and after deciding to have one last night out on the town, it only took one bite of this street vendor’s $3 sausage for this baby to make an executive decision.

“Oh my god…my water just broke. WE HAVE TO GET TO THE HOSPITAL!” Michelle screamed.

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I could tell Michelle had lost all control of the situation. She had begun breathing even heavier and began to look around for a cab or transportation of any kind. Just our luck too. 2:00 AM and at the closing of the latest Red Sox game. I knew cabs weren’t coming around our way any time soon.

“Look!” Michelle said, pointing to an old man riding a horse drawn carriage and pulling it aside next to a nearby building.

“I’m sure he can give us a ride to the hospital” she said as she began to waddle over to the rider and his majestic stallion.

“Hi”, she said trying to calm herself down in the process.

“It looks like I’m going into labor, you see my water just broke. Do you think you could give us a ride to the hospital please?”

The man didn’t look the friendly type. It was obvious he was old and tired, and if he had kids, they probably called him every other year just to make sure he was still around.

“Can’t do that. Sorry,” he said quickly as he began to get off the horse.

“The Horse to Go company only runs until 2am and the Sox just ended their game with a killer 10 to 4. I ain’t going back out after that.”

I figured that would be the case. Old bat.

“Please sir, whatever it costs to get there, we’ll pay you twice as much,” I said, trying to play this old man’s senseless game.

“Like I said. The company closes at 2:00. I’m sorry but that’s the way it is. Now get out of my way. I gotta go to the bathroom,” he said as he locked the carriage up. This guy clearly played by the rules and didn’t give a thought to bad karma. But listen to me babbling on like a schoolgirl describing her first crush. I had a baby on the way, and a pregnant wife standing in the empty streets of Boston. My ten minutes of fame were up, I had to do something, and do it fast.

Jesse Tuttle is a 12th grade student at Swampscott High School. He really enjoys art and media such as writing and movies and cheesy ’80s culture. In his spare time, he really enjoys making movies with his friends.

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Literary Journalism

Or: Watchdog #Ruffriders comin’ to tell you da news

Journalism is often defined as objective news reporting that answers the foundational who, what, when, where, and why questions. Literary journalism expands upon these conventions and allows writers to become opinionated observers, moving beyond the traditional limitations of objective reporting. We approached this course with one primary goal: to provide young writers with the tools needed to complete journalistic writing projects.

Through exercises and the close reading of successful authors, students published ten unique pieces that differ in genre and form. Though each student’s project carries their own individual voice, tone, and style, these collected pieces create a cohesive argument for our definition of journalism: that it’s about more than just objective facts and reporting.

Our students have proved that journalism is a window into a different world, a genre that allows writers to share new perspectives. Whether it’s commentary on the cultural objectification of women, a play-by-play of a broken-hearted sports fan, or an opinion piece about the problematic effects of censorship, each piece presents an argument, creatively and critically, that illuminates cultural issues within our contemporary moment.

Instructors

Caitlin McGill, a first-time emersonWRITES instructor, is also an MFA candidate in nonfiction at Emerson and a writing specialist at Educational Advocates College Consulting Corp. She also works as a teaching assistant for undergraduate literature and writing courses at Emerson, a reader for Ploughshares, and a writing tutor at The English High School in Jamaica Plain. Although she’s lived in Boston for over a year, she can still usually be found discovering Boston by way of bike. When she’s not writing or exploring the city, she loves to practice yoga, travel, and check out live music.

Jordan Pailthorpe is an MFA candidate in poetry at Emerson and a first-time emersonWRITES instructor. His work blurs the lines between poetics, game culture, and surrealism through writing inside an electronic environment and bringing the form of the electronic environment onto the page. His interests in multimodal composition and procedural rhetoric informs his work within the First-Year Writing Program, where he teaches writing and rhetoric to Emerson undergraduates. In his spare time he edits Level257 (a student journal on games and play), rides his Harley, and cuddles his two cats, Virginia and Goku.

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Alyssa Aloise

Everett High School, Grade 11

This year, I most enjoyed learning the many nuances of journalism that I never knew existed before. In this particular piece, I tried to employ the full-circle method of a piece as well as my own desire to bring awareness to injustices such as inequality and misogyny.

Misogyny in Pop Culture Like many other Americans, I binge-watched AMC’s Breaking Bad. In short, Breaking Bad is a show about Walter White, a high school chemistry teacher struggling to get by, who is diagnosed with terminal cancer. Soon after his diagnosis, he turns to crystal meth manufacturing as a source of extra necessary income. Despite Walter’s despicable actions, all I could find on any internet forum was hate toward his wife, Skyler, who was intolerant of his behaviors and simply wanted to keep their children safe, so she resorted to drastic measures. She is arguably one of the best female characters ever written, being more than just the typical two-dimensional female seen almost everywhere, her character well-developed and flawed.

None of this hate was justified, merely throwing the terms “bitch” and “slut” at her. But why? Why do people hate a female character for doing what countless male characters have done in the past? To be quite frank, perhaps the world can’t handle the portrayal of a strong female due to years and years of women being oppressed by misrepresentation (and downright lack of representation) in the media. How are we as a society supposed to get rid of this age-old patriarchy if our favorite TV shows, movies, books, and celebrities can’t?

Let’s start off with the typical female archetypes portrayed all the time. We all know they exist, but we don’t have names for them. To give some examples: there’s the slut, the woman disgraced and slut-shamed for 54

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having consensual sex with a man (despite her being single); there’s the bitch, the woman who dares to speak her mind all the time and actually have an opinion; there’s the mother, the woman who lives for her children, her husband, and her home (and absolutely nothing else); and there’s the girl-next-door/seductress love interest, who is merely a two-dimensional device for our male protagonist. All characterizations of these women gray in comparison to their male counterparts, and they are also often secondary in plot to the male characters. We show these shows and movies to our youngest and most influential minds, and they take note of the women in the shows and grow up thinking that’s how women actually are. It’s been happening for years—hence why girls are more pressured to be “perfect” by society’s standards. They want to be just like the characters they see in books and movies—and if they are not, they’ll be demonized and outcasted for it. Not only do these expectations exist for female behavior, they’re also seen in appearance.

There are quite a few examples in popular films and literature of society’s double standards and female oppression. There’s victim-blaming and male entitlement seen in Twilight, with Bella blaming herself after Jacob forced himself on her and sexually harassed her after she repeatedly denied his advances. He still thought he was entitled to have her and do what he wanted to her. There’s more male entitlement in The Hunger Games, with Katniss being seemingly “entitled” to being a relationship with Peeta and Gale (one of whom basically stalked her and the other was just a friend.) These are common behaviors and expectations toward women that are reflected in our daily lives and shrugged off as normal and okay. While this behavior may not be directly correlated to Twilight or The Hunger Games, the lack of protest against these behaviors is merely reassurance that this behavior is okay. And it’s not okay; not at all.

Not only are these expectations seen in fiction, they’re also seen in reality, in regards to our Hollywood scene. I don’t think anyone will ever forget Miley Cyrus’s performance at the VMAs last year, and for good reason. Miley was “outrageous,” scantily clad and singing about “obscene” content that is, hilariously enough, not as obscene as it is coming out of Robin Thicke’s mouth. She was doing what countless male performers have done in the past, including her companion for the performance, Robin Thicke, whose song “Blurred Lines” glorifies date rape and male entitlement.

Many don’t realize it, but it does, despite various claims against that fact.

Some lyrics from the hit single, as an example: Literary Journalism

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John Bondarek

I know you want it I hate them lines I know you want it But you’re a good girl The way you grab me Must wanna get nasty…

Sturgis Charter Public School, Grade 12

Yeah, I had a b***h, but she ain’t bad as you So hit me up when you pass through I’ll give you something big enough to tear your a** in two.

Yet, no one was outraged at Robin Thicke’s behavior or performance; in fact, it was expected. Miley was, on the other hand, absolutely demonized and ripped on by news stations, gossip stations, and more. While there are legitimate criticisms for her performance—such as her stripping of her childhood role of Hannah Montana and racism—many arguments were ham-handed and not grounded at all. This is another example of expectations of females to always stay the same—silenced, obeying, polite—despite the actions of males.

Now, there are plenty more examples of misogyny in both portrayals and audience reactions besides Miley Cyrus, Twilight, and The Hunger Games.

However, these examples are very much prevalent now and well known by many. It’s sad to see that people never realize the faults in this content, simply shrugging it off as a normal thing. You may ask why portrayals of women in pop culture are important, and why realism is important. It’s because we are all so influenced by pop culture in our daily lives. If there is misrepresentation of women there, there’s a greater chance that that behavior will reflect in our daily lives and put implausible expectations on three-dimensional, real women, not the caricatures depicted in media. And maybe, if there exist more realistic portrayals, the stands held on women would lessen, and perhaps we wouldn’t demonize a woman for sticking out from the norm, whether it’s a fictional woman like Skyler White or a real woman in regular life.

Alyssa is a junior at Everett High School, and this is her f irst year at emersonWRITES. She is interested in writing in many different forms and is a very passionate believer in equal rights. She aspires to combine these two passions one day.

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In this emersonWRITES session I learned how to write an article conveying multiple sensory viewpoints and personal statements. In this piece I incorporated these lessons into a story called “Through our Eyes.” This piece showcases the life of a modern teenager in comparison to a kid’s from the late 1900s.

Through Our Eyes EXTRA! EXTRA! READ ALL ABOUT IT!!! This is how children used to make their living back in the 1900s; selling newspapers out along the corner store. Now we see younger generations from the ages of fifteen through eighteen tasked with much larger responsibilities. The days of children being buss girls and boys are slowly fading away.

The age-old stereotype of the father and oldest son as the sole providers for their family are now being abandoned. It used to be that joining the army was on the top of every young male’s list. Now those expectations have turned to joining the private sector (personally owned businesses) and punching that time card to receive a weekly paycheck. In this day in age, this is how you integrate into the general public and gain your exposure in the workforce.

It used to be that the term manager was never given to someone under the age of thirty. Now it seems like the position is given to a much younger generation and the responsibility is growing. The idea of paying off college, a car, and other debt usually didn’t cross the mind of those who lived in the early 1900s and before. Now a world of tax returns and wage cuts have made their way into modern society. That dream of playing on the playground is slowly dwindling away. Some might say flat out that in the last 20-plus years, we as a younger generation are being forced to grow up too fast for our own well being.

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As a seventeen-year-old living in the twenty-first century, I already know the fundamentals of running a business as a manager of a large scale grocery store placed in three different states: understanding the crucial components that will keep it running for years to come. I also learned how to deal with the general public by making sure that I keep their best interest in mind always.

I have always been told, by my parents and others, that the dreaded dream of waking up at three in the morning to start the day was coming fast and I had to get ready. Boy, were they right. 3:30am to get to work by 5:30am is now my life schedule. I have even lost out on sleep. Back in the day, bedtime for most young adults and children used to be seven or maybe even eight if there was a nighttime special on the television. Nowadays, anywhere between 12 and 3am is the usual time to go to bed because of work and school.

I frequently hear the older generation say that us young folks are “absolutely crazy” for having to stay up that late in the evening. I, as well as many others, respond with “If it were our decision, we in fact would be going off to bed at seven and if I’m lucky wake up at nine for breakfast and then take a small nap to work off the breakfast.”

I do feel that without this kind of treatment, we as a nation would struggle to survive. Times are changing and now that feeling of going to bed tired and waking up even more tired just start the rotation again is happening for a reason. As the young ones we can now be ready to go out and tackle the world full on as opposed to being held back by not knowing how to cope with a stressful, hectic life.

Life is not just going to fall in place for you. Hard work and effort pays off. And who knows? After thirty years you will have worked so hard and will provide a nice, long life of retirement. As the old adage goes, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”...boy I hope that is true!

John Bondarek is a first-time emersonWRITES student. He is a seventeen-yearold from Sandwich, Massachusetts and attends Sturgis Charter Public School in Barnstable. He is the Chief Photographer for his school newspaper The Storm Watch. He loves broadcasting and photography and is planning to study Broadcast Journalism at Emerson College in Boston.

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Morgan Clarke

Boston Latin Academy, Grade 10

This year I most enjoyed learning that there is more than one form of writing journalism. In my writing I decided to do a personal essay to describe how I feel when I swim.

Destructive Thoughts The starter blows the whistle, everyone puts their goggles on, and then sounds the one, long whistle when you step up on the block. You just get ready you don’t touch your goggles you just fix your mind. You try to stay focused but your head is full of destructive thoughts. w I can’t win but I want to, you want the glory--the best time. w I hear my coach’s words, ”Try harder, you put in no effort.” w Why am I doing this to myself when I could be sleeping? w I should have gone to more practices. w I’m too slow I want to be faster. w What if I cramp up and drown? w My mom is going to be pissed if I lose. w I’m going to get that same lecture again.

Then the starter says, “Swimmers take your mark.” Five-seconds pass you breathe in the scent of the chlorine that your know is permanently attached to your body like your skin, then you hear one loud beep that echoes through the pool deck and is accompanied by a bright white flash of light. The adrenaline starts to pump through your blood and your body like a spring uncoiling as you push of the block. All you hear is the splash of water, everything else is a blur of noises that couldn’t be deciphered even if you cared to try. There is a song that plays in your head as you try to convince your body to push harder. Your body starts to retaliate you’re short of breath, your muscles start to cramp you want to just give up but you push back against it. A mental war breaks out that seems to never stop Literary Journalism

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Nia Dorsey

until you can actually win. You know you’re not supposed to be afraid to feel tired because if you do you will never improve, never be recognized as someone who cares about the sport. You’re finally done yet you’re never finished, you’re permanently mad at yourself, you know you could have tried harder but at the same time you know it wasn’t possible. You weren’t ready, you destroyed your own chances of actually winning. Your negative thoughts have destroyed you.

This is Morgan’s f irst year at emersonWRITES. She is a sophomore at Boston Latin Academy. She plays both the piano and violin, and both swims and rows.

Concord Carlisle High School, Grade 9

This year in Journalism I most enjoyed the different ways one could write a piece and the idea of New Journalism. I formatted my piece as a personal essay with a twist.

How the Arctic Monkeys and a Group of Strangers Helped Me Out of the Rabbit Hole I never considered myself a social person. I had my distinct group of friends with a couple of outsiders and that was it. I would often casually give the voice-cracked “hi” to an unknown person who looked like they were also feeling as if they were trapped in the caged walls of my school. The sudden “hello” would often make me feel that they were, though they often looked at me as if I were crazy. I never meant to induce those feelings, but it happened more than I wanted it to. I had to deal with my social incapability throughout my whole day. I often wondered even, do I wanna know if I can accomplish any form of social acceptance?

Comparison has always been my number-one enemy. I have always thought about how I am not better than that person next to me. I even would compare myself to the people who are closest to me. That my brother had his life together more than I did and he was an eight-year-old.

How my best friend, Steph, had way better grades than me, and how I was getting C’s. I wonder if this feeling flows both ways sometimes or if I am the only one who forces this pain on myself.

I never believed I could write. I love writing and reading, especially when I am not forced to, but every time I try to press the keys or put the pen to the paper, I freeze. I have deleted and retyped this paragraph almost five times now and I still don’t feel that I am capable of writing this. I have always had a lot to say though every time I try to write it or even say it out loud my critique of myself screams over my voice.

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The struggle to write was killing me. The struggle to be social was killing me. The comparison to others was killing me.

My feet are killing me, I think as the switch of the lights lifts my adrenaline. The band begins to play everyone’s favorite song and Alex starts to sing. I stand next to people I have never met though I feel a deep connection to them, as if we have not just exchanged names, but we have known each other for a long time. Unlike the student in the hallway, I had no remorse about being myself, knowing that I would probably never see them again. My social awkwardness has suddenly gone into the cold Boston air and frozen and so has my care of being similar to others as well as my inability to believe in myself. In the loud music, the beautiful flashes of the letters A and M, and the strangers, I find that the mental enemies I face are only there because I allow and pressure them to be. If I keep on throwing myself down I am not going to be able to get back up. The euphoric melodies climb into my head and demand me to stop overthinking and to move.

So I climb out of the hole I have been falling from for so long and dance. I let the sound waves bounce off my ears. I dance with the people I will never see again. I don’t consider myself anything but human. I believe that all the pretty visitors that I meet that night will comfort me forever and I will remember them every time I start to fall.

Nia Dorsey is a freshman at Concord Carlisle High School and lives in Boston.

She is passionate about bands and movies that make her think about her life.

She takes voice classes after school at Berklee College of Music. Nia’s hobbies are Netflixing, blogging, and singing.

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Scheneider François

Cristo Rey Boston High School, Grade 10

I learned that it’s okay to write a lot as long as it’s descriptive and explainable.

I really like when we read each other’s stories and we went around the room letting everyone say what he or she liked and how the piece could get better.

The Street I Used To Live In Something so magnificent and yet so ugly and full of sadness. Miracle do not always happen to the one who believe and take time to pray to the one they believed in. Life can be good with sadness, but never good with misery and sadness at the same time. It still can look pretty because of the incompleteness in it. The woman in the yellow house up my street is full of sadness. She sit in her backyard with her friends and kids laughing at something so funny, they smiling and look happy, the street is quiet, yet there so much going on. The women in the next house sit in her chair all alone, her face frowning and gray hair is messy in a ponytail, her house look beautiful and the front yard is full of beautiful flowers, the sun is shining on them, the street is still quiet, her face is unhappy. If you took a picture with her in it, it almost as if the place is not pretty at all, she’s lonely, have no husband and probably have no kids (no one know). She is both the husband and the wife of the house, she is unhappy.

The lady with the yellow house look happy, but she’s not fully happy, she lost three family members in one year. It’s almost as if she have no faith in god. She has three daughters and a son. The two older daughters act so sophisticated and rich, the younger daughter is just living her life, and the son is having fun with his life. The mother has to take care of everyone and sometimes the ones who live outside of the house. And across, on the opposite side, is full of rocks and trees. And there’s my house, the one with the man who constantly cheat on his wife, the women he have one kid Literary Journalism

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with, and the mother of the son, who lost her husband and do agriculture work. And the wife who work so hard for her family that sometimes she have to travel to other city to sell things. And finally the other woman, who have a daughter, who mostly lives with her grandparents. And the women is in love with a married man who died later in a car accident and some people say it was voodoo. She work hard to keep her daughter safe and she took multiple career just to make some money.

And at the end when one have bigger issues; they are always there to help each other, even when one doesn’t have much to offer. They all have two things in common, they all are incomplete and partially unhappy.

Scheneider loves writing, but doesn’t think she’s very good at it. [Ed. note: We beg to differ. Did you see how beautiful this sentence is?? “Life can be good with sadness, but never good with misery and sadness at the same time.” We’re positively floored, Scheneider.] She likes new ideas and loves viewing other perspectives.

Sam Langmead

Stoughton High School, Grade 11

If there is anything I can take out of my 10-plus years of performing onstage, it’s that the things that I’ve learned in the theatre are, in my opinion, more important than any other. My piece explores how my experiences on stage have taught me things that the traditional classroom never could.

525,600 Minutes in Theatre I honestly think that theatre has taught me more than school has, from random life lessons hidden in song lyrics (I would like to hear my math book tell me to “forget regret, or life is [mine] to miss”), or even social things like building positive relationships. In theatre, my ideas are valued.

Although I have to listen to the director, I also have the right to say, “I don’t think my character would do this” or “I would feel more comfortable performing it this way.” I’m allowed to use more creativity than I could ever use in a “creative assignment” in class. I am taught so much in a way that makes me feel better about myself—messing up a monologue, although not a goal of mine, feels a heck of a lot better than a D on a quiz. I just wish that other people could see it the same way that I do, as more than just a silly little arts program.

At the beginning of my sophomore year, I auditioned for my high school’s fall play, And A Child Shall Lead. It was like any other high school play—something that no one had ever heard of. But I soon realized that it wasn’t like any other school play.

This play was all about kids in the ghetto of Terezin, a concentration camp during the Holocaust. Like most stories from that time, this sure wasn’t a happy play. No matter what role I got, my character would be dead or “shipped to another camp” by the end of the show.

This was not something that I was expecting from a department that

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had just done a comedy about speed dating four months prior.

Despite the downright depressing topic, I auditioned with three of my other friends, and we all got cast. On the first rehearsal, our director had us do an activity where we talked a lot about bullying and being judged by others, eventually to the point where we couldn’t help but change. It gave us a perspective that none of us had ever had before. It ended up with a lot of us in tears, talking about the difficult things that were happening in our lives, and realizing that for every problem that we had, someone else was going through the same thing. I became closer to those twenty kids in two hours than those I spent nine months with in a classroom. My school’s attempts to create a closer-knit student body could never measure up to this.

Our relationships became even closer over the course of the show.

I honestly think that I made more friends—real friends—in those two months than in three years of middle school. Maybe it’s the topic that set a base for a relationship, but I think it is more than that. Even in more upbeat shows, like our musical last year, The Wiz, there’s something about the experience of being in a show that creates a special bond. We compare our school’s drama department to “a family, not a club.” That’s what we are—a family. It may be crazy, argumentative, and drama-filled, but what can you say about a group of theatre fanatics that spend 15-plus hours together every day? It would be weird if we were sane.

Being asked to be stage manager—in charge of making sure everyone is in place and knows where their props are—boosted my confidence more than good grades ever could. I was the girl who was barely at rehearsals the previous year because my other theatre company made me prioritize, so I thought that I would spend my junior year in ensemble because I rarely had time to prove that I had the drive to be in a show. But here I am now, halfway through junior year, having stage-managed our fall play, It’s a Wonderful Life, and now our spring musical, Once on This Island.

Two months ago, I had convinced myself that my director wouldn’t even want me in the show (yes, I am a prime example of the Actor Confidence Complex: you can go from being a self-centered diva to thinking no one will ever cast you in a matter of seconds). The fact that I was given such a big responsibility seemed unreal to me. That responsibility taught me about leading a group, being organized, and taking initiative, but at the same time being a part of a group.

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how it changes you. I wish everyone could have the same experience as me, but it does say something about being a part of something that isn’t the “in” thing. It’s as if we are all part of a secret club, and we are surprised, but mostly excited, when we meet someone else who is interested in the same thing. No matter if we had performed together, just being a part of a theatre production is enough to spark a friendship.

Sadly, many people do not believe in the power that arts can have on a person. But until other people realize that theatre can help them the way it helped me, I will continue to measure my life in love. I’ll let the sunshine in. I’ll find my Wonderland. I’ll remember what I do for the things I love, the things that change me for good. Who am I? I am what I am, and I won’t change my passion to be “Popular.” When I grow up, I can change the world, because I am my own creation.

And I’ll continue to put musical quotes into all of my essays and articles, like this one. Because whether it is conscious or unconscious, musicals make everything that I do better than they would be otherwise.

Sam, a junior at Stoughton High School, is new to emersonWRITES, but is a writing veteran, as she has dreamed of being a journalist for years. She stage manages her school’s drama department, and loves every minute of it. She doesn’t do much besides rehearse, so everything she writes relates to performing.

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Maddie Mortell

Marshfield High School, Grade 12

In this piece, I focus on the diff iculties a young journalist faces with content approval. As I’ve become more and more conf ident with my own writing, depicting a challenged writing process comes naturally. This feature highlights my own struggle, as well as those faced by other young high school journalists.

Trapped Truths An enthused journalist gleams behind her computer screen, surrounded in crumpled ideas and ink-stained regret.

“I’ve got it!” She relishes, reaching for another sip of coffee only to realize her cup is empty. There is a certain, defining moment a journalist reaches during the brainstorming process. One could compare it to feeling like a little kid who’s been told a secret they weren’t supposed to know. Accompanied by curiosity and bliss, the writer naturally wishes to explore it. After all, for a journalist, discovering truths and making them transparent is the ideal. As a young, perhaps naive writer, the journalist beams with excitement to pitch her idea to an editor.

“No, you can’t write that. That’s a bitch story,” the authority figure remarks. At that moment, the journalist feels as though a thousand beautiful stained glass windows have shattered in front of her. Potential has died. Creativity has died. With a cold expression, she’s forced to return to the drawing board. Censorship has yet again left her feeling guilty and defeated.

For a high school journalist, first amendment rights can often feel like a pipe dream.

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recent rise in cheating in higher-level classes at my high school. I was told that to write this story I would have to reveal my student sources, which would result in their suspension or expulsion—had they said anything incriminating on the subject.

The First Amendment right, freedom of the press, includes the protection of sources as a reporter’s privilege.

2. “Lights Out For The Darkroom” was a story about how the newly constructed high school building does not include a dark room, which is essential to aspiring photography students. My question was, “How does a new, multi-million dollar school not include a dark room? And what alternatives can film students pursue?” This was the infamous bitch story.

The class fell silent as the fuming authority figure berated me: “Don’t you know that this will just make the administration look bad?!”

3. “Parking Lots Left Unsalted” was a story I wanted to write about the high school parking lot. In New England, snowy roads aren’t unusual, and as students drive to school the problem only appears once they arrive.

Both the town and the school refuse to salt the icy parking lot, because of a funding conflict. No resolution is being reached because neither feels responsible for funding.

4. “Safety Procedures” was a response story following the expulsion of a classmate under the grounds of anarchy. It was a simple story showcasing the safety measures to be taken in case of emergency. As a result, I was not allowed to write it, and as an added bonus, I was called down to the vice principal’s office to discuss anything I knew about a “possible planned riot.”

5. Finally, just yesterday—censorship both angered me and affected my creative process once again. “Alternatives to College: ROTC”: this story highlighted students that rise to the occasion and choose a different path than the expected, four-year academic degree. I would’ve covered students who chose to go into the armed forces. The reason I couldn’t write this story was none other than, you guessed it, censorship. The editor’s reasoning was “We can’t give kids permission to not to go to college.” As if permission was needed.

As a young journalist eager to enter the field, one must prepare to be objective, open-minded, and criticized. I fear that real-world journalism will force me to sacrifice my first amendment rights in the manner conservative high school journalism has. To a young journalist this poses the question, “If I can’t tell transparent truth, then is it news?” Half-truths in media are against moral journalistic ethics.

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As reflected in George Orwell’s classic 1984, half-truths can brainwash and misinform a nation.

Famous journalist A. J. Liebling slyly remarked, “People everywhere confuse what they read in newspapers with news.”

So she sighs, surrounded in notebooks defined by large X’s and strikethroughs. The fluorescent computer screen reflects off of her tired face. With a slight shake of her head, and a war of words filling her mind, she does what any journalist does—and writes about it. Laughing almost crazily, she states, “Maybe someday I’ll write a publishable piece about every story I’ve never written.”

This is Maddie’s f irst year at emersonWRITES, and she is a senior at Marshf ield High School. Maddie is a two-year editor for her high school paper and an active member of the drama club. She enjoys making bad jokes, watching too much Netflix, and journalism.

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Caitlin Paskiewicz

Billerica Memorial High School, Grade 12

This year, I enjoyed learning about ways to start a piece. In this piece, I began by setting the scene of game six of the 2013 Stanley Cup Final.

Seventeen Seconds With two minutes remaining in the third period, chants from Boston’s faithful flooded the TD Garden. The Boston Bruins led 2-1, and were about to force a game seven against the Chicago Blackhawks in the 2013 Stanley Cup Final.

All of the sudden, Bryan Bickell of the Hawks snapped the puck on net, sending it soaring behind goaltender Tuukka Rask. Bruins fans slowly returned to their seats, gnawing on their nails, speechless of the tying goal.

Red shirts frantically moved up and down, those Hawks fans cheered wildly.

Seventeen seconds after Bickell’s goal, Dave Bolland beat Rask, allowing his team to take a 3-2 lead. There would be no need for a do-or-die game seven. The Chicago Blackhawks were only fifty-eight seconds away from hoisting Lord Stanley high above their heads.

Tears flowed from the eyes of many, including myself, who dreamt of a repeat summer of 2011—Boston unified, Bruins shirts galore, and euphoric members of the team riding Duck Boats throughout the streets.

The people of Boston needed something to bring joy to their city once again. With the Marathon bombings that had just happened two months prior, it would have been the perfect way to bring serenity. But it was over.

Many of the Bruins fans fled out of the Garden, as Blackhawks fans rushed down to ice level to get a clear view of their beloved team with the Cup. I was frozen. My hands remained on my cheeks in utter shock. Defeat engulfed my entire body.

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again? My passion for the game of hockey led me to ice level to watch the Hawks celebrate. Players were crying in happiness as their parents, wives, and children grasped them, giving numerous hugs and kisses, proud of their family members. The media swarmed captain Jonathan Toews and Patrick Kane, who had just won MVP. If only a game seven could have been played, then maybe captain Zdeno Chara and players like Patrice Bergeron or David Krejci would’ve been the ones being happily swarmed.

Instead, they headed to the locker room with their heads hung low.

I sat a few rows back from the Hawks fans, silently and sadly taking in the breathtaking moments of the players lifting the Cup. But I wasn’t able to stay there for long, due to security telling us to leave because we weren’t Hawks fans. I never imagined the day I would be getting kicked out of my own arena. Pain and disappointment flourished. Getting kicked out might have been more upsetting than seeing the Blackhawks win the Stanley Cup. Game six will be something I remember forever. Sports have a unique way of bringing happiness and pain, but in the end, the team means everything.

This is Caitlin’s f irst year at emersonWRITES. She is a senior at Billerica Memorial High School and interns at Dutile Elementary School in a third grade classroom. She plans to study Broadcast Journalism next year.

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Mykell Pruitt

Josiah Quincy Upper School, Grade 11

This year I really enjoyed working on journalism and f inding new ways to get a story on the market. In this piece I talk about the trials and tribulations of being a debater during a debate tournament.

Days In The Life Of A Debater Before the debate: You wake up to go to school as you normally do, but you know today isn’t going to be the same as others because you’re not going straight home; you’re not hanging out with your friends after school.

NOOOO! You’re going to argue about Cuba or Mexico or Venezuela in a debate tournament. You’re scared and nervous and you really don’t wanna go. You’re like a little kid going to the dentist except hopefully you’re not kicking, screaming, and crying. You’re just really nervous.

Day 1: After school you meet with your team and take the train to the school where your debate is being held. (My team usually goes to English High or on special occasions we go to Boston Tech, but that’s not very often). When you get to the school where your debate is being held, you have about an hour and a half before the first round starts. During that time you have to register. You get to eat and study you’re cases. A wise idea is to have a round plan which means being able to debate any case, whether you’re affirmative or negative, in order to be prepared no matter which side you get.

All the schools you’re debating against are in the same room, which is kinda scary because your potential debater is sitting in the same room with you, possibly watching you while you’re eating your food, and going over your round plan with your partner. Take a second just to imagine that...

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however many they want. (I’m J.V. but I’ve never done a J.V. round yet so I can really only give a clear picture of a Novice round.)

Rounds. There are four rounds in a debate tournament before going into quarterfinals. In those rounds you’re basically presenting your case.

Each team gets to speak four times (two constructives and two rebuttals) in order to present their side of the case and also give everyone a chance to speak. If you’re AFF, you speak first, stating the problem and giving a solution (for example: the U.S embargo restricts the flow of goods such as medical supplies into Cuba) while the negative side tries to defend why everything should just stay how it is. On the first day you only do two rounds then you get to go home.

Day 2: You wake up early on a Saturday morning and get to your school by 8 a.m. During breakfast you have time to review your notes and flow sheets with your partner.

Flow sheets. What you use during a round to keep track of everything that was stated during that round and to make sure no statements were dropped.

After breakfast you have two more rounds in the morning basically doing what you did the night before.

After completing four full rounds (two from Friday night, two Saturday morning) you eat lunch and wait for them to announce the quarterfinalist.

This is a good 30-40 minute break, but again you’re in the room with all your competing schools, so for 30-40 mins you’re listening to each school scream that they’re better (my school is calm, cool, and collected, casually talking to one another). After that annoying break they start announcing the Quarterfinalist. In that moment you’re having mixed emotions; you want to hear your team be called, but at the same time it’s 1:00 on a Saturday and you just wanna go home. If you make it to quarterfinals then you will be doing what you did during rounds. The only difference is now you have 3 judges making a decision. (It’s important to engage your judge in your speech. Make eye contact during rebuttals. Try to make a situation where s/he can relate. It gives them a better reason to vote for you and shows you have confidence. Confidence is key in a debate tournament.)

After quarterfinals is the award ceremony. Everyone goes into the auditorium. The leader of the event talks to the teams and gives out awards for best speaker, best team (in a specific division), most school spirit, etc. If you and/or your partner get called for any of the awards, you go on stage, collect your award, and shake hands with the person. Then you go sit down.

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After awards there are semi-finals. These teams won during their quarterfinal round. Again, it’s just like all other rounds.

Last, but certainly not least, there are FINALS! (I’ve never made it to finals, but I’ve watched final round before.) There are 5 judges, and sometimes a lot of your teammates who didn’t make it to finals, watching.

Finals are the same as all other rounds, but they are more special than all other rounds because getting there shows you were able to defeat all odds and make it all the way to the end. It shows that you’re a really strong debater.

To me finals are like high school graduation: It’s your time to shine and show everyone you’ve made it!

This is Mykell’s f irst year in emersonWRITES. She is a junior at Josiah Quincy Upper School where she is co-leader of the recycling club and cooking club as well as a participant in school government. She loves reading and writing and plans on coming back to emersonWRITES next year.

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Olivia Stapleton

Beacon High School, Grade 12

During my time at emersonWRITES, my interest in new and evolving types of journalism has increased. In this piece, I explore a non-traditional structure based on a loose timeline that guides the piece to its f inal realization.

The Neglected Keyboard It’s eleven. I have an essay due at midnight. I’ve procrastinated. I slouch over the computer screen that’s open on my bed, unable to find the right words.

I open Spotify with the hope that music may help me concentrate, and start shuffling recommended songs. My fingers hover over the keyboard, but as I realize it’s a song by The National, I lean back and close my eyes.

It’s a song off one of their older albums. Instantly, I’m back in the class of one of the English teachers I once had, who would occasionally play their songs during class.

I haven’t seen him in months, and I miss him. I miss his dark sense of humor, I miss his harsh, matter-of-fact rhetoric about what’s wrong in my life and about exactly what I need to do to fix my problems. I miss the music that would always leak from his classroom and mildly bother other teachers. I miss his genius. I remember how much he cared. I can’t help but realize how my life is centering on all that he’s taught me. I need to visit him. I wonder why I couldn’t have stayed at the school he teaches at. I’m spiraling into a rabbit hole of thought that I need to rip myself out of. It’s 11:15, and I’m crying.

Shuffle songs.

“Everlasting Light” by the Black Keys. Lovely. Suddenly, I’m celebrating my birthday all over again. It’s late on a Saturday at the TD Garden, and my arms are wrapped around my now ex-boyfriend’s neck as we dance. We sway in rhythm as a disco ball drops from the ceiling, sending 76

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specks of light flying across the stadium. He smiles at me, as the lead vocals trail off into a lullaby. “Let me be your everlasting light, the sun when there is none...” I feel alive. I remember that night, the crisp chill in the air as we wandered the parking lot searching for his car. I remember the bliss I knew in those types of moments we shared. When we would pull over to the side of the road and laugh as the car vibrated over all the gravel, and we opened the moon roof to gaze at the stars. What has our relationship turned into, two years later? It’s 11:30, and I’m holding back tears.

Pull yourself together, I say internally. My paper is due in a halfhour, and I still have a long way to go. Music was a terrible idea. I need a change of scenery. I throw on some TV as white noise, and attempt to refocus on my work. Oh hell, it’s a rerun of one of my favorite shows. Yet, I can’t ignore all of the issues it has. Almost all of the female characters are killed off, there’s an undercurrent of sexism that’s impossible to look past. There are plot holes you could fall into, and possibly end up in an alternate universe. Can anything be perfect, though? Why can’t I just enjoy the shows I like for the positive parts without ripping myself to shreds inside because the writers can’t pull it together on important issues? Oh. It’s 11:45 already. My mind is stewing over TV, and the hope that one day I’ll take over a leadership position on every show I like and fix all of their problematic elements.

15 minutes remain. My god, Emily Dickinson wrote thousands of poems on a desk with less than a square foot of space, and I can’t even get an essay finished with all the space I could possibly need, journals and pens scattered across my bed. Further, I have most of the world’s knowledge and resources at my fingertips. Dickinson would have flourished with the kind of information I have. Or, would she have? She didn’t have playlists cursing her with memories and regrets. The process of writing takes not only time, but also the ability to navigate a world bursting with unintentional mementos of the past, and occasionally disturbing portraits of the present.

When sitting down to write, it may be wise to take a hint from the past.

Though sitting alone with only your thoughts to keep you company can be intimidating, it’s often better than what can come of searching for help in forms that can also be pathways to the hindrance of creative thought.

A tiny desk in a tiny room may just be the best antidote to a writer’s ever wandering mind.

12:00 AM. Literary Journalism

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Olivia currently resides in Easton, and is a senior at Beacon High School.

This was her f irst year at emersonWRITES. She plans to major in English Literature when she begins college next fall. Her interests include analyzing literature, writing creatively, and spending time with her friends and family.

Poetry

Finding Inspiration in the Details

The emersonWRITES Poetry class spent this year learning and challenging the conventions that make a poem a poem. We looked to other poets for their techniques in rhyme, syntax, narration, simile, metaphor, and imagery, and began to practice the poetic devices in our own poems.

Every week the students gathered to read and write with the skills that they were learning. Sometimes this was by writing in a style that was offered by a poet or poetic device we were studying, and sometimes it was through breaking the rules of the device to see what’s created when we challenge the conventions we’ve been taught. We wrote about where we’re from, about current events, we added senseless verbs to our poems and took them out altogether, we copied Shakespeare for his charming insults, and continually shared in the surprising inspiration of ordinary things. The students wrote, they workshopped each other’s work, and they revised their drafts into publishable poems.

What can you expect from these poems? I think you’ll see a maturity that comes from continued enthusiasm for learning, writing and revising.

You’ll notice imagery that bends expectation, and most of all, you’ll be captivated by five voices that are wild and brave.

Instructor

This is Amy Fant’s third year teaching with emersonWRITES. She received her MFA in poetry in 2013 from Emerson, where she continues to teach composition and research writing in the First-Year Writing Program. You can find her writing in The Cumberland River Review, Weave Magazine, Squalorly, and elsewhere.

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Raymond Barreau

West Roxbury Academy, Grade 11

I learned a lot of things that benef it my future work, and look forward to writing until I get arthritis. This workshop taught me the power of revision that helps to mold my poetry into music. I’m delighted I had a second chance to be in this workshop.

Where I’m From I am from the landscaped gun, from a revolver and its cousins.

I am from the Caribbean scent of fried meat, white rice, and veggies followed by a burnt melting pot with a black scab.

I am from the golf ball like tangerine that steals its color from the morrow’s awakening shine of Texas.

I am from the dirty, the strong scent illegal in nine countries.

I am from the clean-mouthed stepdaughter of Christ in the land of no father, from my mother’s belly button and right out of a blessed cocoon.

From a women’s khaki skin complexion and priceless smile sent away from one’s mistake, the hands of unconditional love and her dungeon’s deep mate.

I am from the sunflower’s blooming stomach, the hot room where bees feast shortly after the exhausted sun has risen.

I am from being misunderstood, and speaking my mind, from Juromaya and Joshua and the Barreaus.

I am from the motivated ones and those who are leaders, I’m from somewhere in Haiti, Garlic and Maggie, Florida, a place where the first steps of a ladder are missing but an oasis awaits at the top for whoever builds those steps at a rate where he does not stop.

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Haitians

Raymond Barreau

I look at your ebony coated skin tune myself into the words that burst out of your mouth like vomit and wonder why I haven’t had the chance to inherit my culture.

Why do you speak so loudly in the language I can understand but fail to reply in which she can comprehend?

Maybe if my first steps took place in Haiti and not America I’d be able to blend in with you, her, him, and them.

Unfortunately I find myself somewhat aloof from you guys and wish I knew more about you, her, him, and them.

I grew up in diverse communities but never learned Creole, does that make me dumb? Sources were available yet I didn’t acknowledge them.

Whenever you’re around I feel there’s no connection towards us although we share strong odor, are defined by the way we look, and the name Haitian.

But what is it to be you?

I don’t think that it’s fair I walk like the Americans talk like the Americans in some ways act like the Americans but still claim to be you, though it is true.

Maybe a trip to Haiti would answer these questions but how can I enter a country that is foreign to my eyes without any guidance? That’s where you come in place.

Lead me through the path where my ancestors once traveled at a neutral pace, defining what Haitian is by how ever they show it and it being conducted through this sharp gaze of never seeing home but in time will reminisce on what it took me to get there.

I have always been known to be a helping hand, but if I don’t find home sooner or later I will never be able to speak for you, her, him, and them as if I know what it is to be Haitian.

This is Raymond’s second year in emersonWRITES. He is a junior at West Roxbury Academy. He loves music and making new friends, and next year plans on studying creative writing.

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Yanni Cabrera

Cristo Rey Boston High School, Grade 11

This year, I enjoyed hearing other styles of poetry besides my own, and learning how to use imagery. In the following poems, I explored using poetic devices, like rhyme and repetition that I’ve never used before.

Most is False Being lonely Being alone

This Poem is Gay That’s an ugly sweater: It’s so gay.

This food is terrible: It’s so gay.

Your outfit makes you look like a homo.

Yanni Cabrera

It’s not that serious.

It’s not like I hate gays.

I’m just so used to using the word Gay as bad.

Gay as bad.

Gay is bad.

Gay is bad.

That TV show is gay.

I don’t want to watch it.

Those jeans are gay.

I never want to wear them.

That cook is gay.

I don’t want to eat his food.

That artist is gay.

I don’t want to listen to their music.

That person is so gay.

Smooth as a rock Hard as a stone As cold as the sun on Valentine’s Day As warm as flip-flops in Early May As proud as Boston: Boston Strong As violent as Dorchester: Boston’s Wrong

It’s not like I hate them.

I love gays.

Gay just means bad.

Gay means bad.

As blind as a bat with eyes like mine As fast as a turtle, as slow as time Tallest building, smallest view Most is false Most is true

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The Home of My Mother’s Laughter

Jen Grimes

Yanni Cabrera

As the sun shares its light through the towns of Puerto Rico My smile lasts as long as day Even far into the jewelling night Ah, how my mother’s laugh traveled through the walls Only concealing the picture of her happiness But who needs the picture when he face is a constant glow You can just use your imagination and paint my mother laughing.

When the trees shared branches and the beach tugged away at time The Rican wind carried a feeling of yellow sunshine That the ink in my pen can’t create Even if I tried to tell you, my voice would only break Only experience would make your life shake This is Yanni’s f irst year at emersonWRITES. She is a junior at Cristo Rey Boston High School, and she is a soprano in her school chorus. She plans on going to college and majoring in education. She loves Instagram.

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St. Mary’s Junior/Senior High School, Grade 12

My writing is similar to an iPod on shuffle. When it comes to my poetry, there is never an overall theme. I’m always surprised at what comes out. My head is f illed with words, and writing is my outlet for the thoughts in my mind.

Bullying Mia Your words of loathing Penetrate my thoughts; I let them Your friendship was An act, a façade; I walked right into it Your retched voice Encouraging my futile addiction However, I persevere I’m disgusted by the way You make me crouch over the toilet, Bile dripping into porcelain My hatred for you Burns beneath tired bones And yet I cling to you, As if you are my last breath.

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Sweaters

Jen Grimes

There are poems Growing inside of me Poems about winter

Sometimes you’re a book That I can read cover to cover Clean, crisp and clear Or you’re like the smell of oranges Rising, waking, ready for a new day Like the color of morning sun You’re the rush of the city The buzzing of people The ever glowing of street lamps at midnight You’re the feeling of bed sheets That hug the curves on my skin Never too hot, always generously warm Sometimes you’re little moments Snippets of the past and the future Images I hope we become You’re the x factor The number to isolate The algebra equation too complex to understand You’re my ripple affect My beginning and my end A race I must win But the snow is melting Winter’s leaving And I no longer need your sweater.

About branches Shaking off their coats Of snow And delicate ice Blooming on windows There are poems Growing inside of me Poems unending They sound like waves Continuously kissing the softness Of the shore There are poems Growing inside of me Poems that are loud Words crash like glass And we drop them Just to hear the noise

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Jen Grimes

This is Jen’s f irst year at emersonWRITES. She’s a senior at St. Mary’s High School and plans to major in creative writing. Besides writing, she enjoys running, reading, and meeting new people. Jen has poems and stories published online at Teen Ink and The Write Place at the Write Time.

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Ilanna Rosario

Boston Preparatory Charter Public School, Grade 10

This year I learned how to use line breaks and how to show imagery through different poems. We also did free writes to learn how to include writing elements in our poems. In the following poems, I used imagery to describe the characters of my poems.

Cereal Killer

Tintinnabulation

Ilanna Rosario

Long haired hazel eyed, why are you the one to always cry The leaves fall and you still step on the glamour of summer’s kisses Returned like the black tips of a poisoned tree Tintinnabulation, your thoughts spilling as you speak Your words knitting your wounds, your tears spilling salt into your cuts Another maladroit somebody But that’s wrong Incandescent, is indeed what you are Mellifluous Enchanting And I could come up with all of these words just to describe you but You are … just beautiful This is Ilanna’s second year at emersonWRITES. She is a sophomore at Boston Preparatory Charter Public School. She loves shopping, drawing on her homework, playing volleyball, and stalking Justin Bieber on Instagram. She plans on going to an art or design school.

Let me wrap my blood-rushed fingers on your lace Taste the bitter peppermint of your breath Squeeze your ruby eyes into a case Allow me to bite your flesh And return with the name murder on my dulcet voice

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Kiahara Ruiz

Cristo Rey Boston High School, Grade 9

I am a confessional poet overall, but am open to wide ranges of poetry. I write mainly of pain, physical and emotional. At emersonWRITES, I’ve learned how to properly break lines to become more effective with my writing, different forms of poetry, and also how amazing slant rhymes can be!

Now, you see, a mother is someone who raises you a mother is someone who loves you a mother is someone who protects you And my mother just so happens to be my grandmother She raised me with morals and loved me like a mother would she is the reason I am standing strong she is the reason that I am beautiful she is the reason I have a future.

And that woman that I get to call my mother has raised her family well We all have a bright future thanks to her and I love her so Forever will I owe this beautiful woman And as a bit of repayment, I shall bring pride to her.

Unearth A flower springs to life to feel the sun Of life that flower came to exist with pure purpose Yet under harsh circumstances, that flower grew.

A flower that took much time to develop strongly I am that unearthed flower.

I was born to two parents who had no care in raising a baby Their bigger interests far more complex and evil to comprehend No care in being a parental figure, they soared away like birds The two birds abused the flower, picking at the petals and sucking it dry of its nectar intentions of draining the flower of its beauty the flower had a hard time breathing in fresh air Until a woman stumbled upon the flower She looked at it, and though she was standing in a field of perfect flowers she picked up the damaged flower and carried it home with her, nurturing it, and soon the flower was in good condition My grandmother was that woman 90

She saved me from a life that I could have lived And taught me how to breath fresh air and feel love, such strong love

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Tribute to My Parents

Kiahara Ruiz

The liquid form of my pain streams down my pale complexion, as I slam my fist into my own reflection Glass shatters falling to my feet as I scream This all just feels like a horrible dream...

I have begun to realize my parents are not coming back for me My heart beat may now cease to be Or shall I continue on with broken beat, I’m faltering on a flat line, all that remains is this feeling of defeat...

My father chose his bottles and his mistress. Does he even hear me?

Does he hear my calls of distress?

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My mother chose the men who feed her addiction so long as she provides them with love I know I wasn’t anything she planned, but I could have been everything she dreamed of...

I remain here teetering on the brink of insanity and losing focus on reality each day Thinking about you two and what I could have done to keep you from slipping away My mind trails off resorting to my broken memory And I have this sickening feeling deep within my core and it leaves me weary My words are drenched in pain and my eyes threaten tears, Recounting all of the shattered dreams of parents who care that I had in my younger years My heart beats like a worn down drum, bludgeoned numb.

I keep telling myself that you’re coming back for me, but I couldn’t live up to what you wanted me to be I shall remain here haunted by the things you’ve done and this pain I will forever see.

This is Kiahara’s f irst year at emersonWRITES. She is Puerto Rican and Dominican. One of seven siblings, she’s been raised by her grandmother after losing her parents and other family to drugs and the streets at a young age. After being bullied, she took control through art and writing, where she helps others through traumatic events.

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Lidwine St.Rose

Community Charter School of Cambridge, Grade 12

This year I decided to write poetry with short and clear lines so they can express more. I explore words with adjectives that can make the reader more interested.

Sheets She waits She waits for the world to catch up She waits for the moment when Love comes running with open arms.

He waits He waits for the alcohol to Settle in his blood streams Popping six, twelve, thirty-five prescriptions in.

They wait They wait for the phone call that can destroy many We wait for a world to leave The animal scenting the trouble packing their black suitcase and waving goodbye We watch the world abandon us upon the dark alley on main street The trees wait for the wind to carry them But she waits Poetry

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Trees

in silence for her love to come So she will sit patiently until love slips quietly between her sheets she will wait.

Lidwine St.Rose

Lustful Night But don’t call me after sex. Just hold me through the night. Just not when it is light.

Just have your heart shape lips kiss every square inch of mine.

I want your frustration to amuse me Pick me up and whisper lustful songs in my ear I’ll make sure the neighbors know your name At the end of the night I’ll forget your name But I’ll remember your game But I do not want to see you again You fulfilled my desire for today My heart won’t ask yours “if this is love?”

But thank you

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Stationary Soldiers guarding the helpless They stood straight and wide Trunks holding on to the ground keeping all unspoken stories honest as a sniper, they won’t even exploit words to anyone when they fall they fall dying with honor and silent

This is Lidwine’s f irst year at emersonWRITES. She’s a senior at CCSC. She’s been writing for years, but never seriously until her junior year. She will major in creative writing, and enjoys baking, watching Teen Wolf, and singing and dancing in her room while her mother yells from the kitchen.

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Scriptwriting

Save the Drama for Your Script

Scriptwriting is a genre that is meant to be read aloud and brought to life.

In this course we looked for ways to help our characters and stories leap off the page and enthrall audiences. We began by studying craft with Aristotle and his Six Elements of Drama, thinking about plays we read not just as writers, but as actors and directors. We read scripts out loud in class to listen to the sound, defined the scope of the ten-minute play, and explored writing our own short plays: noir crime dramas, black comedies, horror, tragedies, and adaptations of well-known myths and fairy tales.

During our discussions and workshops, we found that although each of us has a unique voice, we were all interested in stories full of emotion and drama. Our plays were full of surprising twists that made us gasp, satisfying triumphs, and aching moments of loss or betrayal. In these pages, you will encounter dramas from the ancient past and the distant future, actions that change the course of lives, and complex characters who will do anything for who or what they love, whether it be family, friends, or an irresistible urge to destroy all happiness and good in the world.

Instructors

Mimi Cook migrated to Boston from the Pacific Northwest to pursue an MFA in fiction at Emerson. She is a first-time emersonWRITES instructor and a lifelong theater lover. Mimi also works as a Marketing Assistant for Ploughshares at Emerson College, engaging with the literary community through social media, and assists in curating the Breakwater Reading Series, Boston’s inter-MFA program showcase. She was recently named the 2014 Ivan Gold Fellow in fiction by the Writer’s Room of Boston. In her free time, Mimi practices shotokan karate, throws dinner parties, and writes an epistolary food blog with her father.

Joelle Jameson received her MFA in poetry from Emerson College in December 2012, and this is the third year she has had the pleasure of teaching playwriting at emersonWRITES. Her rhymed-verse one-act play “Surreal Gist,” an imagined account of the real life breakup between artists Lee Miller and Man Ray, was performed at Gallery 263 in Cambridge, MA this past October. She writes reviews of literary magazines for The Review Review, and in the past has produced and hosted High Volumes, an online radio show dedicated to showcasing the work of writers and small presses. Her theater reviews have appeared in Blast Magazine, but she now prefers to write long-winded, feeling-full reviews on her personal blog.

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A Thousand Dollars Is Worth Change

We leave you with:

an emersonWRITES Group Poem from the Slam Poetry Workshop AUTHORS

Yanni Cabrera Abigail Fisk Schenider François Ellis Hampton Jimmy Cesario Jennifer Grimes Meghan Kenneally

Taqari Patterson Andy Rondon Ilana Rosario Sonia Rugwiza Justin Smith Lidwine St. Rose

GUEST TEACHER Donald Vincent

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And then with that same idea implanted In your beautiful dome and undeniably bright face, I’ll tell you with a sly smile, are you happy with your money? My hand in yours, free of mental limitation or a smile imitation, you can do this. Empty pockets, thin wallet, eyes honest, I want it. It falls into that pit that has no bottom,I can’t see the sense in what you do. Or say. Empathies and sympathy, I’ve got a lot of them. I feel chills and pity at your presence, yet I wish you to stay Mothers childish, children motherless, Fathers roaming all over the world I can see a movement with my eyes and with my ears Hear the cries of my streets full of life, death, and lies One kid dead, the other on his way. A shooting yesterday, Tomorrow the anniversary of 26 children shot. Shot Of their faces suffocate the screen. It was a car accident, God’s accident. Abuse: poor helpless creatures are used as machines so others can take their problems out on them So don’t talk to me about fairness, when you don’t know What it means to be fair. Because when I sit next to you on the train, it doesn’t matter that my first kiss was with a chick and nobody reacts until they see or until I tell I declare on this day, the bottom wouldn’t exist, Because the only way I, you, we, will be going is up How expensive, I wonder. I wonder if it will be cheap or accessible? Accessible, accessible, yes but cheap or free is impossible. Everyone cares about themselves and the ones who care about others are few My words are worth their weight in gold. But I know You know, you can’t listen to a picture. But I know A picture is worth a thousand words. And a thousand Words is worth a thousand seconds. And a thousand Seconds is worth a thousand dollars.

And a thousand dollars is worth change.

Collaborative Poem

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Weto are grateful all the people who work to make

emerson

WRITES happen

Program Coordinators Christopher Milot Senior Administrative Director of Pipeline Programs, Enrollment Management Mary Kovaleski Byrnes Lecturer, First-Year Writing Program, Department of Writing, Literature and Publishing & Curriculum Coordinator, emersonWRITES Adena Smith Sr. Administrative Associate to the Vice President for Enrollment Management

Guest Speakers from Boston Schools Constance Borab Boston Day and Evening Academy

Faculty

special thanks to others in the

Emerson College

Community

Abby Travis Senior Faculty, Anthology Editor, Layout & Design Dymon Lewis & Abby Travis Creative Nonfiction Jamie Burke & Sarah Sassone Fiction Caitlin McGill & Jordan Pailthorpe Literary Journalism Amy Fant Poetry Miriam Cook & Joelle Jameson Scriptwriting

Guest Teachers

Stephen Shane Charlestown High School

Jason Laperriere Ricky Davis Whitney James College Admission Essay Writing Workshop

Mario Alejandro Ariza Roxbury Latin School

Donald Vincent Slam Poetry Workshop

Curtis Perdue Dorchester Collegiate Academy

...including: our

Christopher Grant Senior Assistant Director of Undergraduate Admission MJ Knoll-Finn Vice President for Enrollment Management Tamera Marko Lecurer & Director of the First-Year Writing Program M. Lee Pelton President, Emerson College Robert Sabal Associate Professor and Interim Dean of the School of the Arts John Trimbur Professor and Assistant Director of the First-Year Writing Program Jerald Walker Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Writing, Literature and Publishing Michaele Whalen Vice President of Academic Affairs

Participating Amesbury High School Archbishop Williams High School Beacon High School Belmont High School Billerica Memorial High School Bishop Stang High School Boston Green Academy Boston International High School Boston Latin Academy Boston Latin School Boston Preparatory Charter Public School Brighton High School Bristol Plymouth Regional Vocational High School Canton High School Cathedral High School Charlestown High School Chatham High School Chelmsford High School Community Charter School of Cambridge Concord-Carlisle High School Cristo Rey Boston High School Dartmouth High School Dighton-Rehoboth Regional High School Dorchester Academy East Boston High School Everett High School Fontbonne Academy Gloucester High School Homeschooled John D. O’Bryant High School Josiah Quincy Upper School Lincoln Sudbury Regional High School

Schools Lowell Catholic High School Lowell High School Lynn English High School Marblehead High School Margarita Muniz Academy Marshfield High School Match Charter Public High School Melrose High School Moses Brown School Mystic Valley Regional Charter School Natick High School Needham High School North Attleboro High School Oliver Ames High School Prospect Hill Academy Quincy High School Reading Memorial High School Sharon High School Shrewsbury High School Silver Lake Regional High School Somerville High School Southeastern Regional Vocational High School St. Mary’s High School Stoughton High School Sturgis Charter Public School Swampscott High School Tewksbury Memorial High School The Cambridge School of Weston Wayland High School West Roxbury Academy Westwood High School Whitman-Hanson Regional High School Winsor School