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Northwest Passages: Young Oregon Writers
How do you grow a writer?
When 16-year-old Billy Pham was younger, he didn't think he was a very good writer. He began to recognize his talent, however, when Carlos Reyes, a poet with the Literary Arts' Writers in the Schools program, set him on the path to being published.
Reyes told Billy and his classmates at Benson High School not to write about themselves, but what was around them. So Billy looked out the window, and wondered: Why is the sky blue? The poem that emerged, "Silenced Fantasies," is a tribute to a friend who was killed a few years ago.
Why is the sky so open and blue?
Free from the pull of gravity
Who is the person that replays an
Unseen movie over and over every night as I sleep?
What is that voice that I hear in my ear
When I dream of the past?
Why must sorrow haunt me
On the sixteenth of November every year?
TriMet chose "Silenced Fantasies" to display inside buses as part of its Poetry in Motion project this year. The poem was also published in the 2010 Writers in the Schools anthology.
Now Billy calls himself a "freestyle poet" who says no thanks to Shakespeare (I'll get him to explain why on the show!).
Another young Oregon writer we'll hear from is Hannah Harris, a 14-year-old who says her little brother sometimes helps her pick the right word.
He has a great vocabulary. It's bigger than mine at his age, probably because he reads books I tell him about. I have all these words floating around in my head jumbling jumbling. They're all screaming for my attention. Sometimes he can help me sort through and pick the right one.
Hannah tied for first place this year in the creative writing contest put on by Lane County's Young Writers Association. She's also read her work on the radio before!
Fifteen-year old-Rebekah Burcham says she almost quit writing when she realized it would take a big commitment to do it full time. She says learning to take criticism is one of the best things about a writing blog she started with several friends to support each other. Rebekah moved to Pendleton from Philadelphia a few years ago. She says at first she hated "everything, the dust, the belt buckles, the dry heat." But her poem "The West" captures the moment she fell in love with the land. It was published last year by TeenInk.
If you write, how did you start? What nurtured or pushed you along your way? If you wrote when you were younger, but don't now, why did you stop? Who are the young Northwest writers you're keeping an eye on?
This is part of Northwest Passages, our ongoing series of conversations with regional authors.
Tagged as: books · northwest passages · youth
Photo credit: courtesy Writers in the Schools
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Hey Salem, Can You Spare a School Library?
Now it's official. The Tigard-Tualatin School Board voted to terminate the Media Assistant library positions at all 10 Tigard Tualatin School District elementary schools. So what does this mean to our children? Plenty.
The Media Assistants are the engines that make the library run. They work with every child in the school to check books in and out. Many of them know every child's name and what they like to read. They shelve thousands of books, check in new books, inventory the library at the end of the year, and several operate the computer lab. They can also monitor the lunch room and make sure that your children get on the right bus to go home.
The school district will fully staff the Media Specialist (librarian) positions, however without the Media Assistants they will be captains of ships without engines. The library is a safe harbor for our children. Their minds can wander the library aisles and grab a favorite book to take home. It is likely that library hours will be reduced and books will go unshelved and unavailable for our children.
The impacts of this decision can't be quantified beyond a budget line item on a spreadsheet. How can one predict the impacts of books not read by a child seeking knowledge? The legislature needs to meet and focus on funding the literacy of our children and keep this ship of knowledge moving forward. It is the best investment we can make.
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Maybe students could volunteer to shelve books. Or would that piss off the unions.
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Poets are seen as Romantic Twits seemingly unconcerned with everyday practical concerns. Do you see a means of being able to support your writings even when even poetry professors are being laid off, English Departments are being decimated and University budgets are being slashed? Chances are you will need a regular job or career if you hope to pursue your passion. Do you have a Plan B?
In challenging times, there is a vein of desperation, hunger, unemployment, foreclosures and even bankruptcies that haven't been seen in living memory. Like Great Depression Artists, this was also a source of inspiration and rich topical material that linked them to the people. This is in contrast to escapism and fantasy, also sources of inspiration. Have you touched on our current challenges in your material?
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I admire these young writers and encourage them to keep working.
I've given up my writing life many times since one of my first sonnets won a local prize when I was in high school. Love, work, and the sheer inability to sit my tookus down in front of a blank sheet of paper (or blank screen) for extended periods of time have all contributed to my lack of production.
Of course, the constant stream of rejections that most poets face is also rather daunting. At some periods of my life I've been able to face rejection and have succeeded and getting a few things published. (My work appears in the recent anthology Beyond Forgetting). At other periods I've allowed my ongoing failures to drive me away from sharing my work. (I'm in one of those periods now, having spent hundreds of dollars entering a book in contests and losing every one.)
Poets should remember that there are probably more people writing poetry than reading it and this alone makes "success" in any material way improbable. One should write because one can't not write.
Kake Huck
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I began writing in 2000 when I was published in Honoring Our Rivers, a student anthology that is designed to promote the health and prosperity of our river systems as well as their impact of this beautiful place that we call home. I was thrilled to have become a "published author" in the 2nd grade after a suggestion from my favorite teacher in elementary school that I should share my love for the environment in a more public fashion. My love for writing was nurtured by the excitement of sharing my similar love for nature and encouraged me to continue writing, leading to my publication of an essay about rainforest conservation in Peru in the 2010 10th anniversary edition of Honoring Our Rivers.
The anthology is continuing to influence my path as a writer, as I join other students and professional writers at a series of readings this summer, beginning in July at Powell's Books!
It has really inspired me to continue writing, and I strongly encourage students to share their enthusiasm and their talents through student publications. Kids can find a free entry form at www.honoringourriver.org if they want to send in a poem, essay, or drawing.
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I have been a writer all my life, writing poems and journals as a child. I sailed through English classes using big words and complicated sentences until I met Miss Rhodes, a high school creative writing teacher, who marked up my first paper in her class with so much red ink that it looked like she had bled on it. Her big comment, next to the horrifying "D", gave me my first good piece of advice as a serious writer. "Cut out the deadwood! Less is more."
Forty years later, after a career as a copywriter, editor and graphic designer, I started writing comical mysteries with my sister. I took us a few years to get a working style that plays on each of our strengths, but now we have two published books, "A Corpse in the Soup", and "Seven Deadly Samovars". We have just finished the first draft of "Vanishing Act in Vegas" and expect it to be published next year.
Our first book won a US Book News award. I am 65 and my sister, Morgan St James, is 70. She speaks at writers panels, book signings, workshops, and has started a chapter of Sisters In Crime in Las Vegas. So my advice is you are never too old...or young...to become a successful author!
Phyllice Bradner, McMinnville OR
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"gave me my first good piece of advice as a serious writer. "Cut out the deadwood! Less is more.""
Unless you are James Fenimore Cooper. Then more is more!
"Less is more" is what mathematicians call elegant, as in E equals M times C squared, but if you are describing and explaining something, old J F Cooper was outstanding.
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A lot of younger people write for discovery and for experimentation. It helps you work through things, it helps you think through things, it helps you develop your mind in concrete terms and provides a record of the process of who you are. Whatever is in your head is great, but until you process it, or can document it, in a literal way, it is largely unmapped conjecture. Writing can help younger people navigate an often difficult period of life.
Or, perhaps younger people tinker with writing because they finally can, because their intelligence is developed enough to do so---to see what writing is like and what our language can do. Our first writings are like anything new, you want to use it and try it out, sometimes you stick with it and the love never dies...or sometimes it just peters out... .
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Listening in from Southern Vermont... I'm a 46 year old writer who began writing "memoir" the summer my parents were divorced on the day our family dog died. I admire how young these writers began their work and how engaged they are by it. Though I started writing at 19, I didn't have the courage to call myself "a writer" until I was well into my thirties.
ps. bekah is my niece, and i'm here with 5 of her cousins and another aunt
kelly salasin
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I created an account just for this discusion. I'm 14 years old, and have been writing since I was eight. Recently I completed two novels, one of which in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writer's Month). It was an impressive experience, and I don't think age really makes a difference. If you want to write, you can.
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I want to let everybody know about a creative writing and contemporary arts workshop for teenage writers and artists at Marylhurst University. The program includes introductory and advanced workshops in prose and poetry along with introductory workshops that focus on contemporary art ideas and methods (site-specific installation, collaborative performance and sound work, and assemblage sculpture). A student generates material through guided exercises; studies craft through models; and engages in a critical discussion of fellow classmates’ work. By the end of the program, a student produces two complete short stories/memoirs or five to seven poems, along with a small portfolio of artistic projects. Our guest artists include Portland writer Charlie D'Ambrosio and Portland artist Hayley Barker! for more information, go to our Web site: www.marylhurst.edu/teenwriters
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It's so encouraging to hear such bright and creative young writers. One site that has helped some of my graduate students find Northwest publishers for their work is
http://www.open-spaces.com/article-v7n4-Ekman.php
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I'm 14, and managed to write a novel by means of National Novel Writer's Month. The idea is that you write a 50,000 word book in a month, and ignore any editing until the end. It worked very well, and now I write regularly.
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My name is Zack Harris. I'm Hannah's younger brother. I like to write fantasy stories and I like to read fantasy stories. Hannah has reccomended a lot of great books to me. I think these great book suggestions have helped me alot in my writing. Thanks Hannah!
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For the young woman interested in spirituality I highly recommend Joseph Campbells "Power of Myth" TV series which explains it all or the book by the same title, and pretty much all of Karen Armstrongs books on religions and religious figures.
There are others on religion, like Elaine Pagels, and of course a lot of people who have studied religions, legends, and myths around the world.
But I'd start with Joseph Campbell and Karen Armstrong. The Joseph Campbell people gave out copies of that series to most local libraries around the nation, so it ought to be available. I own a a few copies because it is so good.
Campbell clears it all up and makes it easily inderstandable. Takes the mystery out of it.
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One aspect of writing that I cherish has nothing to do with being "a writer"; it is writing as a basic problem solving tool. Complex human problems still consist of variables, ultimately more than we can usually handle just in our heads. But on paper, given enough time. That's another story.
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I am a teacher and have been dismayed at the cuts in school programs, with arts being the first to go. I worried about a generation growing up without "culture". In some of the more affluent schools, parent's organizations have been able to raise money to support "Artist In Residence" programs- I have seen the effects in my grandchild's school. The effect goes beyond the value of dollars and will affect our city into the future. This program certainly shows the value of such programs in ALL our schools and these students, their mentors and their families are to be commended. They are articulate, creative- I hope we can push for more programs like this, then we can worry less about minds be-numbed by computer games.
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Psychologists recommend writing in the form of journaling because the human brain has to sort out what initially seems vague and ambiguous, like feelings and emotions, in order to create an understandible story for the mind.
Writing is self therapy.
The brain has to make things clear in order to be able to write it down.
It is like a psychologist asking you questions so that you express verbally what is going on inside yourself, so that you clear those thinngs up for yourself. That's called "Talk Therapy", and journaling allows you to do that for yourself.
So I highly recommend it.
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Boy, this new "Here and Now" show sure is lame. It is just another talking heads show of pundits talking "at us", rehashing old news "at us".
I liked WHYS because they asked for our participation, they talked "with us" instead of "at us". And we got to talk with people all over the world, even with people who are our nations enemies.
Please bring back WHYS, OPB, it was one of the best programs OPB ever had on for decades past.
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Comments are now closed.
I know so many teens, including myself and my friends, who think so much and write and write but have trouble putting things together in forms that they can share. It is so amazing to me that Billy and Rebekah can put words together in such a beautiful way and have the courage to share them with all of us. Can't wait to hear them live tomorrow morning. So soon!
-Kelly (WITS intern)