TOPSHAM

Two Mt. Ararat High School juniors have had writing pieces accepted into prestigious student writing contests, bringing them exciting opportunities and underlining their teachers’ emphasis on the importance for students to write for a real audience.

Alicia Thurston and Ben York were accepted into the New England Young Writers Conference at the Bread Loaf Mountain Campus at Middlebury College in Vermont. The annual conference, from May 15-18 this year, brings together 200 high school writers to share manuscripts, study craft skills with professional writers and other education opportunities.

In his creative writing class, where students do a range of writing, work is regularly shared anonymously followed by what teacher Jeff Trippe called good dialogue and commentary, and “these two kind of emerged as the leaders.”

Trippe approached both students about the selective programs: Telling Room, a nonprofit writing center in Portland dedicated to strengthening the skills of young writers and building confidence, and Bread Loaf.

At the time, Thurston was working on a short story in class, “Velvet,” set in the 1950s regarding people of color and LGBT relationships. Although she had 15 pages already written, she sent just the first page because of the length limit.

York decided nonfiction would be his strength as he worked on a submission for the New England Young Writers Conference at Bread Loaf. He eliminated the initial op-ed piece he wrote on a civil rights issue as a submission candidate. Always considering himself good at math and science, “that kind of logical progression of facts is something that resonates with me and that I find easy.”

So in his second piece he tried to discuss how as someone who really likes math and numbers, “I notice numbers in many different places.” But he learned “there’s showing versus telling, and telling, it’s just straight up facts,” which he said in a nuance piece of writing, “that’s not something you do.”

His third draft however, “showed the connections between numbers and how we assign values to things,” York said. The number 9 “simultaneously describes the time it takes to make a cartoon, and a school year, and a life and it’s these three disparate values that emotionally we have for things and yet we describe them with the same numerical value.”

He remembers that moment when he brought that draft to English teacher Meredith Cass “and she starts reading it and she starts smiling, because I’ve got it.”

Cass teaches York and Thurston in Advanced Placement English Language and said, “I think all of us as English teachers have an intrinsic belief that writing, whether it’s fiction or nonfiction or poetry or drama, has the potential to illustrate the nature of the human experience like nothing else can, and a piece of what we get to do with these kids is help them find their way to that.”

“Ben is a fascinating human being as is Alicia,” Cass added. “Alicia’s instinct for how to turn that into language is at the forefront of who she is. At the beginning of the year, Ben’s instinct for that was not at the forefront of who he is.”

A writer’s job, Cass said, is to assemble details in a way that allows the reader to feel what the writer felt, “and that was the thing that Ben made happen in the last iteration of his piece and I got to feel in that moment what it is like to be him.”

Emily Vail, head of the English department at Mt. Ararat High School, said English teachers are interested in expanding the audience for students, which may draw better work as “students tend to be more conscious and interested in addressing a wider audience, particularly if they’re addressing an audience of their peers or the community, as opposed to just me, and it just seems a bit more authentic to have them writing for a wider readership.”

This idea of “going public” makes the writing more real, Vail said, “communicating with others as writers do.”

The writing contests are new to Thurston who said it has been exciting to submit to them and gave it her best. One of her poems was picked for the Wild Words contest through Telling Room and will be published in an annual anthology.

Cass, for the past two years, has required her students to submit to the writing contest in the spirit of writing for a real audience. Thurston worked with Telling Room editors to ready her poem for that publication and you may hear her reading an excerpt on Maine Public Broadcasting Network.

“It’s amazing,” Thurston said at the prospect of soon having so many people read her work. “It’s more than I could have hoped for.”

Thurston said she did a lot of visual art in middle school and transitioned more to writing in high school, “and when I started (Trippe’s) creative writing class last semester, I definitely started taking it more seriously and recognized the importance of thorough editing and I definitely think I improved through both his and Miss Cass’ class.”

It also changed where Thurston looked to attend post-secondary schools. For a long time she took courses at Maine College of Art during the school year and is now looking at other schools like Rhode Island and University of Maine at Farmington to earn a bachelor of fine arts degree. She’s not sure what she’ll do after college but knows there are many opportunities, and “I really do hope that I continue writing.”

Thurston and junior Lydia Schneider were nominated by the English department to submit their writing to the National Council of Teachers of English Achievement Award in Writing program and Vail also pointed to junior Ted Burns who last spring was one of three Maine high school students selected to have his 10-minute play “To Kill a Mocking Nerd” produced by professional actors as part of the 2013 Young Writers Project at the Portland Stage Company.

With these student achievements, “There is that confidence and awareness that, ‘Oh, maybe I can do this,’” Vail said. “It opens up another possibility for some who might not have thought of themselves as writers before.”

dmoore@timesrecord.com