Booking it: Creative Youth Center authors prepare for book release celebration
The young authors will be doing readings and book signings at Wealthy Theatre May 30 to celebrate the release of their new anthology, “Dear, Monster, Dear World.”
“Magic comes from many places. But not cats!”— Kaitlyn, 5th grade
It was hailing, of course. Not necessarily a bad thing. Hail can be helpful. It’s a good reminder that the world isn’t in your corner.
I fell into Madcap and ordered a coffee as dark as my prospects. Next to me sat Brianne Carpenter, of Creative Youth Center. Brianne is tall and bright, like a sunflower. Not even the hail could keep her down.
She pulled out a book and set it down with an optimistic smack.
“Collecting Shadows & Lights,” I read.
“This is last year’s book.” She said something about the title, but I was no longer listening. I flipped through the book as shocked as some painting junkie who’d found a previously unknown Tintoretto in a pawnshop.
The book. That’s the thing: it looked real.
A couple of months earlier, I’d gotten a call from my editor.
“I need you to look into the Creative Youth Center.”
I nearly dropped my decanter. “This come with hazard pay?”
“Ha. So you’ve heard of it.”
Of course I’d heard of it. Everyone had. Half the city took it at face value: a nonprofit organization dedicated to fostering creativity in young students through the written word. The other half figured it was a front for a gang of child thieves. Or worse. Assassins. I was in that other half.
They put on a good face, I had to admit. Take the website: spend a couple of minutes on it and you’ll be impressed by the professionalism and warmth. Spend a few minutes more and you’ll start thinking the children are our future. It’ll be all you can do to stop yourself from writing a check.
Still, these days even Sauron would have a benevolent-seeming website. I shut down my laptop and got into the other superhighway, the non-information one. Dropped into bookstores and clubs, asking about the CYC. Whether pierced or preppy, everyone told the same story: they’d heard good things.
I was getting nowhere, and I was getting there in an old Jetta with a taped-on passenger mirror.
Then Brianne agreed to meet me.
“It is longer than I think you would expect,” she said, describing the process that leads to the volumes of “The Book of Explosions,” of which “Collecting Shadows & Lights” was the most recent, the one I held in my hand.
Students, ranging from first grade through high school, write in response to prompts or assignments throughout the year. Then, with a substantial amount written, they read through their notebooks to find the best of their own pieces.
CYC faculty and volunteers type out those pieces exactly as written, including errors.
“Seeing it in another form helps,” Carpenter told me. “It looks different. Some of their errors are more visible.”
In three sessions with adult volunteers, they work to polish their pieces. During the first round, only content is focused on. Later, voice and structure are addressed. The CYC considers not just grammatical rectitude but the beauty and vitality of variant forms of English. The highest obligation is making sure the piece is what the student wants it to be.
During the editing process, which Carpenter described as intensive, care is taken to ensure that feedback is sincere, specific, and encouraging. “If we’re giving critical feedback, we’ll phrase it as, ‘I wonder if…’ or, ‘What if you tried…’”
The result is an unusual willingness to make changes.
“That’s the thing with writing,” says Carpenter. “You’re not changing things forever. The first thing you write should be Play-Doh. What happens if you roll it into a snowman?”
The students experiment with different voices, removing sections, revisiting characters.
“They’re willing to play with it. That’s a victory.”
Enough victories and the war is won; over time, the students grow in both skill and confidence. Carpenter has seen a boy move from struggling with the mechanics of holding a pencil to excitedly reading to his parents the stories he had gotten down on paper.
Nora, a student Brianne began teaching in fourth grade and who is now in sixth, came to the CYC already loving to write. Her parents brought her, Brianne said
“They thought, oh my gosh, our child is writing novels at home for fun! What in the community can support her? You know, she doesn’t want to do soccer. So I take no credit for her love of writing.”
One day, Nora asked to speak with Carpenter privately. She wanted to tell her in person that she had been diagnosed with autism, and that she experienced synesthesia.
She wanted her teacher to know. And she wanted to stay. She was worried she might not get to.
Imagine that.
Carpenter assured her that not only could she stay, her experience of the world was valuable.
“You get to see things in a different way,” she told her.
At the premiere of “Unspoken,” a film created by CYC students, Nora — a student who had sometimes been reluctant to share her writing — stood up and talked about the character she had written. Like her, the character had high-functioning autism. And like her, she saw the world in a different way.
Afterward, her mother went to Carpenter. In tears, she told her that this was the first time her daughter had publicly told anyone that she had autism, and she had done so in a positive way.
It wasn’t an admission. It was a declaration.
Each year, Carpenter reveals the new book to her students with a proper amount of drama. She makes them do drum rolls, then she pulls the book from behind a curtain.
Students shout enthusiastically about the cover, which is always done by a different local artist, and which they will be seeing for the first time. This year, the local artist is Alynn Guerra, a printmaker and owner of Red Hydrant Press. The title, too, is revealed then; each year, it’s taken from a student piece. Of course that student is thrilled. But then, all of them are.
“Because they’ve become published authors, they develop an identity as writers,” she explains. “That impact — the way that you see yourself shifts. It gives them something to take pride in. Something they can own.”
This year’s book, “Dear Monster, Dear World,” will be released at Wealthy Theatre, on May 30 at 6:30 p.m. The free event will draw family and friends, but it will draw strangers, too, who will listen, and buy books, and ask for autographs.
Some of those people will go on to volunteer (if you will be one of them, Carpenter can be reached at brianne@creativeyouthcenter.org). Some won’t. But all of them will take the students students seriously.
You know the end of this story. By the time I closed the book and drained my coffee — by the time my recorder had given up the ghost — I was convinced: Creative Youth Center isn’t raising child thieves or child assassins. It’s raising writers.
Less dangerous, maybe. Then again, I’m told the pen is mightier than the sword. With the help of the CYC, the nibs of these students’ pens have begun to conform to their grips. They know how to hold their blades, in other words.
Watch what they do with them.
