Composing their thoughts
Roxbury creative writing camp helps teens practice the art of expressing themselves
Moses Michel, a 15-year-old 10th-grader at the Community Charter School of Cambridge, sat in a conference room at Hibernian Hall in Roxbury last month listening to his peers and an instructor, Bridgit Brown, suggest changes to his poem, "Lamb of the Wolves."
The poem begins, "For the first time/I felt the chill through the warm wind/Carrying my sorrow through tears/Which drip from my black lashes." After another student reads the poem aloud, Michel immediately puts it into context, explaining that he wrote it as part of an assignment last year in his humanities class, which covers US history from the Revolutionary War through Reconstruction. Michel said, "I was supposed to write a slave perspective of being torn away from their village on the west coast of Africa."
Brown commended the poem but pushed to make it better. Perhaps, she said, he could add more detail so readers who are unaware of its origins would immediately understand the time and place of the poem. Brown suggested that the poem's title didn't capture the trauma Michel has explained.
"You put lambs and wolves but you don't bring it up in the poem again," says Brown, director of development at ACT Roxbury. "Nor do you bring up . . . any other connota tions to lambs or wolves, like fur or teeth - other things that might imply that. This [title] is the only place I see that."
Before moving on to the next student, Brown lets Michel know that only he can decide what changes to make. The students had until Friday to submit altered versions of their original piece or a completely different work.
The group editing session was a new addition to the four-day annual creative writing camp ACT Roxbury, a Roxbury-based cultural and social revitalization program, begun three years ago for teenagers who get their essays, poems, prose, or short stories published in the youth edition of the organization's Roxbury Literary Annual. In the past, students attended sessions on fiction, spoken word, memoirs, and performance. But because of the deadline for the annual, the authors often couldn't incorporate the skills learned during the camp into their submissions.
"A lot of times in the past they asked if they could change [the piece]," says Terri Brown, program manager at ACT Roxbury, "but it's been too late." This year publication of the annual was delayed so students could have time to revise their writing based on what they learned at the camp.
It's difficult to get into the Roxbury Literary Annual Youth Edition, which is funded by a grant from the Boston Globe Foundation. This year, ACT Roxbury received 180 submissions of up to 750 words; about 40 works were selected. ACT Roxbury found its young writers through a variety of channels. Representatives of ACT Roxbury culled talent from spoken-word events such as Critical Breakdown and Verbalization, as well as WriteBoston and the Cloud Foundation, which runs a teen spoken-word program. Teachers in Boston public schools, pilot schools, and the Metco program were contacted. A selection committee of four people, which included Brown, Robert Frank of the nonprofit Center for Collaborative Education; Sylvia Simmons, a trustee at the Museum of Fine Arts and her daughter Lisa Simmons, who runs The Color of Film Collaborative, decided which work would be included.
The publication goes on sale by April 15, depending on when the editor, Boston poet laureate Sam Cornish, and the graphic designer finish their work. The teen writers can sell the $7 literary annual themselves and keep a $2-$3 profit from each sale, says Brown. The publication will also be available at A Nubian Notion, Jamaicaway Books, Brookline Booksmith, the Black Library Booksellers book cart, and Amazon.com.
"It's a good opportunity, because we deserve to have our words spread out," says Nagelore Jean-Caidor, 16, a sophomore at Dorchester's TechBoston Academy, whose poem "Stripped" made the cut.
Life stories
Although this will be Michel's first time in print, he says he's been known as a writer since kindergarten.
"Really a lot of it is just his sense of words," says Will Connell, Michel's 10th-grade humanities teacher. "He loves words; he has a word diary, and he's constantly writing down new words."
During a black history month assembly at Michel's school, he had the opportunity to read journal entries he created in his humanities class based on a captive's journey from West Africa to the American South; he wrote narratives from the perspective of the enslaved person and other participants. Michel also read "Lamb of the Wolves." The writing, says Michel, allows him to escape his Central Square neighborhood where he's heard gunshots and seen drug transactions.
"I don't always like to stay in that type of environment," Michel says. "Sometimes to get out the way I feel about what I'm surrounded by, I'll write."
The content of some pieces are very personal. Ashley King, a 15-year-old freshman at Fenway High School, wrote a poem about a relative who, she says, began physically abusing her at the age of 3. Her poem "Remember" begins: "You woke me up that night,/I knew something wasn't right,/You had that look of hate in your eyes,/I felt as if this was goodbye."
King didn't hesitate to reveal such a personal aspect of her life. "I know a lot of people have been abused in their life," says King. "I just wanted to be the one to come out and talk about it."
Virginity was the subject on the mind of Ricketta Pryce, 17, an 11th-grader at the Boston Day and Evening Academy in Roxbury. In Pryce's essay "Are You a Virgin?" she takes her male and female peers to task for pressuring her to have sex and acknowledges how difficult it is to stick with her decision to remain a virgin.
In her essay, she writes, ". . .sometimes I feel as if my friends may be putting me down. I hear girls gossiping about how to 'keep your man' and one way is sex. Sex is not a priority, well at least not for me. Why can't they see beyond that?" Pryce wrote the piece during a reading and writing class. Her teacher had asked the class to write about what aggravates them the most.
Monica Soto, a senior at Pryce's school, teases Pryce for being so forward about the subject. "Most of Boston is gonna know," Soto says.
But Pryce says her personal exposure is worth it. "I just feel that it needs to be out there," she says. "People look at me and think I'm not a virgin, but I am. So people look at me differently. Then when I tell them, they're just like, they don't believe me, you know. And I hate that."
Soto's submission also resulted from a class assignment to write about what aggravates her most. She wrote "What are You?" to share her frustration with people who think she's Caucasian when she's, in fact, a Latina with Dominican and Colombian parents. She writes, "I can't stand it when people ask me if I'm white. It bothers me. I know I'm light skinned, but honestly I think people say it just to tick me off."
By the end of the four-day camp, about five students decided to make adjustments to their work, says Brown. One submitted a new piece; four others revised their work. Although Michel changed a few words in his poem and edited it to read more tightly, he decided against taking Brown's advice to change the title of his piece and add more detail. He has his growing fan base to think about.
"The name had already been big in my school," says Michel. "Changing it would be weird for some people, like, 'Huh, I already know it as this name.' " 