Writing South Carolina

Description

"How should we improve the state of South Carolina?" That invitingly open-ended question served as the basis for the first annual South Carolina High School Writing Contest as the call went out in fall 2013 to juniors and seniors across the Palmetto State, encouraging them to take a stance through good, thought-provoking writing. The nearly five hundred responses that resulted were as impressive in quality as they were in quantity. Young writers sounded off on issues of race relations, environmental conservation, economic imbalance, opportunities of infrastructure, substance and physical abuse, and the maladies of education. Most wrote on issues of education rooted in their own burgeoning awareness of its gifts and limitations in their lives. From that pool of contestants, twenty-three finalists rose to the top to have their initial entries and subsequent writing on a favorite book or place judged by best-selling author Pat Conroy. The insightful and often revelatory responses from those finalists—including the first, second, and third place winners by grade—are collected here in Writing South Carolina.

In heartfelt essays, poems, short stories, and drama, these diverse writers lay bare their attitudes and impressions of South Carolina as they have experienced it and as they hope to reshape it. The resulting anthology is a compelling portrait of the Palmetto State's potential as advocated by some of its best and brightest young writers. Editor Steven Lynn provides an introduction and contest judge Pat Conroy provides a foreword to the collection.

Senior Winners / Walter B. Edgar Award
• First Place: Rowan Miller, Aiken, Aiken High School, "Different Worlds" (essay)
• Second Place: Katherine Frain, Mount Pleasant, Wando High School, "Place of Refuge" (poem)
• Third Place: Allison Able, Saluda, Saluda High School, "Song of Silence" (essay)
• Honorable Mention: Drake Shadwell, Dalzell, Wilson Hall, Untitled (play)
• Honorable Mention: Jordhane Stanley, Seabrook Island, South Carolina Virtual School, Untitled (essay)

Junior Winners / Dorothy S. Williams Award
• First Place: Hallie Chametzky, Columbia, Dreher High School, "Change in Simple Arithmetic" (poem)
• Second Place: Zoe Abedon, Sullivan's Island, Charleston County School of the Arts, "To Overcome" (poem)
• Third Place: Madison Seabrook, Charleston County School of the Arts, "A Novel Prospect" (poem)
• Honorable Mention: Suzanne Jackson, Charleston, Charleston County School of the Arts, "Local since Forever" (essay)
• Honorable Mention: Rebecca Walker, Spartanburg, Dorman High School, Untitled (essay)

Sujets

• Writting
• Disciplines
• Language Arts
• Carolina del Sur
• Struggle (TV series)
• South Carolina Department of Natural Resources
• I Wish (manhwa)
• Firelight
• Rant (novel)
• Charleston Southern University
• Charleston County School of the Arts
• Anderson University (South Carolina)
• University of South Carolina
• College of Charleston
• General officer
• Writing
• South Carolina
• General
• Susannah
• Université de Caroline du Sud
• Ralph Ellison
• Ernest Hemingway
• Caroline du Sud

Informations

• Publié par: University of South Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 27 mars 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781611175202
• Langue: English

Extrait

WRITING SOUTH CAROLINA
Seated, L-R: Katherine Dumont, Suzanne Jackson (Honorable Mention Junior), Madison Seabrook (Third Place Junior), Pat Conroy, A da Rogers, Drake Shadwell (Honorable Mention Senior), AnnaJamieson Beck, Natalie Jacobs.
Second Row, L-R: Rowan Miller (First Place Senior/Walter B. Edgar Award), Allison Able (Third Place Senior), Zoe Abedon (Second Place Junior), Nicole Jankov, Rebecca Walker (Honorable Mention Junior), Rhiannon Lemaster, Ayret Contreras, Emily Moore, Robert N. Coleman.
Top Row, L-R: Katherine Frain (Second Place Senior), Ashley Kreiner, Jordhane Stanley (Honorable Mention Senior), Zoey Johnson, Jake Farrer, Chris Kannaday, Hallie Chametzky (First Place Junior/Dorothy S. Williams Award), Alicia Davenport, Kaylie Lively.
Not all competition finalists participated in this collection.
Photograph by Allen Anderson.
WRITING SOUTH CAROLINA

Selections from the First High School Writing Contest
Edited by Steven Lynn with A da Rogers
Foreword by Pat Conroy

The University of South Carolina Press
2015 University of South Carolina
Published by the University of South Carolina Press
Columbia, South Carolina 29208
www.sc.edu/uscpress
24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/
ISBN 978-1-61117-519-6 (paperback)
ISBN 978-1-61117-520-2 (ebook)

Kim Shealy Jeffcoat, Series Editor
CONTENTS
Foreword
Pat Conroy
Introduction: They re Here
Steven Lynn
Juniors
A Change in Simple Arithmetic
Always Warm, Always Sweet, Always Ours
Hallie Chametzky (First Place)
To Overcome
Built by Familiar Hands beneath the Puerto Rican Moon
Zoe Abedon (Second Place)
A Novel Prospect
Losing My True Kindred Spirit
Madison Seabrook (Third Place)
Local Since Forever
The Face in the Floor
Suzanne Jackson (Honorable Mention)
Imagine This
Hold Still and Heal
Rebecca Walker (Honorable Mention)
Palmetto Strong
One, We Are the Devils!
AnnaJamieson Beck
Invading Vermont
Homesick
Katherine Dumont
Letter from a Foster Child
My Personal Haven
Natalie Jacobs
The Coming
Thanks for Thinking of Me
Zoey Johnson
The Ripple Effect
The Backyard Echoes
Ashley Kreiner
Abstinence Education
The Reason I Write
Rhiannon Lemaster
A Call for Change in South Carolina
A Good and Humble Home
Kaylie Lively
Education: What Is It Teaching Us?
In My Room
Emily Moore
Seniors
Different Worlds
On the Lake
Rowan Miller (First Place)
Normal Ones
My Mother s Last Gift
Katherine Frain (Second Place)
Song of Silence
Terrasultra
Allison Able (Third Place)
Allegory for Cooperation between Federal and State Governments as well as Acceptance of Foreign Ideas and Cultures
The Stage Is My World
Drake Shadwell (Honorable Mention)
South Carolina s Secret Invasion
My Peaceful Respite
Robert N. Coleman
Principal Investment
Ayret Contreras
The Snapshot of Michael
The Importance of Noticing an Invisible Man
Alicia Davenport
Improve School-Reduce the Number of Days
Fishing at Clarks Hill
Jake Tyler Farrer
Preserving Life
From Fantasy to Memoirs
Nicole Jankov
A Question of Participation
My Me Time
Chris Kannaday
Contributors
FOREWORD
In the summer of 1961, my family crossed over the Combahee River and entered into Beaufort County for the first time. I was fifteen years old and had never heard of Beaufort, South Carolina, in my life. It was my twenty-third move since my birth, and Beaufort High would be the eleventh school I d attended and the third high school in my adolescence. I was in the middle of a very unhappy childhood.
But I was a military brat, and my mother had convinced her seven children that we were serving America whenever we moved because our father was a fighter pilot and our nation needed him. Little did we know that we were driving toward the life we were meant to live and toward the destiny we were all meant to share. I had entered the Lowcountry of South Carolina for the first time in my life, a place of such mysterious and uncommon beauty that it still strikes me as some lost archipelago of paradise. I had no clue that I would spend the next fifty-three years of my life writing about this sacred place and the amazing people I found there.
This much I know. I was a teenager, like all of you are, and like you, I entertained the improbable dream that I wanted to be a writer and that I had things to say. I also know this-all of you who contributed to this book write much better than I did in high school, and the stuff I published in The Breakers , our literary magazine, would not have made the cut in your wonderful book. I m reading my dinky poems and quasi-essays as I write this, and I think objectively that I showed little promise during those awkward, melancholy years of my boyhood. You, ladies and gentlemen, write with a verve and a confidence I don t believe I matched until my final years at the Citadel. As high school writers in South Carolina, I think you re writing better sentences and thinking deeper thoughts and showing off a more refined talent than I could present to my teachers in high school. Someone has taught you well and you ve been smart enough to listen, and you re using the English language with both purpose and gracefulness.
I owe my writing life to the cowled nuns of my grade school who taught me to read and write and taught me about how the great interior engine of words could work together; if you learned the immense powers of verbs and good grammar, then you could align words in a sentence as pretty as a string of pearls. I learned to diagram sentences that looked like the blueprints of battleships. I never quite learned the mysteries of colons or semicolons. From an early age, I developed an intolerance for the exclamation point, and I ve never gotten over that bizarre tic in my writing style. A teacher told me not to use the word poignant even when I found situations that struck me that way, because we have endured enough poignant moments in fiction, so we can retire that overused word. I thought I had never used it again until a sharp-eyed reader found it blinking like a lantern in some tired sentence in The Prince of Tides. But learning to write is a safari into those far interiors of self that can seem reckless and unreachable until the voyage begins. Our English teachers become our guides through the perilous missteps we make when we begin to turn our most private thoughts into stories and poems we d like other people to read. They light the campfires in our bloodstreams that combust into the bright firelight of dreaming in our consciousness. The teachers lead us to the books that are great, tell us what makes them so good, and tempt us to develop our own personal styles that force the language to do what we require from it.
There is no phrase I revere as much as English teacher. That profession still strikes me as a form of holy orders, but I revere all the teachers of the world, and it shames me to see them bullied, excoriated, and subject to the contempt that America displays toward them in the early years of this century. My teachers found me as a young boy who didn t know the alphabet and helped lead me every step of the way to a manhood where I write books that are the joys of my life.
When I was a freshman in high school, Sister Ann of the Sacred Heart order introduced me to William Shakespeare and Twelfth Night , then told us we were now reading the greatest writer who had ever performed acts of pure magic with the language common to us all. The next year Joseph Monte taught me that teaching was an art form of the highest calling, and I read twenty books under his watchful eye, including David Copperfield, Crime and Punishment, and The Sound and the Fury . He made me write a letter to William Faulkner, a letter to the editor of the Washington Post , and the first short story I ever wrote. He presented his class with an ambitious list of the hundred best books ever written (according to the world of Joseph Monte), and I crossed off the name of the last book before I began my plebe year at the Citadel.
My fate as a writer continued in its exalted fashion when I walked into the Beaufort classroom of Gene Norris in September 1961. He was the first person who ever taught me who did not wear either a priest s collar or a nun s habit. On one of the first days of school, he put on a recording of Ravel s Bol ro and asked us to write him an essay on whatever feelings the music brought out in us. I described a camp of gypsies about to be slaughtered by a group of Franco s troops during the final stages of the Spanish Civil War. The last book on Mr. Monte s Hundred Best Books list had been For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway. My Bol ro paper caught Mr. Norris s eye, and the next day he told me he knew I was going to become a writer whether I knew it or not. I ve written about my complete admiration of Gene Norris in five of my books, and his spirit is present in every word I write. During his final years, we called each other on an almost daily basis; when Gene died I delivered a eulogy at his memorial service, and I served as one of the executors of his will. Though I didn t know this in high school, you can grow up and be best friends with the men and women who taught you. After I walked out of his class, I never let