by Sheilah Britton

Sixteen fourth and fifth grade students have just returned from a short recess in their Saturday morning class. They settle into a room in the lower level of the Architecture Building on Arizona State University’s Tempe campus. A solo piano from the soundtrack of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind lulls them out of the frenetic energy they bring through the door. As Frisbees, balls, and games are tucked into backpacks, they began lining up paper and pencils for their next assignment.

Today the students are writing fiction—stories spawned from their fertile imaginations. The class is part of ASU’s Program for Talented Youth. Their teacher is a Master of Fine Arts graduate of ASU’s creative writing program. She has spent the past two weeks teaching these students about narrative voice, interior and exterior character, tone, dialogue, and setting. Now she asks them to spend the next 30 minutes writing.

They spread out in the spacious room—two girls climb behind a portable blackboard, a boy sits on the top of the table at the back of the room. Three others sprawl on the floor next to their desks. Their teacher slowly fades the music down until there is no sound. Only the scratch of pencils on paper.

For 30 minutes they write. The silence is broken only by the pleas for more time to write when the teacher says their time is up. Then she asks for one of them to read from their work. All of their hands fly into the air, eager to share what they have imagined. A young boy reads the words he has written, the other 15 students listen with interest, and at the end of his reading, burst into applause.

Chad Unrein and Sean Nevin direct ASU’s Young Writers Program. They both recall moments in their young lives similar to this when their writing was favorably acknowledged. For Unrein, it was a report in elementary school on the gestation of the fetus. He likened the human fetus to a teddy bear and won an award for his creative approach to the subject.

Nevin’s fourth grade poem about Martin Luther King, Jr, also garnered an award. “I remember writing it and can still recite the poem—it was a great experience,” he says. “I like to look back to that first positive early arts experience. I wasn’t made a writer at that point—but years later, I realized it opened a door for me.”

Unrein came to ASU with a journalism background and began working for the Office of Youth Preparation. “We worked state wide—down in Nogales one day a week, out in Winkleman another,” he explains. “We were assigned to schools, sat in on their classes, talked to students, and determined the needs of schools. Our office then came up with strategic plans to address those needs.”

Unrein visited English classes and watched teachers who were not really comfortable with writing, and kids who were bored with it. The Young Writers’ Program evolved from some of his early ideas.

Marilyn LaCount is director of ASU’s Office of Youth Preparation. She is pleased to see the program thriving. “Our communities need citizens who are well-rounded educationally,” she says. “One of the areas that need to be addressed is language. The Young Writers Program meets the needs of the office, ASU, and our communities.”

The program began in 1999 with workshops for young writers at the Carl Hayden Community Center and the Wesley Community Center in Phoenix. It then expanded into ASU’s Program for Talented Youth. By that time, Unrein had entered the Master of Fine Arts program in Creative Writing and recruited other MFA candidates as teachers. One of those teachers was Nevin. He was working on a degree in poetry and brought a wealth of experience in community outreach and teaching to the program.

Nevin realized the potential of YWP immediately. “This is a really positive experience for everyone involved. You see kids through this program when they feel good about what they are doing, when they succeed, and when they get positive reinforcement for their ideas,” he says. “They realize their lives are worth writing about.”

The program has grown through its partnerships in the community. Julie Hampton is an MFA graduate who began working for YWP as a student. She developed a professional relationship with the Tolleson School District. Hampton teaches young students, conducts workshops with teachers, and works with the Creative Writing Club, an after-school program.

Lynette Turnbaugh chairs the English Department and is an advanced placement (AP) teacher at La Joya Community High School in Avondale. She has seen the benefits manifest in her own students.

“My students' writing has improved because Julie is able to work with them in a creative way that I lack,” she says. “She has activities to get the students writing. Before they know it they have filled notebooks with poems, personal essays, and ideas for future writing projects.”

Developing the creative process in young students informs Hampton’s own processes, both in writing and in teaching.

“I remember the first teaching I did. I thought a teacher had to be an authoritarian,” she says. “I had all these preconceived notions of what a teacher should be. That was a huge lesson for me. Now I realize that I’m asking these students to be vulnerable. I feel like I have to be vulnerable myself—it pushes me forward.”

Hampton is also a dancer and performance artist. She brings her love of all the arts into the schools. Last year she developed a project with the photography instructor at La Joya. The students created Tolleson Through The Lens—a mirroring of photographs and poems focusing on Tolleson through images and words of the young people who live there.

The program has allowed both Tolleson students and teachers to work creatively.

“School budgets are stretched to the limit and the classroom teacher has no control over funding. We love the idea of guest speakers and exciting curriculum. But we don't get to make many of those decisions,” says La Joya’s Turnbaugh.

“The Young Writer's Program allows teachers the opportunity to have an expert come to the classroom and encourage students to perform in a way that we often don't have the time or the talent to do. The YWP is invaluable to schools and students because it builds confidence and creativity in us all.”

Working closely with MFA students in ASU's Creative Writing Program, the YWP has recently developed the Socially Embedded Teaching Assistants (SETA) program, funded jointly by YWP and Creative Writing. Through Nevin’s class in Creative Writing Outreach, students are mentored and supported during their YWP creative writing residencies. “They teach one composition class at ASU and two residencies for the Young Writers Program,” Nevin explains. The students have the opportunity to glean experience both in teaching at the University level and working in community outreach while they are students in the MFA program.

Tina Hammerton is a former social worker who is currently a SETA MFA candidate in poetry. She finds the work with the young writers informing her own poetry.

“The best thing it does for my work is open up my imagination,” she says. “By telling the kids not to worry about what anyone will think, using metaphors and similes that seem crazy, it reminds me to do that when I write. It also reminds me that writing is fun and magical, the real reasons I began writing in the first place.”

Many of the MFA students who have grown through the YWP have studied with poet Alberto Ríos—whose own writing has always embraced community.

“The program, more than anything else, encourages students to think, and to find ways to articulate that process. This is about them and their place in the world, an intellectual invitation and embrace,” Ríos says. “We face so much alienation in the community on so many levels, this seems the right kind of effort. It is the language and work of listening.”

In 2000, YWP created its first publication of 22 ACROSS, A Review of Young Writers. Unrein and Nevin edited the most current anthology. They selected work from more than 800 students in grades 4 to 12 who participated in the YWP community outreach programs and partnerships. More than 150 pages are filled with their poems and short stories beautifully bound into a handsome volume.

This may be the paragon for these young writers. They can say they have been published—that they waded into a sea of words, that if felt good to swim, and when they emerged dripping with new awareness, they were recognized.

ASU’s Young Writers Program is giving many young people confidence in their own writing ability. It also provides invaluable opportunities for teaching and community outreach to graduate students in the Master of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing. The learning process, much like the writing process, for both is reciprocal.

“Writing is one very good way to make the changes we want—for all of us,” Ríos explains. “I remind my college students that when we look backward, we are looking forward—that is, when we gauge the difference between that young writer and ourselves, and how much distance has been covered, it helps us to see that there is yet that much more still ahead of us now.”

The following are writing samples from students in the Young Writers Program (links will open in a new window):

"Remember" by Sarah Gayman
"She's in California" by Victor Perez
"An Opened Poem" by Krystal Aguilar
"I Remember Paris" by Alexis Cabrera
"Rising and Falling," collaborative poem, Silvestre S. Herrera Elementary School students
"Tolleson Landscape" by Ashley Sperry