Saturday, April 24, 2010 10:19 PM EDT
Putting one word after another forming descriptive sentences or stanzas or dialogue is a demanding yet rewarding task. That we have new writing instruments; cellphones for texting with truncated spelling; tweeting a thought or two in less than 146 characters is a reality many embrace and see the opportunities in novel ways to communicate.
For those of us who make a living largely by how we present words, we recognize the new modes for what they are — a revolution really in communications. We’d by remiss in shunning them.
Yet, too, we celebrate when teenagers labor with their writing, be it prose or poetry, fact of fiction.
What a great evening it was at Central Connecticut State University Wednesday evening when students gathered over dinner to have their writing recognized. We tip our hats to them all and we offer you on this page the first place poem by Morgan Finn, a sophomore at Bristol Central High School. It is a good read, full of elegant surprises for the reader who cares to linger and think and let her words settle in.
We tip our hats to the Connecticut State University Young Writers Trust, which presented Finn with the $500 prize money and will present the statewide winners in prose and poetry with $1,000 each.
Over the last dozen years the organization has awarded $192,000 to young writers.
Three other local students were recognized as finalists in the prose competition for Hartford County: Farah Kader of Berlin High School, Madeleine Morrin of Berlin who is a student at the Greater Hartford Academy of the Arts, and Jason Myers of Plantsville, who is home schooled.
Kader: The sun greets me slowly from beyond the horizon, a fiery ball of amber blazing in a crimson sky.
Morrin: He’s always trying to take me out of one place and put me somewhere else; take me away from sleep overs and into his smoke-filled car . . .
Myers: “I had a nightmare . . . and I’m scared.”
“You don’t have to be scared anymore, I’m here,” you say. You reach over the empty half of the bed and turn on the side lamp. He’s at your side in his baseball pajamas, twirling the bottom of the shirt into a knot with a finger.
We like Professor Heather Urbanksi advice to the younger writers that night —“Write everyday.”
And what did Martin Finn say of his daughter Morgan? “She writes everyday.”
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