Editor’s note: The NJ Council of Teachers of English will launch our high school writing contest within the next two weeks. Our writing contest committee is finalizing the prompt. This year we’re exploring the interrelated concepts of illusion and truth. Please join the discussion.
Good afternoon, writing contest friends,
There will be a brainstorming session at Panera Bread on a Thursday or Friday (4-4:30 p.m.) or Saturday (around 11 a.m.) for those interested in promoting the high school writing contest in urban schools. This will take place the 2nd or 3rd week of September.
The rough draft of the prompt below has drawn some comments:
Illusions are false beliefs. In life, as in literature, these false beliefs might be about ways to be happy or successful or about what another person is truly like. Much of great literature centers on the dangers – or at least the foolishness – of living with illusions. And yet, Mark Twain, perhaps humorously, states: Don’t part with your illusions. When they are gone, you may still exist, but you have ceased to live. Write a personal essay about the discovery of a truth hidden behind an illusion. This may be about your own illusion or an illusion that someone had about you. What led to the discovery of truth? How has this affected your life?
Comments so far:
- the word “truth,” has become such a loaded word recently
- the idea of fiction getting at deeper emotional truths- stretched truths
- the authentic search for truth vs politics
- Consider asking students to write one truth and one lie — might prompt some creative interaction in the fiction
- How have illusions governed your reality? How has your truth been shaped by illusions? How can one distinguish between truth and lies?
Thank you for your help!
Michele Marotta
Writing Contest Director
New Jersey Council of Teachers of English, the New Jersey state affiliate of NCTE, the National Council of Teachers of English
by Audrey Fisch
Two picture books stand out for me (and remind me of how powerful picture books can be for readers of all ages). Marwan’s Journey, by Patricia de Arias, with evocative illustrations by Laura Borras, tells the story of Marwan, who walks from his home across the desert with a photograph of his mother, who comes to him only in his dreams. Marwan’s story is brutal in its lack of detail and richly suggestive in its language. Marwan is one of many; “Hundreds of people, thousands of feet” make this journey on foot. He is one in a “line of humans like ants crossing the desert.” One particularly dark and poignant illustration depicts tanks: the night “they came” and the “darkness grew colder, deeper, darker.”
My Beautiful Birds, by Suzanne Del Rizzo who created the amazing illustrations in polymer clay and acrylic, tells the story of Sami from Syria. Like Marwan, Sami walks (all day and all night) from his home, “`Just like follow-the-leader,’ says Father.” Sami’s home has been destroyed, but his father insists that Sami’s pigeons, his beautiful birds, “escaped too.” In a refugee camp, Sami tries to paint his birds, but he struggles to do so, and Del Rizzo offers readers a picture of his work: a bird, covered in black paint, “black smears edge to edge, swallowing everything underneath.” Sami begins to find his birds, however, in the clouds and in his dreams. He builds new nests and paints birds on kites.
Grappling with this issue of how to represent the unrepresentable horrors of war, Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone, published in 2007 about his experiences as a child soldier in Sierra Leone, seems incredibly powerful. At the end of his book, Beah tells of his experience at a rehabilitation center where he struggles to reconcile his horrific experiences and actions in the war with the repeated line: “None of what happened was your fault. You were just a little boy.” At one point, Beah dreams of the violence, feeling the pain of his victims, and seeing himself covered in blood. In the dream, he then sees his family, “all smiling as if nothing had happened,” as if they “didn’t seem to notice that I was covered with blood.” Beah struggles to reconcile himself and his reality: Can he really be a faultless little boy, with a smiling family, given all that has happened, given all the blood?
The cycle of violence, and the recurring plight of the refugee, is the center of Alan Gratz’s 2017 and wildly popular Refugee, a text that is accessible to young readers, despite its sometimes graphic depictions of the experiences of his three refugee protagonists and their families: Josef, a Jewish boy from Nazi Germany whose family manages to find a temporary escape on board the St. Louis, bound for Cuba; Isabel, a Cuban girl whose family attempts to make its way by raft to the safety of Florida; and Mahmoud, a Syrian boy whose family hopes to make its way across the Mediterranean and then to a future in Europe.
This connectedness resonated strongly for me in my favorite of the texts I read, Inside Out & Back Again, by Thanhha Lai. In magnificent free verse, Lai tells the story, inspired by her own experiences and memories, of Ha, whose family manages to flee Vietnam and ends up in Alabama. Ha is a feisty, furious girl, and her story is full of both brutality and kindness. Her tales of school in Alabama reminded me so much of my mother. Lai writes, “So this is what dumb feel like,” when Ha is placed in a class to learn the ABCs and numbers, “unable to explain I already learned fractions and how to purify river water.” Ha’s acquisition of English cruelly enables her to understand the taunts of her peers and to “wish I could go back to not understanding.”
New Jersey Council of Teachers of English 