Troy Smith took a page from the writers of the Harlem Renaissance and spun it into cautionary advice for people he knows and hopes to know. It ends with the phrase, “It’s not going to be about respect when we’re sleeping in a coffin.”
Smith is one of 43 young writers who performed their work before peers at a celebration of the publication of the school’s first-ever book at Co-Op High School on Wednesday morning. The literary nonfiction guide on how to adjust to high school is aptly and a bit ironically entitled, “The Wise Ones Once Said”.
Click the play arrow above to hear Smith read.
The volume contains prose and poetry on teenage love affairs and fashions, among other things. The section on friendship, for instance, is subtitled: “Is honesty always the best policy?” The book is published by the school’s own imprint, Co-op Publishing House and is for sale.
Also being celebrated Wednesday were the publication of “Metamorphosis”, the school’s annual literary magazine and coopvoices.com, the New Haven Public Schools’ only online school newspaper.
Students like Nakia Jones (pictured) nervously lined up Wednesday afternoon for their turn behind the microphone in the school’s main stage theater. Their testimony revealed a theme running through the prolific writing at Co-Op: the importance of finding your voice through revision.
And more revision.
“Before [I came to Co-op] my tone was angry and not original. Now it’s very sassy and ‘revolutionary,’” said Jones, a senior who hopes to study screenwriting at the University of Southern California next year.
The secret to finding her voice?
“The teachers really want [us] to re-draft and through that process they take out what’s not you,” she said.
Jones read the opening two stanzas from her poem, “Different People”:
She was bad
Made chicks quiver
In the halls when she walked by
Slick mouth spat harsh words
Quick hands gave hard hits
She showed no emotion
She was hardcore.
Allan Appel Photo
Troy Smith (pictured) said he wrote at least five drafts of his poem “For My Peers.” It’s a work that he said was inspired by the writers of the Harlem Renaissance, which he studied in Judith Katz’s poetry class.
According to Mindi Englart, the journalism teacher who helped her kids midwife the anthology of non-fiction advice to kids entering high school, “This book is my class’s baby. Raw real and personal rather than cliché’d.”
That would be no surprise to young writers Sawda Salami (left) and Jess DiLieto. In their works, “Me Lost Me” and “The School Day” respectively, they reflected the drilling down through language – and revision – that their teacher Tim Grady was urging them to get at.
“Painting, sculpture, all that is fine. When you write [however] it’s like cutting your skin and letting you bleed,” DiLieto said, paraphrasing Grady.
Englart said the passion for revision the kids expressed was no surprise. The school uses the National Writing Project model, adapted to the creative writing department, where pieces often start in brainstorming and go through extensive rewrites.
“We basically don’t allow a first draft even if it’s amazing. The process is as important as the product, if not more,” she said.
In her introduction of her writers’ body of work to the rapt audience of freshmen, Englart said, “We love this baby and we hope you will too.”
They did.