Ever wondered what kids are thinking about today? What do they like? What do they dream about? All is revealed in a collection of prose and poetry titled Coastal Voices that offers selected work from Grades 1 to 11 students from School District No. 46.
The writing is often comical, as in this poem from Johnathan Holliday of Grade 4 “…And my tooth fell out/And it started to run/So I excused myself from class/And ran after it.” Or the stories are entertaining like the adventures of Blacky, the black hole, and Galax, the galaxy (Ori Morantz, Grade 2). Who wouldn’t like the cat that loved fruit and who rowed all the way to the “desserted” island of Fruitland (Violet New, Grade 4)?
Some of the older students write about soccer or dancing, or they describe how mean some girls are. Others talk of nature, midnight strolls, walks in the rain or the forest. Others go darker into their (fictional?) lives to describe their search for missing parents. Gunshots, house fires, mysterious strangers are all there – and the angst: “All I wanted when I was three was to be five,” writes Katie Kennelly, Grade 7.
The Festival of the Written Arts works with the school district during the year to bring Canadian writers into Coast schools through the Celebration of Authors, Books and Community (CABC). This year they published the seventh annual edition of Coastal Voices, an adjudicated anthology of writing by Sunshine Coast elementary and secondary school students. Over 550 submissions were received and the five adjudicators had the challenging task of choosing the best for the 60-page book, the largest one yet.
Author, teacher and writing coach Maggie de Vries went into a Grade 6/7 class in Roberts Creek Elementary this year, and she wrote a brief foreword to the book. “I was inspired by the students, by their writing,” she said, “and by their engagement with the writing process.” She also records that some of the stories made her weep.
But many of the writings give hope for the next generation. Matthew Coneely, Grade 6, writes: “The grass that prickles me/Prickles you/The tree that shades you/Shades me…” It’s an optimistic statement that bodes well for realizing that people are more alike than they are different.
