Smith Hill Student Receives Young Writer’s Dream
Young Writers to Enjoy One Week Before the Mast:
By Nandini Jayakrishna, Printed in the Providence Journal June 20th, 2008
Jade E. Emmanuel loves writing mysteries and scary stories. She enjoys reading and writing about everyday teenage experiences. But for a while now, the 13-year-old Providence resident has wanted to try something different, to write on new topics and to share her ideas with other writers. Her dream will come true this weekend as she and 19 other teenagers embark on a week-long writing and sailing adventure aboard a 19th century-style schooner.
The voyage, called “Down to the Sea with Paper and Pen,” has been organized for the first time by Merlyn’s Pen, a former Providence-based publishing company that now maintains the New Library of Young Adult Writing, a Web site publishing fiction, essays and poems by teenagers.
The program is designed to celebrate young writers’ creativity and to give them an opportunity they might never get in their classrooms — to write, discuss their ideas and share their work with their peers in a unique setting, said R. Jim Stahl, founder of Merlyn’s Pen and editor of the New Library Web site.
“It’s a program for young people who like to write and who also have an adventurous spirit,” Stahl said.
The ship will leave Boston on Sunday, sailing in coastal waters before returning to Boston on the following Saturday. Though the trip’s average cost is $1,400, Jade’s enthusiasm and love for writing won her an $1,800 grant from the Rhode Island Yacht Club Educational Foundation, in Cranston, an organization that seeks to promote sailing and boating safety, said. Piers L. Curry, secretary of the foundation.
The trip has not only attracted Rhode Islanders but also teenagers from Massachusetts and Connecticut, New Jersey and New Hampshire, and even Wisconsin and Alabama.
Students have been sponsored by an eclectic group of donors such as the Society of American Silversmiths and Shikiar Asset Management Inc., a New-York based-investment firm.
While onboard, the group will maintain journals and read the works of prominent writers — Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville and Jack London — who went to sea or wrote about it.
And to top it all, they will be sailors for a week, learning to read charts, raise and lower sails, stand watch on the deck and assist the crew in ensuring the ship’s safety.
With no running water in the living quarters, the young sailors will take showers in Buzzards Bay, or if they’re lucky, in the rain. They will have no access to cell phones or the Internet.
“It’s like something out of a movie,” said Stahl, who will be one of the editors working with them on the ship. “But I think we’ll adjust.”
Stahl said he decided to start the program to combine his two passions - encouraging budding writers and sailing. If the program is successful, he would like to expand its size and duration in the future and introduce a similar program for adults.
Patricia E. LaSalle, Jade’s mother, said she is confident that new experiences during the voyage will make her daughter a more thoughtful and mature writer.
But for Jade, the trip will do more than that.
Over the course of the week, she hopes to speak to her fellow writers about her relationship with her father and her feelings about the car accident that took his life just two months ago.
She tried to write about the incident once but it felt “awkward, weird.”
“Right now it’s not easy,” she said. “But I think I will [write about it] in the future.”