The Daily Standard
Story Archive
Brynn Lehman of Celina reads an excerpt of a story she wrote to a large audience at the Mercer County District Library on Saturday morning.
CELINA - Intergalactic visitors with nefarious intentions. An out-of-control passenger plane heading for a mountain. A golfer now in her college years studying to be a doctor. Children preparing their goats for the county fair.
A strange-looking egg from which hatches a dragon with shiny red scales, sharp claws and a long tail, affectionately dubbed Mr. Twinkle Toes.
Ranging from the fantastic to the commonplace - albeit enlivened with excellent details that make their characters utterly fascinating - these are the stories resulting from a four-day writing camp hosted at Mercer County District Library earlier this month that fired up the imaginations of 14 children.
The stories will now be compiled in an anthology, copies of which will be given to the soon-to-be published writers as well as the library, according to camp instructor Cheryl Pease, who in a few months will be in her 25th year teaching at Celina City Schools.
Writing camp instructor and Celina City Schools teacher Cheryl Pease talks about the work that students put into their stories, from which they read aloud to a packed house at the Mercer County District Library on Saturday morning.
"I want to thank you for letting your kids join me for that first week after school," Pease told the parents in the audience. "For a lot of people in Celina that was our first week off for summer break. So that was quite a commitment to say, 'I'm going to write for four days, right after coming out of the school.'"
The summer writing camp culminated Saturday morning at the library meeting room with the budding authors reading excerpts of their stories to a packed house.
"Some people have complete finished stories, some people just got so far and summer kicked-in and they'll probably go back and finish it later - and that is all OK," Pease said.
The program was open to students in grades 4-6 and completely funded through the Ohio Arts Council. A few home-schooled children also took part in the camp.
Despite their differences in age, school districts and skill level, the kids all shared a love of the written word and a desire to sharpen their craft.
"You have to have that love of writing," Pease told The Daily Standard after the public reading. "They're not in school mode anymore, they're in summer mode, so you have to have that love of writing. … We had several different levels in here, as far as writing capabilities."
On the higher end, a handful of Pease's students took part in a similar writing program headed by local retired educator and guidance counselor Lucy Staugler last year at the Fort Recovery Public Library.
"They did it again this year because they loved the writing," Pease said. "I had one student who wrote a story last year. This year, she wrote a new story about the same character. So that was kind of cool to see that she still is developing that character."
Others had a vivid, continuous dream of a story in their minds but just needed help putting in on the page.
Students met daily to discuss the basic elements of fiction writing - character development, plotting, rising tension, voice and universal themes, according to Pease.
Kate Fuelling of Celina reads an excerpt from her short story about an aspiring dancer to a large audience at the Mercer County District Library on Saturday morning. She was one of 14 students who took part in a writing camp instructed by Celina City Schools teacher Cheryl Pease.
"We talked about 'You write what you know,'" she said, pointing to Kate Fuelling's story about an aspiring dancer. The young writer's mother is the owner and an instructor at En Pointe Dance Studio.
Pease also emphasized the importance of students learning about their own characters, even if not all of the concrete details make the final draft. Once students had a better understanding who their characters were, they were easier to write about.
"They had to write their character out, they had to say what he liked for breakfast, what color of hair he had, how many siblings she or he had, everything about that character," she said. "So when they were telling us the story of that background, they had all that background information. We went through a lot of different things like that."
Students also learned about how to write picture books, graphic novels and chapter books. "They totally understood how many words it took to make a book, first of all. That shocked a lot of them, if they were going to do a novel," Pease said. "So I think that's something that opened their eyes a little bit. If you're going to write a novel, it's going to be a lot of words."
Pease said she enjoyed the writing camp as much as the students, noting she too is a writer who takes part in a critique group with established authors such as Michelle Houts.
"It was fun for me who's being critiqued by adults to get to sit down and talk to other kids about how this all works and kind of be their editor," she told the audience Saturday morning. "I hope you got to enjoy the stories. Hopefully whatever they (students) read today makes you want to read the rest of their stories, which will be in an anthology."
