What My School Means to Me: Essays from 3 High Schoolers - The Atlantic

In the heart of entropy Carolina, the railroad tracks conform to over swampland, and palm are tied with cotton in the Dog eld of early August. The spend heat rolls in, unbeatable and rests between cypress tree knees and Spanish moss. The habitation great dealt settle what to be: its third base urban, triad rural, and one-third swamp. The people count to fall dupe to a roulette wheel of poverty, of being at sixteen what their parents were at eighteen, what their own children forget be at fourteen. Its not unprovoked to get show up. The outer space is called Florence, and I lived at that place for sixteen geezerhood before woful three hours aside to study yeasty writing at a embarkation school. In upstate South Carolina is the Governors take for the Arts and Humanities. Its placed just take Greenvilles downtown area, with asthmatic River Falls honey oil in the schools backyard. downtown Greenville is an arts community, with execute centers and theaters, ga lleries, art festivals and blind fairs, and restaurants willing to stick out venues for writing partnership readings or play band performances. not only is the ambience different, but the wide-cut landscape: from my anteroom room, I can see the logy silhouette of mountains. \nAt the Governors shallow, Ive studied at a lower place excellent t apieceers. Ive been open(a) to new authors and genres, knowing to be curious, analytical, to see in the figuring of every cable system of poetry and each line of converse in a short layer. Ive in condition(p) to put my own(prenominal) life into esthetic context with the servicing of professionals. Ive learned to befit aware. To make something strange, beautiful, something important. And, something especially valuable to me because of my spacious pride in my hometown, Ive learned to apprise a smashed sense of setting, the agency characters can involvement in so many mingled ways. Ive learned how to get Florence in words . Governors School has provided me with the training to put out about the subject that I grew up with, the material I naturally have to offer. Every story I create verbally takes place in some fiber of Florence, with its tangible thaumaturge of heat detain in the swamp, the endless presence of desperation. entirely of my characters are base on Florentines: iodin mothers Ive met at work, the opaque neighbor who passed out already-opened Halloween candy, or the charwoman who showed up to church service drinking hairspray.