Abby - When the first semester of freshman year—WFP—came to a close, it didn’t even cross my mind that I wouldn’t be continuing the path I so haphazardly stumbled upon.  I decided to continue, and I decided to stay, because of the pure rush I feel when a story I’ve worked tirelessly towards gets published and praised. I decided to continue, and I decided to stay, because of words and...

Abby - I remember so clearly the nervous energy dancing through the room during WFP when Ken George said that we would be learning our last type of story: features. He had been hyping them up for weeks, preparing us for the “hardest story” of the class, and I was actually terrified. WFP had gone well by this point—I won a lead contest, I was feeling comfortable with most of the stories, ...

Abby -  In the middle of my first day at the high school, I walked into a classroom that was set up in a completely different way than my previous classes—it looked backwards, upside down, turned around.  There were no desks—just a circle of chairs.  With a group of kids I had never seen before seated in the chairs, I immediately had second thoughts about joining a class I had never re...

Abby -  We know that I am endlessly attracted to words, so when I was flipping through the high school course catalog in eighth grade and saw “Writing for Publication” amongst every other extracurricular, I was instantly intrigued. Writing for the school’s newspaper sounded exciting and intense and fast-paced and fun; the description for the class in the catalog made it sound so appealing...

Abby - As I clicked on the document for our editor’s column, the third different article I’ve worked on for TCT tonight alone, a thought danced across my mind. A quick little waltz of a thought, a moment of pure, exasperated exhaustion. Why am I even doing this? It was clipped. It was sudden, but it was there. It was that thought amongst many others: it’s late, I want to go to bed, I�...