The Piano
Violet can’t wait to start playing the piano “Do you play the piano?” my friend asked me. “No,” I replied. Starting from when I was four, a lot of my kindergarten classmates started to play...
Memoirs
Personal narratives and life experiences
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Violet can’t wait to start playing the piano
“Do you play the piano?” my friend asked me.
“No,” I replied.
Starting from when I was four, a lot of my kindergarten classmates started to play the piano. Of the thirteen students in my class, six played the piano, or at least an instrument. The seven people who didn’t play instruments included me.
Will Gregory be able to write a memoir that will make his teacher cry?
It was a normal day in these past few months of quarantine: attending online classes and doing work. I casually got my half-full writer’s workshop notebook, a pencil, and signed into class.
“You will be your own teachers today, guys, as our last few days for the memoir are approaching.
For the author, a bad hair day turns into a bad hair week
All names in this story have been changed for privacy.
A few years ago, my mom and dad, my two older brothers, and I moved from a refugee camp in Tanzania to Chicago. Now I’m eleven years old. My name is Happiness.
One Sunday night I sat down on my usual pillow on the couch between Mama’s legs so she could fix my hair.
For the first time ever, the author is given permission to go outside alone—in New York City
I stared longingly out my bedroom window on the thirty-third floor of my New York City apartment building. I could almost hear the babbling of New Yorkers walking down the labyrinth of streets that unfolded in front of me.
A visit to a favorite Los Angeles bakery sparks a series of memories about the writer’s family
When I walked into the bakery on Cesar Chavez Avenue in East Los Angeles, my lungs were instantly flooded with the sweet air of butter and sugar wafting from the kitchen while pots and pans clanked and banged loudly and voices called out in Spanish.
A tense moment sparks a meditation on friendship
Friends. Friends whose shouts are the reverberating crash of ocean waves on a rocky cliff, slowly sanding down its rough edges in the way that we shape each other. Like the slow ascension of water as it marches up the steady inclination of a beach. Those are my friends.
I stand still, watching a distant world whiz by me.
Waiting to hear if she and her dance teammates won nationals, Lily reflects on the ups and downs they met along the way
I walked onstage slowly, following the dancer in front of me. I was sweating up my costume, partly because of the intense heat coming from the blazing stage lights overhead and partly because of the anxious anticipation. I peered into the audience, trying to find my grandma.
A strange noise spooks the narrator
My eyes were wandering around the page of my book as I was sitting in the fort I made. The moon was strangling the sun and winning for the next eight hours until he was finally defeated at dawn. A frightening sound whispered through the window. Horrified as a person could be, I abruptly hid under the covers.
The writer recalls the day they had to put down Cody, her pet rat
The day Cody was put to sleep started off terrible. I thought my day couldn’t get any worse. At school I was barely there.
“Elena. Hey! Earth to Elena!” My friend Penelope brought me back to reality. “Are you okay? You don’t look so good.”
“It’s nothing,” I said. But it wasn’t nothing.
A trip to the Ecuadorian jungle prompts the writer to reevaluate the comforts of her life in the U.S.
An observant onlooker, upon watching her fellow passengers in the airplane, might have noticed a girl who lacked the lethargic nonchalance of the other voyagers. This girl peered, fascinated, through the stained window. She appeared to be caught in a lustrous reverie that refused to release her.