BRIANNA CLARKE-ARIAS
YEARS AS MENTEE: 2
GRADE: Sophomore
HIGH SCHOOL: Hunter College High School
BORN: New York, NY
LIVES: Bronx, NY
PUBLICATIONS AND RECOGNITIONS: Scholastic Art & Writing Award: Silver Key
MENTEE’S ANECDOTE: Normally, Rachel and I sit across from each other at a café as we recount our week apart and our creative struggles, small and large. Rachel is the explorer who pushes my ideas forward with a magnifying lens. The presence of a person who has figured out how you write and relate to the world to help you grow, instead of fit a mold, is both empowering and inspiring. Beyond a writing mentor, Rachel is a person who I can be honest with because we can be genuine with each other.
RACHEL SHOPE
YEARS AS MENTOR: 2
OCCUPATION: Senior Associate Editor, CB Insights
BORN: Chapel Hill, NC
LIVES: New York, NY
PUBLICATIONS AND RECOGNITION: Short play Vinegar Syndrome was published in Twenty-Five Short Plays: Selected Works from the University of North Carolina Long Story Shorts Festival, 2011–2015
MENTOR’S ANECDOTE: Brianna continues to inspire me with her talent, the way she thinks about her creative work, and her active desire to refine her voice. Meeting up in the little Inwood bakery for our pair session is always one of the highlights of my week. Reading her work and talking about the writing process with her has honestly made me a more ambitious writer and a more focused editor. I’m so excited to keep watching her grow and seeing her brilliance continue to evolve.
This piece was inspired by my evolution as a reader and a writer and how small but impactful experiences have formed how I create along the way.
1. My grandmother left the snow for the sand, and the crowds for the plains, and the present for the future. She filled boxes to the brim with old, browning books that smell like decay and life and left them in her past.
My mother gave them away, but I picked gratuitously from the piles. Kept more of them than I could ever hope to read. They overflow with pages and now my room overflows with their thoughts. In the dark, I’ve heard them speak.
I only ever read their words in my own voice, but when I speak I feel them cling to me. Like I carry them in my voice, like I carry my textbooks to class, like I carry flowers to my mother, like I carry my body from room to room, like I carry feelings in my marrow. Like I carried those books through city blocks and up my stairs.
1. My favorite moment is when words are dripping from my lips, bubbling up and falling in perfect harmony with gravity. Sometimes I feel an emotive tang on my tongue and I know any words that leave my mouth with be languorous and embossed as if with gold.
1. I write poetry on my homework in a stark orange marker. If I press it too sharply to the page it turns red like the dark of juice, wrinkling the paper. Its tip is large and clumsy, but it overpowers the meticulous computer print. That’s how I know the thoughts that flow from my hand.
Orange marks out my words, stains the page, permeates the fibers, floods the space between the pulp with color. I can’t take anything back, the ink of my words does not leave my hands. My fingers carry them. They are the only things I cannot drop. They are still on my skin when I press a new pen to my hand.
1. I read once about the power to be affected. It reminded me of a loud room, where the walls throw the sounds back at one another like a fraught game of tennis and I have to sit immovably in the middle. I wanted to spin tales where I had the power. But what I spun instead was a spiderweb of affection, a canvas of forces absorbed and exerted in all of my words. Sitting in a loud room and playing tennis with the walls. Words dripping from my lips and staining as they fall. Handing back my homework splayed with orange in illegible scrawl. My grandmother handing over the books from her history and my naïve hope to read them all.