We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel – or have done and thought and felt; or might do and think and feel – is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.
Ursula K. Le Guin
The City Voice is excited to announce a new project: a creative writing and fiction column! As longtime readers will know, we have never done anything like this before so we will be relying on your help and contributions to make this work. Nevertheless, the newspaper team is really excited to venture into new territory, and we hope that you will enjoy reading the stories that City High Middle students dream up.
Each marking period of the school year there will be a theme or short prompt to inspire City’s creative writers, and each week we will feature either a creative writing entry on the theme or review of a famous entry in the literary canon that has helped define the genre.
WHAT IF?
This Quarter’s Theme
To kick things off, The City Voice team has decided on “What if?” as the theme for the first quarter. We believe that this theme is perfect for our first prompt as the pandemic has raised a lot of ‘what if’ questions about technology, society, safety, bureaucracy, civilization, and more.
That is what we hope you will explore this marking period. When the rules are broken what new ideas take their place? How could the world be different, and what it would mean if it were?
If any of that inspires a story, please consider writing it for this project. There are no rules, your stories can be in any genre and about any topic. We encourage wildly out of the box interpretations of the theme and our whole team is looking forward to reading your stories.