Write Out Loud presents Read-Imagine-Create finalists

I want to plug a project that’s dear to my heart.

Founded in 2007, Write Out Loud has a commitment “to inspire, challenge, and entertain by reading short stories aloud for a live audience.” Their skilled, dramatic readings use few — if any — props or costumes. The emphasis is on a story told out loud in a setting as intimate as a campfire.

The company has branched out in the years since it opened. They present story concerts, an annual TwainFest, Stories for Seniors, StoryBox Theatre (for elementary students), and Poetry Out Loud (for high schoolers). These “core programs” reach over 16,000 people each year.

Another annual program, Read–Imagine–Create, encourages middle and high school students to read a chosen author and create a response based on the experience. It can be a written work (“stories, poetry, monologues, dialogues, biographies, plays, etc.”), a piece of visual art (“illustrations, paintings, sculpture, mixed media, surf/skateboard designs, etc.”), or performance/media art (“dance, music composition, film, claymation, etc.”). Wide-open choices free students from narrow responses. Anything goes.

Fourteen area schools participated: Community Montessori School, Dehesha Charter School, Granite Hills High School, Grant K-8, Grossmont Middle College High School, Mesa Verde Middle School, Morse High School, New Dawn High School, Rhoades School, Serra High School, Sacred Heart Parish School, San Diego SCPA, Southwest High School, and Standley Middle School.

This year’s author was Emily Dickinson — and talk about the artworks her poems could inspire!

Artistic director Veronica Murphy: “[W]ith the continued cutbacks in arts funding throughout our schools, programs like Read–Imagine–Create play a much-needed role. They encourage students to read and then connect literary concepts to an artistic outlet that engages them and may instill a lifelong love of both literature and artistic expression.”

Write Out Loud received almost 400 submissions this year. They will present the finalists on Monday, April 10, at the Old Town Theatre at 7:00 p.m.

I hope someone chose Dickinson’s poem #812:

• A Light exists in Spring
• Not present on the Year
• At any other period –
• When March is scarcely here.

• A Color stands abroad
• On Solitary Fields
• That Science cannot overtake
• But Human Nature feels.

• It waits upon the Lawn,
• It shows the furthest Tree
• Upon the furthest Slope you know
• It almost speaks to you.

• Then as Horizons step
• Or Noons report away
• Without the Formula of sound
• It passes and we stay –

• A quality of loss
• Affecting our Content
• As trade had suddenly encroached
• Upon a Sacrament.