San Pedro Girl Has Storybook Success

Bethany Martin is like many girls her age.

The energetic third-grader likes going to movies, making bracelets and having her friends stay overnight at her house. But unlike her friends, Bethany is a published author at the age of 9.

The young San Pedro resident, who for years had hoped to have one of her short stories in print, has entered the literary world by being selected as one of 108 winners nationwide in the fourth annual competition by the Young Writer’s Contest Foundation.

Chosen from more than 10,000 poems, essays and short stories submitted by first- through eighth-graders, the winning works were published in late May in a book titled “Rainbow Collection: Stories and Poetry by Young People.”

Improve Communication Skills

The Young Writer’s Contest Foundation, based in McLean, Va., and financed mostly by a grant from Ronald McDonald Children’s Charities, encourages children to improve their communication skills.

“I’m excited to see her get some recognition for her work,” said Bethany’s mother, Joanne Martin, who owns a typesetting and graphic arts business in Cypress. “But it’s weird that at the age of 9 she has already achieved her life’s goal.”

But it hasn’t taken Bethany long to set a new goal. “Now I want to write a big story and get it published,” she said.

Bethany’s winning story, “Meg and the Week of Despair,” which was submitted by her teacher, Leanne von Mittenwald, tells of a young girl who learns about responsibility and disappointment.

“The lesson is that you should think about what you do before you do it,” said Bethany, who attends Montessori Greenhouse School in Garden Grove. “You try to think about the consequences before you act.”

According to her mother, Bethany may have shown a strength in writing, but her real love is reading. “I will take her to the grocery store with me, and she will find an empty aisle and sit down and read,” Martin said. “She reads all the time. Sometimes she worries that she is going to read up all the good books.”

But Bethany is no bookworm, her mother said. “Most people would think that if all this kid does is read, she must not have any friends. But that is not how she is. She has lots of friends, just like any other girl her age.”

Bethany’s father, John, 35, a computer programmer, attributes his daughter’s love for books to the bedtime stories he and his wife read to her. And when Bethany learned how, she began reading to her parents.

“She is an excellent writer and reader,” Von Mittenwald said. “She gets a lot of ideas from reading.

“She is a very introspective child. She thinks about things that other children her age don’t think about--like world peace.”

Bethany, an only child, said she enjoys reading fiction, mysteries and stories about people and animals.

Her favorite authors include Ann Martin and Judy Blume, both writers of fiction for young people. She said her own stories come from ideas she gets while reading, as well as from personal experiences. “I think about things that I hope will happen or I want to happen,” she said.

Cards for Potential Clients

Bethany is so enthusiastic about writing that she has started her own business. Her mother printed dozens of business cards so Bethany could pass them out to potential clients who are in the market for a poem or a short story.

“So far, I have only sold a few stories to friends and relatives,” Bethany said. “But I hope to do more business soon.”

The young author considers someday becoming a paleontologist, because of her interest in dinosaurs, or an astronomer, because of her love for star-gazing, or a librarian, because of her infatuation with books.

And, of course, she thinks about becoming a writer.

“What ever else she is, writing will always be there,” Martin said.