Writing Frees At-Risk Girls to Be Themselves

The brightly painted Yucca Park Community Center, a wild splash of color, stands out against the rest of its drab Hollywood neighborhood. Inside, two tribes sit at opposite ends of a large room. They are worlds apart -- but not for long.

On one side, about 40 teenage girls, most from crowded schools in gritty neighborhoods, whisper, stare into space or scribble furiously in purple and beige journals. Fingers nervously flip pencils back and forth. On the other side, a like number of professional women -- screenwriters, lawyers, entrepreneurs, advertising executives -- also chat quietly, pausing to jot a few lines in notebooks.

Wary glances and nervous smiles pass across the room; many of these girls and women have never met before. Yet, by day’s end, brought together by a program called WriteGirl, they will have bared their souls to one another. Today, adolescent awkwardness will melt in choruses of laughter and affirmation. Shrinking violets who might not raise a hand in class will confide in strangers about the pain brought on by a parent’s absence, a friend’s drug use or the everyday angst of school, hormones and bad hair days.

Egged on by workshop leaders, girls will raise their voices and their pens in celebration of themselves.

“I feel like dancing and never stopping,” one young woman offers when asked for a positive statement starting with the word “I.”

“I feel like laughing my guts out with absolutely no fear,” a second chimes in.

“I’m a shirt that has been washed over and over -- because it’s a favorite,” says another.

For five or six hours, these girls will talk, listen, learn and share. Most of all, they will write: journal entries, lines of poetry, personal essays, fragments of short stories. The founder of this “literacy program in disguise” didn’t name it WriteGirl for nothing.

Laid off from her online sales job in the fall of 2001, Keren Taylor needed a new outlet for her abundant energy. She recalled the satisfaction she had gotten as the mentor of a girl when she lived in New York City. And that memory inspired her to create an opportunity for girls -- especially those at risk of failure or trouble -- to escape the pressures of adolescence, discover their artistic voices and just be themselves.

Two months after losing her job, Taylor brought together 20 women and 20 girls for a creative writing workshop. WriteGirl was born.

Since then, the nonprofit organization -- funded by the Los Angeles Unified School District and the Annenberg Foundation, among other sources -- has matched nearly 200 girls with successful women from around the L.A. area who volunteer as one-on-one mentors. WriteGirl also has monthly workshops during the school year in which all participants write and exchange ideas. And it is presenting six public readings in 2003-04, up from two its first year.

Perhaps WriteGirl’s crowning achievements are its publications: “Threads” and “Bold Ink,” two glossy, professionally designed books in which girls’ and mentors’ writing appears side by side. A third volume is due out in June.

“Unlike traditional mentoring, we focus everything on writing,” says one WriteGirl mentor, Allison Deegan, a marketing consultant and writer. “What I’ve seen in these workshops is the freeing aspects of that.... For a lot of these girls, this is the one place they feel comfortable.”

The mentors and their “mentees,” as the girls are called, often form a special bond, with the adult sometimes a big sister, sometimes a literary muse. They even help with things like college applications. Fairfax High student Mara Bochenek says her mentor, Shawn Schepps, is more than a writing coach.

“I can talk to her,” Bochenek says. “If I get into a fight with my parents, I can always call her, and she makes me feel better.”

Bochenek and Schepps, a screenwriter whose credits include “Drumline,” discovered a shared taste in movies and went to see “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” together. The gender-bending theme of that movie seems to find its way into Bochenek’s poem “Tee Hee,” which starts:

I wear a tie people think

I’m a guy

I wear a skirt people think

I’m a girl.

The women who run WriteGirl say its relentless concentration on creative writing boosts girls’ confidence and communication skills, while its emphasis on community-building and self-respect reduces their chance of dropping out of school, abusing drugs or getting pregnant.

A supportive, all-female environment is crucial to Taylor’s philosophy, because “boys do all the talking” when boys and girls mix in school and elsewhere, she says. “There’s real value in having a place where girls can be girls.”

By 1:30 p.m. in the Yucca community center -- WriteGirl’s home since June, after it outgrew its space at the Bresee Community Center -- the ice has finally broken.

With sunlight trickling through the beveled-glass windows and yellow and pink balloons dangling festively from the ceiling, small groups of teens and women sit around tables sharing notes on topics like “What you should know about me” and “Who do you admire most in the world?”

A little later, they will listen to music ranging from Tuvan throat singing to flamenco guitar, letting the evocative sounds inspire words on the page. Then it’s on to a lesson in the many methods of keeping journals.

Certain themes come up again and again as girls of different races, ethnicities and class backgrounds talk about why they are passing up the mall or the park to spend a Saturday afternoon indoors with pen, paper and their thoughts.

They point to writing as a way to cope with stress, anger and other powerful, negative feelings. They describe the WriteGirl community as a safe place to spill their guts -- where they can be sure that they’ll be supported rather than judged.

“Everyone here is equal,” Lovely Umayam says. “Everyone just gets along.”

In Umayam’s case, the program didn’t just give the Marshall High sophomore an outlet for self-expression; it also led to her goal of a career in journalism. Before getting involved in WriteGirl, “I expected to be a secretary or something,” she says. The program “helped me find what I want to do in my life.”

Umayam’s contributions to the WriteGirl books include a short meditation on being invisible and a poem about the surprising similarities between boys and books:

Some books are confusing

With unexpected twists and

turns

Like the mind of a player,

Trying to worm his way out of

something ...

Umayam doesn’t limit herself to journalism and poetry, however: She’s writing a novel too.

Alli List, a student at Luther Burbank Middle School with a sharp gaze and a T-shirt that says, “Boys make good pets,” finds that words work best when they’re connected with music. For List, who writes poetry and composes songs with the help of her mentor, songwriter Michelle Lewis, the ability to put thoughts down on paper means never having to feel alone.

List surely speaks for many of the WriteGirls when she says: “Writing is like having a best friend who you can talk to at 3:30 in the morning.”

(The website is www.write girl.org. “Bold Ink” is available on Amazon.com and at Vroman’s in Pasadena, Skylight Books in Los Feliz and Portrait of a Bookstore in Studio City.)