Messages to the Past

From Me to Me

Dear Sierra,

Wow, there’s so much to say, yet nothing at all.

I don’t have much to say to you, for I think you have always done your best. I guess maybe that it gets better, but I guess that’s irrelevant now. Because I’m already here. You already made it. It doesn’t matter because it’s over. The past. But soon this letter will become the past and the future and your opinions will change, my opinions will change. I’m assuming something will change.

I more wonder what I have to say to you, the more I actually wonder what you would have to say to me—I know you have something. You always have an opinion.

Maybe you would tell me to have more fun. At least I hope you would. I wish you would give me justification to let loose and to stop thinking. At least you could say it and I would smile a knowing smile and that would be it.

You’d probably tell me to keep on going, that I have, you have, made it this far. But I guess that’s just what I’d want you to say. To give me a push to keep going, just as we both know I will.

I wish you would tell me something snotty and blunt. Something that would make me say “Kids, man,” but I know you would never do that. (more…)

Dear Young Writer

by Morgan Sutton

To the adolescent writer:

You do not have to be tragic. Tragic things may happen to you, or tragic things may not happen to you, but you do not need to be a tragic person.

They say, Van Gogh was Sad and so he was an artist. They say, Sylvia Plath was Sad so she became a poet, but poetry did not heal her, and she killed herself, anyway.

Do not think, “if I am to write I must be sad.” Do not think, “it is much more poetic to be tragic, to be deadly.” Your mother, she cries because she thinks that you are so, so talented. But she cannot bring herself to encourage you, because you insist that you must be sad, must feel hopeless, in order to write.  (more…)

Some Advice


by Ellen Huggins

The best advice that I can give to a young person is: never get chubby.

Never let it happen to you, because it really does really really BLOW.

One reason why you should never get chubby, is that then you won’t have all these thoughts  about it that you can never really talk to anybody about, because you’re so afraid that you’re not going to hearing other people’s opinions will make you feel so much worse, so then you have to write a  so nobody can interrupt you and then you don’t have to write something awkward like this that you have to read aloud to 20 people.

I used to be so skinny. Like ridiculously skinny.  I remember looking in the mirror and saying dear god am I  skinny and dear god I am happy about that. I was so skinny, I used to make fun of fat people. I remember picking up a book at the book fair in the seventh grade, called How to Lose 5 Inches Fast and turning to my two friends and saying “Hey look, how stupid is this?” And then tried to make a double chin, but I was too skinny at that point to make one so I just pushed out my stomach like I was pregnant. Looking back at this experience, at the weight I am now, with the level of human kindness and decency that seem to have sky rocketed in the past few years, all I have to say to my past self is F*CK YOU. If I was at that bookfair right now, I would probably be straight up putting that book on my Amazon wish list. How did it all of this happen?  (more…)

A Little Chunk of Wisdom

By Camille Sauers

Ah young self, specifically adolescent self, the self that fostered a vibrant face rash and once ate too much of the wrong sort of chicken at the  Medieval Times near Mall of America. You have pimples, blue rubber-banded braces, and your hair is bad because you brush it too much during the hours you spend in front of the mirror before soccer practice, examining your body that in comparison to the twigs that are your  teammates make you a mammoth, a sunburned mammoth, but a mammoth none the same. You adjust and readjust your headband, hoping to become god damn extinct already.

So here you are in the lobby of the Holiday Inn, it’s your 8th grade class trip, and having  contracted food poisoning from a place where people wear crowns like business suits, you (more…)

[don’t let them tell you]

poetic slam written by cassidy cole

i remember the first time you wrote a poem, and maybe you didn’t really know it was a

poem, but you tried really hard, I know you did.


somehow that poem about a pumpkin turned into something about imagination and its

constant changing colors,


but you were so proud

and your mom put it on the fridge 

and thats when you told yourself you were going to be a poet.


i’m going to tell you one thing, (more…)