A full house at English Festival

By Harold Gwin

About 3,000 young people from across the region are participating in the event.

YOUNGSTOWN — There was a low buzz in the Chestnut Room of Youngstown State University’s Kilcawley Center as several hundred junior high school pupils compared notes in a team creative writing exercise.

The young people had come to YSU to exercise their brains at the annual English Festival for junior and senior high school students.

Aly Saleh’s friends told him that last year’s English Festival at Youngstown State University was a lot of fun.

The Canfield Village Middle School eighth-grader took them at their word and signed up to participate in this year’s 30th anniversary event.

He wasn’t disappointed.

“It’s a great experience. You learn how to work together, and it’s fun,” he said Wednesday, the first day of the three-day event.

Saleh was one of about 800 young people taking part in the festival Wednesday. About 3,000 are expected to take part over all three days.

The level of participation has been at its maximum for about a decade, said Dr. Gary Salvner, professor and chair of English and co-chairman of the event. There’s just not space for more, he said.

This year’s festival has a record 175 schools participating.

The festival goes on because YSU wants to encourage reading and writing by young people, particularly in this age of technology, Salvner said. Teachers try to stress that in the classroom and it’s something the university supports very strongly, he said.

“It’s all centered around honoring reading and writing and the importance of it. That’s what it’s all about and that’s why we do it,” Salvner said.

Participants compete in various team and individual categories involving the two disciplines. They also get to meet and listen to noted writers and poets invited to take part in the festival.

The festival was created in 1978 by YSU professors Thomas and Carol Gay in memory of their 13-year-old daughter, Candace McIntyre Gay.

Since then, nearly 80,000 young people have come to the event.

The particular authors featured this year — Christopher Curtis, Naomi Shihab Nye, Joan Bauer, Chris Crutcher and Scott Dikkers — are a big part of what attracted Katherine Sieman, a seventh-grader from Willow Creek Learning Center, to her first festival.

She said she liked the books participants were required to read in advance and wants to meet the authors.

“I heard it was fun from a lot of my friends who went before,” she said, adding that the day was living up to her expectations.

Her first assignment was to join with three other pupils — Alexa Morocco an eighth-grader from Struthers Middle School and Nathan Scott and Paula Hartsough, both eighth-graders from Austintown Middle School, (all three back for their second year) — in a creative writing competition.

“It was just really fun last year,” Scott said, adding that he enjoyed meeting other people and participating in various events. He plans to come back again next year.

Morocco, sporting a black T-shirt with the message, “Got English Festival? Struthers does,” said the events are challenging, “but worth it.” She also noted that she enjoyed meeting many people last year.

That was one of the reasons Hartsough said she came back this year. She said she is still e-mailing a friend she met at last year’s event.

Hartsough said she also enjoyed the selection of required books to be read last year.

The competitions are challenging but they’re still fun, she said, adding that she would encourage other young people to participate.

“I admire this festival tremendously,” said Nye, one of the authors invited this year. The poet and writer lives in San Antonio and was a featured author here nine years ago. The YSU event is one of the most powerful festivals of its kind that she’s ever encountered, she told a group of teachers, librarians and parents.

Today is “Poem In Your Pocket Day,” she said, a practice started in New York several years ago. It’s a day when people are encouraged to carry a favorite poem in their pocket and read it to people they meet, she said, encouraging everyone to participate.

Nye also suggested the everyone should write down three lines a day about something they see or feel or something that bothers them, then revisit that list after a month’s time.

“You will learn something about yourself. You will never regret it,” she said.

gwin@vindy.com