100s of Valley kids at YSU English Fest

By Elise Franco

Students from five counties participate in the 31st annual event.

Students inside the Chestnut Room of Youngstown State University’s Kilcawley Center had known one another for just a few hours, but they chattered away like they’d been friends for life.

The banquet room was full Wednesday morning during the 31st annual English Festival with high school students in grades 10-12 working on a creative writing exercise.

Greg Fenton, 15, said he came back for the third year because it gives him the opportunity to read and improve his writing.

The Boardman High School student sat in a group with three other participants as they worked on the writing exercise.

“What we are doing here is taking characters from the books we read to create new characters and a new story,” Fenton said.

Fenton’s group member, Kay Bahrey, 16, from Lakeview High School, said this type of exercise helps her dig deeper into the characters.

“This makes you think about who the characters are as people instead of just thinking of them as characters in a book,” she said.

Bahrey, who has participated four times, said the festival began at 9 a.m. with an impromptu writing exercise that she enjoyed.

She and Fenton are just two out of nearly 3,000 students from Mahoning, Trumbull, Columbiana, Mercer and Lawrence counties who participate in the English Festival over the course of three days.

The students are assigned seven books they must read before the festival. They are broken up into groups by grade level — grades 10-12, which attended Wednesday and grades 7-9, which attend today and Friday.

The festival, created in 1978 by YSU professors Thomas and Carol Gay in memory of their 13-year-old daughter, Candace McIntyre Gay, gives students the opportunity to compete in team and individual categories. They also are encouraged to meet and listen to noted authors of some of the books they’ve read throughout the year.

Caleb Slater, 18, of Lordstown, a student at Trumbull Career and Technical Center, said he’s back for his second festival and having a blast.

“I just love doing it,” he said. “It’s an awesome way to express creativity.”

The featured authors for this year’s festival were Susan Campbell Bartoletti, Wendy Mass, Richard Peck, Graham Salisbury, Jordan Sonneblick, Kate Thompson, Cinda W. Chima, Carl Deuker, Helen Frost and Markus Zusak.

Autumn Timko, 16, from Mathews High School, said her favorite book for this year’s festival was “Runner” by Deuker.

“All the authors are really interesting,” she said. “This book showed me how hard kids work to help support their families.”

Salisbury was one of the authors invited to speak Monday morning in Tod Hall. He discussed his life before becoming an author and talked about why it’s important to be in school because you want to, not because you feel you have to.

“That I am here at all is a very improbable story,” Salisbury, of Philadelphia, joked. “I failed English my first semester [of college], and I’m a writer.”

He said it wasn’t until later in his life, after being kicked out of the University of Vermont, leaving school at Santa Barbara City College and playing in a rock band for nine years, that he was ready to be serious about his education.

Salisbury said he attended California State University, North Ridge, and graduated magna cum laude.

“I wanted to be there,” he said. “My intent was to do something with my life.”

Since becoming an author, Salisbury has written seven novels — three are included in this year’s English Festival reading list.

“I was way too free as a child,” he said. “But because of it I have all this stuff that I can use as a writer now that I wouldn’t have had otherwise.”

efranco@vindy.com