WAKE THE ARTIFACTS Wake the Artifacts Student Writing from Wake Forest University’s Special Collections Curated by the ZSR Writers Camp Committee First print/electronic edition © ZSR Library, Wake Forest University, 2016 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ ISBN 978-1-61846-014-1 (paper) ISBN 978-1-61846-015-8 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-61846-016-5 (e-book) Cover image: W. J. Cash typewriter, Wake Forest University ZSR Library Special Collections Cover design by William P. Kane, Library Partners Press Produced and distributed by: Library Partners Press ZSR Library Wake Forest University 1834 Wake Forest Road Winston-Salem, North Carolina 27106 Dedicated to DR. EDWIN GRAVES WILSON, “Mr. Wake Forest,” Professor Emeritus of English and Provost Emeritus of Wake Forest University CONTENTS XI PREFACE: ABOUT WRITERS CAMP XIII INTRODUCTION: GOING DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE JENNY PUCKETT 1 Kari Marie Burgess, Junio del 1972 19 Kathryn Huggins, W. J. Cash at his Typewriter, Mexico City, 1941 25 Savannah Baber, Ground Breakers: To Wake Forest’s Firsts 33 Leah J. Haynes, Six Impossible Things 41 Emily Goodman, How to Raise an Elephant 45 Erin E. McKee Praise Song for the Memory of Brian Piccolo 49 Madeline Baxter, Rebirth, of Sorts 65 Ashley Laughlin, Strangled 75 Ziwei Chen, 1932 81 Maggi McCann, The Most Loyal “Folder” 89 Rachel I. Schwam, Graded & Dated 91 Olivia Teegan, Get Closer 119 Alexandria C. Dean, The Stories She Didn’t Tell 127 Sara Isabel Coronel, Happiness: A Double-Edged Sword 143 Jessica Hung, You Promised Me a Kingdom 179 William Morgan, The Struggle to Be Good 193 Yunyi Rong, The King’s Medal 205 Maya Marks, Circuit 209 Ben Covington, Ever Endureth 223 Rachel Stewart, navel characters 229 Weiji (Ji) Wang, Trophy 235 Matt Schlosser, Our Path 243 Hannah L. Goodwin, Cane and Able 251 Natalie Jacqueline Casimir, To Excavate a Beast 255 Leo Capobianco, Jr., Freshman Year 259 Zachary I. Thomas, Heating Glass 277 Elizabeth Waid, If Not for that Damn Balcony: The True Story of Romeo Montague 293 James Falese, Dust Storm 299 Laura Garland, Self Portrait 311 Jack Olsen, Untitled 321 Thomas Poston, Homage 329 Karringtan A. Harris, Over 337 Lena Hooker, It Will Last Longer 355 Sean Dougherty, Elegy 387 CONTRIBUTORS 399 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS PREFACE: About Writers Camp The inspiration for Writers Camp @ ZSR came after a group of ZSR librarians heard Jane McGoni- gal present “Find the Future: The Game” during the American Library Association’s 2014 Annual Confer- ence. ZSR Library wanted to provide an opportunity to engage students interested in writing outside of the classroom and to offer these students the opportunity to become published authors. During the summer of 2015, the Writers Camp @ ZSR committee was formed and the Writing Center and other university partners were brought in to help plan, market, and lead the event on January 29, 2016. Students were invited to apply to participate in Writers Camp during the Fall of 2015, and forty-one student authors were selected for the overnight Writers Camp. The works they created that night are published in this volume. The Z. Smith Reynolds Library provided the staff and venue for the event, WFU Writing Center tutors offered assistance to the student authors throughout the night, and costs associated with the event and book were paid for by a grant from the WFU Provost’s Fund for Academic Innovation. You can learn more about this program at http://zsr.wfu.edu/outreach/zsr-writers-camp. xi INTRODUCTION: Going Down the Rabbit Hole Jenny Puckett As rhetorical questions go, one that never needs answering around Wake Forest is, “Why do we write?” I think we all know the answer to that! You write fre- quently in response to the gentle encouragement of your professors. Assigned writing is one thing, but it is a different matter when you write for more personal or creative reasons. There may be questions for which you want to develop answers, curiosity, or issues that concern you. You have come to Writers Camp to have a new ex- perience, which will put you in close contact with an artifact from another age. I had a similar experience several years ago: writing in response to boxes full of artifacts and random documents. Somehow, that turned into a book, so I want to share with you some lessons I learned, with examples from the book that was born of the experience. I had always been curious about our tenth Wake Forest president, Harold W. Tribble. I was acquainted with one of his daughters who lives in Winston-Salem, and when she was cleaning out her house in the sum- mer of 2010, she offered to let me look through sever- xiii al boxes of her father’s personal effects. There was so much material that my first big question was and is: How do I start? The materials in those boxes consisted of docu- ments, photographs, and assorted relics. In your case, today you will encounter fragments of our history in different forms, which will ignite your creative spark. You may end up writing about the artifact itself, or it may be that the artifact serves as an inspiration to go in a completely different direction. So, let’s imagine that you are assigned an artifact that is oddly familiar. Your spark has ignited, so now it’s good to decide on how you will create a roadmap to write about this object. It may be the object itself, as you walk around it, looking at it from all angles, deciding on what is the first thing that catches your eye and makes you won- der. And now the second thing you notice, and now the third thing. You can conjecture about the importance of this object in its world of the past or the present: who needed it or who needs it today? Why is it import- ant enough to keep? As you go through the process of writing, at some point you may experience brain fog, writer’s cramp, or a period of the blahs. That may be a good moment to look at your artifact again, and consider what it is NOT. Is this object in use today? If the answer is No, then why did it fall out of use, or, did it evolve into something else? Obviously because there is a scarier and more amusing way to do something! A few years ago, in my case, the first relic to draw my attention was an old passport from 1931, and with it came my first lesson: ask why. Why was Harold Tribble’s passport written in German with the Fueh- rer’s name on it? xiv I posed this question to both of Dr. Tribble’s daughters, and thus began a fascinating conversation. A little digging was in order. I discovered that the word Fuehrer was a very old word from the ancient High German that originally meant “wanderer” or “travel- er.” It still meant that in 1931. It was a few years later that the term Fuehrer was identified with Hitler. So, I’m glad to tell you that the words above Dr. Tribble’s photo actually mean “Information about the traveler.” Both Tribble daughters, Betty and Barbara, re- called hearing their father talk about his trips to Eu- rope, especially to Bonn, Germany. His purpose was to study theology with none other than Karl Barth, the eminent theologian of that period who was world-fa- mous for his new and controversial theological inter- pretations. For two summers, Dr. Tribble used that passport, studying in Karl Barth’s home along with another the- ology student who would later be known as a Christian martyr during the regime of Nazi Germany: Dietrich Bonheoffer. In the same box was his journal from those years, in which he described dinners at Karl Barth’s home, accompanied by his wife Nelle and two-year-old son, Harold Jr. On one occasion, the Tribbles were severe- ly embarrassed that Harold Jr. just couldn’t keep his hands out of a bowl of cherries on the dinner table. The next lesson I learned is a big one: Respect the Rabbit Hole! Don’t fear the Rabbit Hole. It can take you to great places, but don’t get lost down there. The most vivid Rabbit Hole that I fell down into was the result of a letter from a box of Harold Tribble’s personal correspondence. The letter was written in April of 1943 to Dr. Jesse M. Bader. In the letter, Trib- xv ble was accepting Bader’s invitation to visit the state of Arkansas on a mission of mercy; Tribble was agree- ing to assist Japanese pastors in offering some form of help to the Japanese American citizens who were interned in two camps in the state of Arkansas. Those two camps were known as Rohwer and Jerome, where approximately 16,500 Japanese Americans were in- terned, 30% of whom were school-age children. This was a shock to me. I had seen a documenta- ry about Manzanar, in California, and I suppose I as- sumed that there was only one. But as I went further into the rabbit hole I discovered that when President Roosevelt created the War Relocation Authority in March of 1942, ten relocation camps were built for the Japanese Americans living in California, Oregon, and Washington. These ten camps were located across the US on federal lands. The easternmost camps were Rohwer and Jerome, camps that had been carved out of swampland.