The following blog entry was written by Sarah Solomon, an intern here at READ.

**Update: The first issue of Stand and Voice is here. And it looks fantastic! Chock full of stories, poems, essays, and artwork--all by teens--Stand and Voice is truly an accomplishment. Kudos to Baobao et al.

What does it take for a teen writer to be published? Teens seem notably left out. At least, this is the view of Baobao Zhang, who attends high school in Virginia. In order to mend this modern literary tragedy, she has started an online literary magazine – Stand and Voice. And it is just for teens. When asked how the magazine got started, Baobao, explained: "It got started around April this year when I was talking to a friend. I was getting rejected by — god knows what — every magazine in the country probably. We were talking, and we’re sure there are other teens who have this problem getting published, especially in adult magazines, because people don't want to take teens seriously. So we thought it would be cool to give people an outlet for their voice. Since then I’ve gotten published."

In terms of the technical preparations, "We had to find a web hosting company—we did it with Yahoo— and it's fantastic because you can edit it online and don't need software. We had to write everything about us. One of the challenges we had was to find a staff of volunteer editors, but we found them now." They also were lucky enough to be advertised by another magazine, Teen Ink.

Once the magazine was properly set up, it was time to start getting submissions. I asked Baobao why she thinks it's so important for teens to have their voices heard in today's society. Her response: "There's the adult world, and they don't take teens very seriously. And then there are the kids' magazines that don't take teens very seriously. We lack a voice. Modern media says we're irresponsible and lazy, but I don't think so. I think we have something to say."

Very well said.

On her hopes for the magazine: "I hope teen writers will have the chance to get published and put themselves out there. One of my goals is to spread this magazine to educators across the country. Kids that don't like to read can find something they're interested in."

Baobao and the rest of the editors have a whole process of deciding who to publish. Baobao says, "We have a review process. You send something in, when we're looking at it we're reading it anonymously and we edit it anonymously. We also have a rubric."

Writers can submit poetry, short fiction, personal essays, editorial essays, one-act plays, and even book movie or music reviews. Artists can submit drawings, paintings, prints, multimedia, photography, digital art, cartoons, and sculptures and ceramics.

All writing must be emailed to submission@standandvoice.org in Microsoft Word (.doc) or Rich Text Format (.rtf), in a double-spaced standard font (such as Times New Roman). Since the writing is judged anonymously, put your name, date of birth, grade level, state, and name of school in the body of the email, but do not put information in the file. You'll also find a complete list of instructions at the site.

The first issue is going to come out in August. Deadline for the issue is July 27.

If you are a teen writer and want to be heard, submit your writing to Stand and Voice. If you are a reader, get ready to read some original writing from teens across the country.

READ thinks that Baobao is poised for success. After all, her poem "In Search of Sleeping Beauty" will appear in the first issue of READ this fall. We hope that Stand and Voice is a raging success, and wish Baobao and the rest of the team good luck!

The following blog entry was written by Sarah Solomon, an intern here at READ.

Just about everyone knows of the fabled tale of Wilbur the pig and Charlotte the Spider. The author of this book, Charlotte's Web, was none other than the American author E. B. White, whose birthday was July 11.

Born in 1899 in Mount Vernon, New York, Elwyn Brooks attended Cornell University. It was a tradition at this school that anyone with the last name White would be nicknamed Andy, because one of the co-founders of the school was named Andrew Dickson White. So Andy it was. However, in all his professional writings, he used the name E. B. White.

Though he started writing in publications such as The New Yorker and Harper’s Magazine, he soon turned to writing children's literature. His first novel, in 1945, was Stuart Little, a tale of a boy from New York. He described that the boy exhibited a "shy, pleasant manner of a mouse", and since the illustrations portrayed the boy as a mouse, this is the image most associated with this novel’s protagonist. (This book has a short ending – why? Because White was a hypochondriac and thought he was going to die before the book was finished. Turns out he died 40 years after the book was published!)

His next novel was Charlotte's Web, written in 1952. If you aren't familiar with the story, Wilbur, a runt pig who is saved by a girl named Fern, is sent to live in a barn where he does not know anyone or any animals. Charlotte is a spider who reaches out to Wilbur, and the two maintain a strong friendship throughout the novel.

E. B. White's third children's novel is Trumpet of the Swan, which tells the story of a poor swan who has no voice, and therefore learns how to play the trumpet.

Notice a pattern?

Why is it that a lot of children's literature revolves around animals? One explanation is that human adults are tangled and complicated and wrapped up in various social, economical, mental, and emotional webs (no pun intended). Children, on the other hand have not yet succumbed to those adult complications. And animals, unlike humans, live simple, carefree lives of simply doing what it takes to survive. (Not that surviving Thanksgiving and Christmas is slightly worrisome for some farm animals). The relative simplicity of animals is attractive and conducive to children's ways of thinking.

Or, another possibility is that the idea of animals making friends and talking to one another is simply cute and entertaining.

Either way, E. B. White's novels have obviously resounded with children, and are still read and referenced today. So happy birthday, E. B. White, and thanks for giving us eager beavers the bees' knees of children's writing.

It was about this time last year that our very own Bryon Cahill wrote a lovely Happy Birthday article for George Orwell, that great British writer who brought us 1984, Animal Farm, and many, many political essays. If you want to learn about Georgie on his birthday, check out Bryon's article here. If you want some good, sound writing advice, keep reading.

Though I like Orwell, his fiction never really spoke to me in the profound way it has for so many readers. However, about two years ago I suffered a painful spell of writer's block. That's not good news for a student majoring in fiction writing. A great professor of mine gave me an Orwell essay entitled "Why I Write" for inspiration. It really helped. So, I've decided to excerpt it below. I hope you enjoy Orwell's wisdom as much as I did. And, once again, Happy Birthday, Georgie Porgie.

"Putting aside the need to earn a living, I think there are four great motives for writing, at any rate for writing prose. They exist in different degrees in every writer, and in any one writer the proportions will vary from time to time, according to the atmosphere in which he is living. They are:

1. Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive, and a strong one. Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen -- in short, with the whole top crust of humanity. The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all -- and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But there is also the minority of gifted, willful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class. Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain and self-centered than journalists, though less interested in money .

2. Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story. Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed. The aesthetic motive is very feeble in a lot of writers, but even a pamphleteer or writer of textbooks will have pet words and phrases which appeal to him for non-utilitarian reasons; or he may feel strongly about typography, width of margins, etc. Above the level of a railway guide, no book is quite free from aesthetic considerations.

3. Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.

4. Political purpose -- using the word "political" in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples' idea of the kind of society that they should strive after. Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude."

The following blog entry was written by Sarah Solomon, an intern here at READ.

When most people hear the word sonnet, they automatically think of William Shakespeare, and for good reason. However, the sonnet was around way before Shakespeare was born, and continued to be modernized after his death.

Shakespeare usually wrote English sonnets, which have 14 lines and a rhyme scheme of:
[ABAB CDCD EFEF GG]
Each letter corresponds to the last word of each line. So the first and third lines will rhyme, the second and fourth lines will rhyme, etc.

This is an Italian sonnet. Though the rhyme scheme of an Italian sonnet is somewhat flexible, the first eight lines are
[ABBA ABBA]

There are other structural elements to sonnets, such as the literal structure of ideas (like an essay) and the rhythm of the words (enunciation). But that would be a whole other story.

Try writing your own sonnet!
It's harder than it looks!