by Adam Johnson
826 NYC
826NYC’s writing center opened its doors in September 2004. Since then its programs have offered over one thousand students opportunities to improve their writing and to work side by side with hundreds of community volunteers. 826NYC has also built a satellite tutoring center, created in partnership with the Brooklyn Public Library, which has introduced library programs to an entirely new community of students. The center publishes a handful of books of student writing each year.
826 LA
826LA benefits greatly from the wealth of cultural and artistic resources in the Los Angeles area. The center regularly presents a free workshop at the Armand Hammer Museum in which esteemed artists, writers, and performers teach their craft. 826LA has collaborated with the J. Paul Getty Museum to create Community Photoworks, a months-long program that taught seventh-graders the basics of photographic composition and analysis, sent them into Los Angeles with cameras, and then helped them polish artist statements. Since opening in March 2005, 826LA has provided thousands of hours of free one-on-one writing instruction, held summer camps for English language learners, given students sportswriting training in the Lakers’ press room, and published love poems written from the perspectives of leopards.
826 CHICAGO
826 Chicago opened its writing lab and after-school tutoring center in the West Town community of Chicago, in the Wicker Park neighborhood. The setting is both culturally lively and teeming with schools: within one mile, there are fifteen public schools serving more than sixteen thousand students. The center opened in December 2005 and now has over five hundred volunteers. Its programs, like at all the 826 chapters, are designed to be both challenging and enjoyable. Ultimately, the goal is to strengthen each student’s power to express ideas effectively, creatively, confidently, and in his or her individual voice.
826 MICHIGAN
826 Michigan opened its doors on June 1, 2005, on South State Street in Ann Arbor. In October of 2007 the operation moved downtown, to a new and improved location on Liberty Street. This move enabled the opening of Liberty Street Robot Supply & Repair in May 2008. The shop carries everything the robot owner might need, from positronic brains to grasping appendages to solar cells. 826 Michigan is the only 826 not named after a city because it serves students all over southeastern Michigan, hosting in-school residencies in Ypsilanti schools, and providing workshops for students in Detroit, Lincoln, and Willow Run school districts. The center also has a packed workshop schedule on site every semester, with offerings on making pop-up books, writing sonnets, creating screenplays, producing infomercials, and more.
826 BOSTON
826 Boston kicked off its programming in the spring of 2007 by inviting authors Junot Diaz, Steve Almond, Holly Black, and Kelly Link to lead writing workshops at the English High School. The visiting writers challenged students to modernize fairy tales, invent their ideal school, and tell their own stories. Afterward, a handful of dedicated volunteers followed up with weekly visits to help students develop their writing craft. These days, the center has thrown open its doors in Roxbury’s Egleston Square—a culturally diverse community south of downtown that stretches into Jamaica Plain, Roxbury, and Dorchester. 826 Boston neighbors more than twenty Boston schools, a dance studio, and the Boston Neighborhood Network (a public-access television station).
826 DC
826DC opened its doors to the city’s Columbia Heights neighborhood in October 2010. 826DC provides after-school tutoring, field trips, after-school workshops, inschool tutoring, help for English language learners, and assistance with the publication of student work. It also offers free admission to the Museum of Unnatural History, the center’s unique storefront. 826DC volunteers recently helped publish a student-authored poetry book project called Dear Brain. 826DC’s students have also already read poetry for the President and First Lady Obama, participating in the 2011 White House Poetry Student Workshop.
ABOUT SCHOLARMATCH
Founded by author Dave Eggers, ScholarMatch began as a simple crowdfunding platform to help low-income students pay for college. In five short years ScholarMatch has grown into a full service college-access organization, serving more than 500 students each year. We support students at our drop-in center, at local schools and organizations, and online through our crowdfunding platform and innovative resources like the ScholarMatcher—the first free college search tool built specifically with the needs of low-income students in mind.
Our mission is to make college possible for underserved youth by matching students with donors, resources, colleges, and professional networks. More than 80 percent of ScholarMatch students are the first in their families to go to college, and over 50 percent have family incomes of $25,000 or less. ScholarMatch students are bright, resilient young people who have overcome significant challenges, and maintain their determination to seek a better future through college.
With the support of donors, volunteers, schools and community organizations, we ensure that college is possible for underserved students in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond. To support a student’s college journey or learn more, visit scholarmatch.org.
Visit www.hmhco.com to find all of the books in The Best American Series®.
About the Editor
ADAM JOHNSON, guest editor, teaches creative writing at Stanford University. He is the author of Fortune Smiles, Emporium, Parasites Like Us, and The Orphan Master’s Son, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in fiction. He has received a Whiting Writers’ Award and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation.
Footnotes
1 Years later, after you’d all scattered to various high schools, you heard that Boy 5’s mother had died of a brain tumor, and you instantly remembered the smell of her perfume, and the time she asked you if you’d go out to her car to get her cigarettes. “Would you be an angel?” she’d said.
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2 You were in college when, on a late-night train ride to Boston, you told another woman this story, and she said that a boy had once told her she had pneumatic boobs. You both laughed, and wondered if it was a trend among teenaged boys, to create new derogatory phrases by linking preposterous adjectives to the word “boobs.” Well, at that age they’re afraid of women’s bodies, she said. You didn’t know her well; she’d been in one of your classes the year before. She was on her way to visit her boyfriend for the weekend, as were you (Boy 19), and at first you spoke about them proudly, bragging a little; but as the dark train slid and rattled through the hours, she eventually told you she didn’t really love her boyfriend and you said you weren’t sure you even liked yours.
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3 Followed, in later years, by Boy—no, Man—Xb, a stranger who fell asleep, or pretended to, next to you on a train, and whose head slipped onto your shoulder and then down to your breast where his face then began to burrow and you tried gently to push him off but his sleep-heavy, or pseudo-sleep-heavy head, didn’t move and so you let him stay there because maybe he really was sleeping and you didn’t know what else to do. And Man Xc, another stranger who pressed his hard self against your ass on a packed New York City bus, and there was no room to move and you were afraid that if you said “Stop that” he would announce to the crowded bus that you were crazy, and finally another woman passenger noticed what was going on and stopped it by saying loudly, “Honey, why you let him do that to you?”
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4 While you might have been right about this particular Boy X and his contempt for you, you’d been wrong about beauty guarding against the X Boys and X Men of the world. Every woman you would ever get to know—no matter how beautiful—had stories like this one. Or worse. You’d been lucky.
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5 She wrote to you in college, to ask what had gone wrong in the friendship. You wrote back, curtly, and told her. She wrote back pages of apology. She honestly had not realize
d, she said. She had never thought of it as stealing—nothing had ever really happened between them, he’d never even tried to kiss her. It was really just that I admired you so much, she wrote, and you admired him, so I tried to admire him too. You were both so smart, she wrote, I wanted you both to approve of me. You crumpled up this letter and didn’t write back; but she kept trying. She wanted to see you, she wrote, when she came East for Christmas vacation. Finally you said yes, worn down by her persistence and her distress, which seemed real; and you went out to lunch with her and kept in touch after that. And though it took years for you to really trust her again, and you and she have lived in different states for years now, she is still one of the people you are closest to.
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6 Troubled too, not then but years afterward, by remorse. He told you on that first walk that his mother, with whom he’d been living in New York City, had died a few months before, after a long illness, and so he’d had to come live with his father of whom he said, chuckling in the fakely sardonic way that you found so annoying, let’s just say that he’s oil and I’m water. He told you also—not on that first day but later—that his mother had had a drinking problem and some breakdowns, for which he blamed his father. And another time he said that his mother had done something to him once, when he was twelve, after his bath; but, he said, I don’t think she really knew what she was doing. When he told you this it made you remember something strange he had said that first day, right after he first kissed you: he had buried his face in your neck and said, Oh my God you smell so good, I thought all girls smelled like mothers. You were too young to realize how young he was, and how wrong all this was, and how recently his mother had died. Would you have loved him, or at least have been less irritable, if you’d known? No, but you wish you had known—you wish someone had known. His loneliness, back then, must have felt infinite, hopeless. From searching online you’ve learned he is a judge now, living in Minneapolis, married, with a son and a daughter. Somewhere in your house you have a white silk scarf he gave you, that belonged to his mother.
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7 He came to the twenty-fifth reunion of your high school class with a younger man who sat silently on a bench outside the library smoking. Boy 18 sat next to him, smoking too, and you sat next to Boy 18. He was a writer, a reporter for one of the big weekly law journals. He looked almost the same - his white hair was no more pale than his yellow hair had been - but instead of his old tweedy costume he was wearing jeans and a T-shirt.
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8 You were feeling the way you would later in your life every January, with the blaze and clutter and over-richness of Christmas over, the children back in school, the ornaments back in the basement, the tree lying on the curb, nothing on the calendar: a little bleak, but also peaceful, clean, looking out at a landscape of packed ice and bare black trees.
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9 You didn’t know that you were about to meet your husband, who never felt like Boy 23; he felt like your husband almost at once. He had had his own odyssey, before he got to you. He wasn’t there, and then he was, sitting on the floor next to a couch you sat on at a party you hadn’t really wanted to go to.
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1 Pink Hill is a town of about five hundred in southeast North Carolina.
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2 Cuernavaca is a city of 350,000 in the state of Morelos, about sixty miles south of Mexico City.
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3 In the United States, children as young as twelve are permitted to work on large, commercial farms and children of any age can work on small-scale farms.
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4 To ensure a steady workforce, many farmers pay a fee to labor contractors, who are responsible for recruiting and supervising crews of seasonal farmworkers. As a result, many farmworkers have little idea who owns the fields they are harvesting.
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5 When “suckering,” tobacco harvesters often use their hands to remove the small shoots (though machines are sometimes available for the job). The removal of these shoots forces the tobacco plant to focus its energy on producing large leaves.
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6 Workers absorb nicotine from tobacco plants through their skin, and one in four every harvesting season suffers from acute nicotine poisoning, also known as green tobacco sickness. The symptoms of GTS can include dizziness, vomiting, headaches, abdominal pain, and fluctuations in blood pressure and heart rate. Researchers at Wake Forest University have found that, by the end of the season, “nonsmoking workers had nicotine levels equivalent to regular smokers.”
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7 North Carolina farmworkers suffer the highest rate of heat-related fatalities in the nation.
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8 A study in the American Journal of Industrial Medicine of 287 farmworkers—the majority of whom worked in tobacco—from forty-four different farmworker camps in eleven eastern North Carolina counties found that the workers were exposed to a large number of pesticides, and exposed to the same pesticides multiple times.
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“Miss Melissa” is Melissa Bailey, a farmworker advocate in North Carolina. In 2010 she formed NC FIELD (North Carolina Focus on Increasing Leadership Education and Dignity), which provides leadership training to young farmworkers like Neftali.
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10 Officially the “Association of Farmworker Opportunity Programs’ (AFOP) Migrant and Seasonal Farmworker Children Essay and Art Contest.” AFOP is a non-profit that seeks to address the safety and wellbeing of farmworkers, including children.
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