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2017
Allesandra Kust, Fifth grade Mentor(s): Francine Mathews, former Ricks parent and professional author |
Alessa's passion: Creative writing:
Alessa Kust is a person who values loyalty and honesty in her relationships, who despises those who undermine others for reasons of personal gain, and who possesses a nascent understanding of how others sometimes manipulate personal loyalty and affection to attain power over their peers. She is blessed with a vivid imagination, a broad and deep vocabulary, and in innate sense of story structure. She also has a firm grasp of the truth that plot drives the pace and architecture of a fictional narrative.
What Alessa is pursuing:
Over the course of ten months, Alessa wrote a novella entitled Rivermills that when completed will probably be about eighty pages in length, or sixteen thousand words. After debating various time periods and locations, she decided to set her story in a seaside village in Ireland during World War I, specifically in 1916. The year is significant because it was also the Time of Troubles, when Catholic and Protestant Irish were are war with one another. Alessa chose one teenaged protagonist, a privileged Anglo-Irish girl growing up in luxury, and her foil—Lizzie, a poor Irish Catholic girl roughly the same age who serves as Hazel’s maid. The goal was to examine in the story the contrasts and conflicts between religion, social class and nationality, with one important common theme: Both girls are orphaned during war and navigating their joint world alone.
Alessa Kust is a person who values loyalty and honesty in her relationships, who despises those who undermine others for reasons of personal gain, and who possesses a nascent understanding of how others sometimes manipulate personal loyalty and affection to attain power over their peers. She is blessed with a vivid imagination, a broad and deep vocabulary, and in innate sense of story structure. She also has a firm grasp of the truth that plot drives the pace and architecture of a fictional narrative.
What Alessa is pursuing:
Over the course of ten months, Alessa wrote a novella entitled Rivermills that when completed will probably be about eighty pages in length, or sixteen thousand words. After debating various time periods and locations, she decided to set her story in a seaside village in Ireland during World War I, specifically in 1916. The year is significant because it was also the Time of Troubles, when Catholic and Protestant Irish were are war with one another. Alessa chose one teenaged protagonist, a privileged Anglo-Irish girl growing up in luxury, and her foil—Lizzie, a poor Irish Catholic girl roughly the same age who serves as Hazel’s maid. The goal was to examine in the story the contrasts and conflicts between religion, social class and nationality, with one important common theme: Both girls are orphaned during war and navigating their joint world alone.