“The words just sort of came to me while I was reading a book,” says Paul Tran a Pickens Middle School eighth grader of his award-winning poem. The poem took first place in the Sassafras Literary Exchange’s annual Creative Writing Contest for Youth.
Quoting from his poem, ”My path was paved but now it’s crumbled....” says Tran. “I don’t know which way to GO!!”
But after talking with this young man, one may inject that his poem is more a reflection of the age of adolescence than a story of personal struggle.
Tran reads a good bit, fiction such as Harry Potter and other fantasies but he sometimes reads and is interested in European history and Greek mythology. His favorite subject in school, however, is biology. He isn’t sure what he wants to do as an adult but he may go into the field of medical science or physics or maybe even electrical engineering.
Tran is also a math whizz and has just returned from a mathematics competition at Berry College. He plays clarinet in the band. For relaxation he likes card games, board games and to play on an X-Box. There’s not a lot he watches on TV but he likes an occasional action movie. He says that he used to play soccer but doesn’t quite have time for it now. Not being really into sports doesn’t mean that he marches to the beat of a different drummer, he just most likely listens more closely to the melody.
Moving here about three years ago, Tran says that he lived in Florida for about three years. Although he admits that he misses the beach he says that he likes it better here, in part because his grandmother and uncle live here. He also likes the schools here better. When speaking about his twin sister he says that they try to see which can get the best grades but other than that they aren’t that much in competition with each other.
For this polite and very bright young man, not withstanding the tone of his poem, it seems that he very much knows which way to GO!!
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