Winter 2007

Roberta Klarreich has been writing since she was a child. She has taken several classes at Hugo House, and wrote this story while in "Fiction in a Flash," taught by Angela Jane Fountas. The story grew out of an in-class exercise in writing a "speculative" story, where students were asked to imagine "What if...?" Roberta thought: what if a little girl were to become president of the United States?


"The Summit"
By Roberta Klarreich 

When Laura was eight years old, she decided she would be the first female president of the United States. She started her campaign right away.

        She walked down the block to Devon's house and found him digging a tunnel to Australia in the garden. "I'm running for president. Want to be my vice president?" she asked.

        "Okay," said Devon, putting down his shovel.

        They collected pennies and nickels from classrooms around the country, promising to lengthen summer vacation by two months and remove broccoli from the school lunch menu. Their campaign manager, Dad, proclaimed, "This will be a new era of purity and innocence in the White House." When the votes were in, Laura and Devon had won in a landslide.

        At the inauguration ball, the president-elect served hamburgers, Kit Kats and a special dessert she had made herself out of ice cream, Mars Bars, Cool Whip and ginger ale. All the women wore pink dresses trimmed with lots of lace. In her speech, Laura promised a new approach to foreign policy: "I'm going to invite them over really soon," she said of world leaders. "And then we're going to do some brainstorming."

        Three days later, the presidents of China and North Korea came to Washington with their aides and interpreters. They stayed at the White House and had a sleepover with the president of the United States. They drank cocoa with marshmallows and stayed up late telling Chinese and Korean ghost stories. But in the morning they sat down with construction paper, magic markers, blunt classroom scissors and tape and brainstormed together to solve the world's problems. They made good headway, drawing maps of the world and coloring them in, writing poems and helping each other find rhymes (through their interpreters), and making lots of paper dolls with smiling faces.

        But just before lunchtime, the presidents of China and North Korea had a fight. It started when the president of China accused the president of North Korea of grabbing the orange marker out of his hand.

        "I did not," said the North Korean president through his interpreter.

        "Did too," said the Chinese president through his, sticking out his tongue.

        "Did not!"

        "Did too!"

        "Did not!"

        "Did too!" And with that, the president of China seized a pair of scissors and stuck the president of North Korea.

        "Owwww!" yelled the president of North Korea without an interpreter.

        Laura's chief of staff, Mom, made the president of China stand in the corner. But the president of North Korea went home, and as soon as he walked into his office, he sent a nuclear bomb to America.

        "No fair!" said Laura when she heard the bomb was on its way. "I didn't do anything." And she sent a bomb right back to North Korea, to get even.
   
        A few hours later, the bomb arrived from North Korea and blew up Washington, D.C. But first Laura and Devon went through the tunnel in Devon's front yard and moved to Australia.

Laura González began writing as an adolescent in her native Mexico. She wrote this poem in Eugenia Toledo Keyser's class, "Poesía Como una Forma de Mirar," which was taught entirely in Spanish. Her poem expresses "the tendency we have to worry and the importance of not wasting time."

En Redondo
By Laura González

Tiempo perdido pensando en redondo
Tiempo perdido.

La vida como una cinta de película
Infinita sigue corriendo

Los mismos dramas, las mismas comedias
Se suceden ecos de otros tiempos

Copias de los anteriores
Repetidos en épocas y continentes

Hoy, hoy, hoy acuérdate
Hoy estas viviendo hoy, hoy, hoy

Pero los deseos, los miedos, las memorias
Los resquemores son también el hoy, hoy, hoy

Tiempo perdido pensando en redondo
Tiempo perdido.

In the Round
By Laura González
Translated by Carolyne Wright

Time lost thinking in the round
Time lost

Like an infinite loop of film, life
goes running on and on

The same dramas, the same comedies
succession of echoes of other times

Copies of what went before
Repeated in epochs and continents

Today, today, today, remember
Today you're living, today, today

But desires, fears, memories
Resentments are also of today, today, today

Time lost thinking in the round
Time lost

Ann Batchelor Hursey wrote her poem, "Posthumous Epistle to Einstein from Marilyn, 1956, NYC" in Deborah Woodard's "Generating Poems" class. In it, she imagines what would happen if Marilyn Monroe were to write to Albert Einstein, even though he was deceased. In the poem, Marilyn refers to her basset hound puppy, "Hugo." Ann says, "As I revised, I began thinking of the speed of light, a celebrity friendship and puppies. I do not often write rhyming couplets. However, thanks to Deborah Woodard, Alexander Pope, "Hugo," Albert and Marilyn, I wrote this poem.

Posthumous Epistle to Einstein from Marilyn, 1956, NYC
By Ann Batchelor Hursey

Dear Albert,

I hold my pup Hugo, in basset hound bondage-
Arthur quips, "Lean in honey, give it more cleavage."
I lower my eyelids, is this photo meant to be lewd?"
(Al, your tongue sticking out on Life's cover: shrewd.)

Wish you were here in Central Park with "Hugo,"
to walk with me and my pup in this warm July meadow.
(We'd sigh as the newsies hound us for close-ups.)
When you talk to a dog, it doesn't tell you to shut up.

Who cares what the world thinks of us?
Matinee bombshell. Atomic bomb genius.
We live in such light, such speed: what a pair!
Living your formula, "E", "M" C squared.