“They were very beautiful. Such things are.” Most would not expect this to be the title of a book, but it is. This is the title of a group of stories, memoirs, done by kids not just here in Lewiston, but all over Maine and some are even from another country.

Patricia Buck and Rachel Silver were the editors of this book. They put everything together. The memoirs in this book are from different places in Maine, and from two refugee camps in Dadaab and Kenya. The kids wrote the memoirs in their own words and their perspectives, and Ms. Buck and Ms. Silver created the book by putting all the memoirs in specific categories.

In this book, you will see that Lewiston Middle School is part of this collection of memoirs. It all started last year. LMS had a writing group that consisted of the 10 kids who wrote in the book. The club had both English Language Learners and mainstream students. The group came together once a week for about a month to write stories about their lives. These stories turned into the memoirs in this book.

Each week, students from Bates College would come in and help the kids with writing their memoirs by having mini group discussion sessions. The Bates students would throw out topics like a moment you felt powerful or a moment you felt weak. The LMS students would then discuss it. After, instead of writing down what they said, they recorded themselves. With a recording, people are more fluent and they can always play it back to make sure they haven’t missed anything important they wanted to add. After they made a lot of these recordings and wrote them down, the club members chose the one piece they liked the most and worked on it to make a final draft.

The LMS writing club was a great success last year and it is continuing this year. They are going to keep writing new memoirs about their lives.

“Things were very beautiful. Such things are,” is going on sale now. For anyone who wants to read the memoirs that teens from Maine, Dadaab, and Kenya wrote, read this book.

Congrats to all the writers in this book, you worked hard, and you accomplished something amazing.