Each summer, Sage Hill offers free, five day writing workshops for young writers aged 11-18. These workshops offer young writers the chance to develop their skills via the mentorship of local authors.

We are proud to showcase a selection of 2024 youth program participants’ writing. Thank you to the writers for allowing us to publish your work here!

Those Fallen Souls Shall be Remembered by Peyton Y.
Those fallen soldiers fought for
your freedom, risking their lives
one on one the scars that show
will never unfold the truth behind
them, the truth that shows lays
underneath the solemn ground
may those souls be remembered
on November 11th.

The Jar by Peyton Y.
One day my best friend said to me
“How do you open this thing, every
time I do I always spill a little bit I
just wanna open it normally.” And I
said “it’s simple.” But really I hope
she never opens that jar.

There is Still Tomorrow by Liisa D.
Today is a good say. I have yet to doubt myself.
I have yet to question my motivations,
Question my reasons to live.
I have yet to let my mind wander,
To stray from its path.
Today is a good day. I have yet to doubt myself.
I have yet to overthink a basic conversation,
To stumble over my words like a fool.
I have yet to hide myself away,
Convinced that I am a nuisance.
Today is a good day.

Today is no longer a good day. I have doubted myself.
I questioned my motivations, my reasons to live.
I let my mind wander, and now I pay the price.
Today is no longer a good day. I have doubted myself.
I started to overthink, stumbled over my words like a fool.
I hid myself away, embarrassed and ashamed.
I feel like a nuisance.
Today is not a good day.

Today may not be a good day, but today is still worth living.
Today may not have gone my way, but I’ll still survive.
I may not thrive in the ways I intended to, but I can still succeed.
My mind may have wandered today and the many days before, but I know there is still tomorrow.
There may not always be a tomorrow.
But until that final day comes, I will continue to survive.
Today may not be a good day, but there is still tomorrow.

Dear President Rico by Leo W.
Dear President Rico,
They say your voice sounds better in your head,
I agree, people say mine sounds like a dying duck,
I think the government especially hate my voice,
Number one hater,
They don’t let me talk at all,
You know, all this neglecting paints my rainbow blue,
I want to speak up, but the government won’t let me,
Why Regenalor? The impact I have is subtle,
Big voices, subtle impact. 
Is it because my father quit being your henchman?
Is it because you still think I’m trying to kill you?
You know, life is like a sandwich.
Some people fill theirs with good ingredients,
And some people fill theirs with bad,
That’s why I’m not taking a bite out of yours,
You’ve been longing for this moment for many years,
Waiting for the chance to humiliate me,
Knowing that I can’t say anything or else you’ll take Liv and Andre away from me,
Take everything away from me,
Leave me with nothing,
Understand that it is all your fault,
You’re the reason Regenalor is going to collapse,
You’re the reason why your family is going to live in fear,
Know that.
For, I am Tras Silverwood, the son of the father that you killed years ago.
For, I am Tras Silverwood, the one to take revenge,
For, I am Tras Silverwood, the one that dares to speak up.
Just asking, what song would you like for your funeral?
I’ll pay for the choir because you won’t be able to,
You always looked like a “Highway to Hell” sort of guy,
Ha ha ha.
I’m sorry I can’t say any of this out loud but know that it’s all happening,
Blueprints ready, Tras mind is ready, no need to fidget,
How ‘bout this President.. I mean, dictator Rico, you sell Regenalor and
you’ll be all safe.
Reject this deal, and I’ma chase you all over town in your black leather tuxedo
I’ma bout to rip the damn apart,
Yellin’
“Please, please spare me”
I won’t give a damn about you,
Like how you never gave a damn about me,

I’ma teach you a lesson, lil scaredy,
I’ll fix you alright,
With my hatchet and hammer, 
Don’t be scared, Mr. President, just remember to listen to my
instructions.
Step one. Resign from presidency
Step two. Let people speak
Step three. Put yourself into prison
Step four. Pay back all the money you stole
Step five. Shut yourself up
Remember to always pray for your safety,
From Tras Silverwood

A Brief and Dubious History of the Back-Pain Poster by Mythili G.
Some patients have trepidations about anesthesia. They ask if it will hurt. I used to tell them it would hurt less than if they stayed awake, but I learned that that only scared people further. It was like telling a small child not to wake up in the middle of the night because the spindly-armed goblin under his bed would eat him. Nowadays, I tell them they’ll have pleasant dreams and they’ll wake up just fine, and it won’t hurt. Most of them do have pleasant dreams. Some have strange dreams. Deborah was a patient who had a strange dream.

A brief and dubious history of the back-pain poster:

It was 1908. The artist was Polish in America. He didn’t speak English. He carried a bewildered expression with him wherever he went. He lived in a little thatched hut outside Connecticut. He hated to eat because he never managed to get the food he wanted at the grocery store. He woke up one morning with a yearning for hotcakes and peach slices. He went to the grocer and asked for flour and peaches. He wound up with a pound of ham and a celery stick. Each meal was like reaching into a bag of party favours and pulling out some object you couldn’t recognize or comprehend what pleasure could be derived from it. He walked home with the celery stick between his teeth and the ham in a sack over his shoulder. He looked like a very bored and mildly irritated horse. The sides of his brown vest flapped slowly in and out with the wind. A cart of chickens passed by and squawked at him angrily. He had learned to tune out the sounds he could not understand. Along with English, these included wildlife’s declarations. The artist had been painfully aware of his ignorance for a period before his muting of the world. Nobody else in Connecticut in 1908 was aware of just how much they didn’t know, but he was. In the loneliness of that knowledge, he was both slightly above and slightly below them, occupying his own plane parallel to theirs but, he thought, never touching it.

A man walked up beside him, leading a Camel with a rope. That was rare. The artist looked over and looked at the Camel and formed a sentence in his head that could be translated approximately to, “the earth has been flipped inside out and back and thrown in a giant laundry and we have all been juggled around like coins in its pockets and we are probably going to go blind from the preposterous amount of detergent.” He reached up to adjust the celery stick. It was slimy from his saliva. The man leading the Camel looked over and grimaced. The artist willfully ignored him. The Camel looked over, eyed the juicy celery, and pounced on the artist. The artist found it difficult to ignore that.

The Camel wrestled the artist down onto his sack of ham on the side of the road while the other man made a negligible attempt to control his beast. The artist thrashed around beneath it for a while and then realized that all he needed to do was be still and relinquish the celery. The Camel reached forward with its great muzzle and plucked the celery out of the artist’s mouth with astonishing daintiness. From afar, they might have seemed to be kissing. Satisfied, the Camel gave a curt nod and continued its princely saunter down the road. The celery stuck out of its high-held head like a cigar in the mouth of a plump man with a mustache who is convinced he has just made a brilliant business decision.

The man had let go of the rope and looked between his quick-disappearing Camel and the artist on the ground, trying to decide whether it was worth it to be a good Samaritan. He reached a hand down to the artist and said, “sorry about that.” The artist didn’t know what ‘sorry’ meant, but now it was forever associated with an outstretched palm. The artist stood up. His back hurt. His ham was mushed. He hadn’t really wanted ham anyway. He felt the petulant fury one does when they have spent many hours acquiring things and disregarding their thoughts, only to find themselves jolted by the dispossession of both thoughts and things. It was an empty, empty feeling.

The artist looked at the man. The man looked at anything except the artist. The man asked if he could walk the artist home. The artist cursed politely in Polish and turned and hobbled off in a direction he could guarantee was not homewards, but he would have to keep going because he did not want to face the man with his impossible questions again.

The artist travelled in a straight line until a star came out and startled him. He looked up at it and held the curve of his back with his left hand. He wondered how he looked. He guessed that he looked like he was waiting for the dark sky to open up and become bright again, like stage curtains revealing the set of some bubbly performance. He thought someone should paint him right then. It would be a masterpiece titled “Waiting for Time,” or “Sojourner.” It would sell for so many dollars. All the ritzy museums would want it. They would fight over it. Their leaders would meet in a solemn boardroom with a different animal head on the back of each chair. They would each take a side of the painting and grit their old yellow teeth and pull until it ripped apart. Then they would all let it go and it would fall into five pieces on the floor. They would blame each other and sue each other. And the judge would tell them each to take one piece. And then the judge would tell them to stop smoking in his courtroom. They would point out that the judge himself was smoking. So the judge would become enraged and have them thrown out of the building. All the museum leaders would remember to take their pieces except for one, because he was too worried about the hole in his cashmere sock showing to run fast enough. And that piece would be the piece with the artist’s hand on his back, and it would go home with the judge and hang in his bedroom for years and years, and he would always wonder whose body it was in the painting, in such exquisite tension. The judge would retire and search America for the artist in the painting. And he would find him in the little thatched hut in Connecticut, eating dirty ham. The judge would kneel down beside the artist’s chair and take off his hat and hold it to his heart and call the artist the most beautiful mystery of his life and beg permission to whisk him away into affluence, just like he deserved. And by a miracle, the artist would understand those words.

Another star came into view and the artist lowered his eyes and waved his hand away from his back and looked around to find out which way he had to go to get home. He saw a light in the distance and walked toward it with no deliberation. He felt silly for his fantasy. There was a universal, unspoken disgust for individuals who wished to be famous and rich. It had been in his homeland and it was here, where it was all the more powerful because it was like a vibration not needing words to be expressed. The artist reasoned to himself that the sentiment wasn’t completely fair. The shame in manipulating art for material gain was really a hypocritical idea. If art could hang on walls in museums and palaces and people would pay to see it, and complain that they had to pay to see it, if its value was to be judged by money, then why on earth did the artist himself not get to demand some money? If art was going to be processed in a system where it didn’t belong, then at least the system could show some respect and pay up.

The artist approached the light feeling quite righteous indeed. He knocked on the door of the house. A woman wearing a nightcap opened it. “Yes?” The woman said. The artist had limited experience with the word ‘yes.’ In most contexts, it meant, “I grant permission for you to do this thing you have requested.” In this case, he knew, he had requested nothing yet. This woman must be superhumanly generous, he deduced, despite the look on her face. He smiled very nicely and barged past her into the house. He found a pillow in the small living room, put it on the kitchen table, and lay down. In his head, he had told her everything that had happened to him since he was twelve, and asked to stay the night to rest his back.

Of course, the woman knew nothing about him and was horrified. She was a widow. Her husband had passed away in the night a winter ago and she had found him frozen when she woke to get some water. Her son was in the army. Very little frightened her. But she didn’t know if she was strong enough to throw the intruder out. He didn’t seem scrawny enough, but he looked tired. She closed the door and walked over to him. She jabbed at his shoulder. He opened his eyes. She asked him who the hell he was and what the hell he thought he was doing. He prepared to explain something in Polish, but became embarrassed because he remembered she would not understand. So he opened his mouth into various graphic shapes, until the woman tired of him and fetched a pad and paper so he could write it out. She thought he had laryngitis. He thought she wanted him to draw her a picture.

He thought hard about what to draw to impress this person. He hated himself for that. He became frustrated. He drew what he felt like. He drew his back. He drew a man bent over, holding his back. He drew a man lying down, holding his back. He drew a woman walking, holding her back. He drew a woman running, carrying a baby and holding her back. He drew every iteration of back-pain he could imagine. By the time he was done, the woman had fallen asleep. The sun had come up outside. He yawned and climbed carefully off the table. He moved the pillow he had used closer to the woman so that if she tossed in her sleep, she would hit something soft. He put the pad down next to her and walked out the door.
—
When most patients wake up, they ask me things like, “is it over already?” and “is it safe for me to go to the bathroom?” Sometimes they’re still groggy and ask me something related to what they’ve dreamt, like “what did you do with Edna?” (Edna being a goldfish) and “is Daddy coming back?”

Deborah was a surprising one. She asked me where the poster on the wall came from. I had to look around to see it. It was so old I hardly thought about it, like a ring on your finger you never took off and forgot was there. I told her it had been my mother’s. She asked how my mother had gotten it. I laughed and told her nobody knew. Mother insisted a man had come into her house one night in 1908 and drew it for her and left. Nobody believed that, except apparently Deborah. I’d always wondered what it was about 1908. I don’t know if my mother was lonely then. Papa was gone. I was in the army. I used to fight in those days, before I had to switch to doctoring. Mother’s story had to have happened before the war because the war came and took everybody’s innocence away. In Connecticut in 1908, nobody knew how much they didn’t know. A while after 1908, you didn’t hallucinate artists who drew you pretty, emotional posters. You hallucinated monsters.

Deborah was able to leave soon after her procedure. She collected her coat and slid her feet into white-furred boots, told me it really happened, and walked out the door.

The Lethal Beverage by Tanitoluwa M.
I am dragged out of my petite cottage in the village side by soldiers. My once-
buttery skin is brazed by the sharp tiny stones and dirt on the ground. I lifted my head
above the ground, and with my good eye, I saw one of the soldiers throw a match into a
puddle of kerosene. With a flicker of the match, the spark of fire snaked its way into the
cluster of cottages, engulfing each home in flames. The flames leaped up, consuming
the wooden floors, sending shards of glass from the window, flying into the night.
Parents fled the scene with their children in their arms. I searched for mine, but the
scene was swallowed up by black smoke rising into the night sky.  
I am resurrected from my nightmare by a knock, no, a bang on my metallic door,
that results in a buzzing effect with each reverberation reminding me that I’m not a free
woman. Ever since the night I was captured from my home, I’ve been far from free, I’m
a measly slave girl and a concubine to the king. 
“Woman, where’s my tea!” the King ordered as he barged into my room, or as I
would like to call it, my dreary, dimly lit dungeon. “It’s… I haven’t-” I stutter, as my brain
rummages for a selection of words to tell him that I was just on my way to get it.
However, my search comes to an abrupt halt when the back of his left-hand swings
from his side, across the space between us, slamming into my right cheek. My ears
begin to ring, and I can barely stand, as I stagger backwards, feeling for something I
can grasp before I collapse. At this point, I’m fuming. I can swear that my ears are
steaming due to the heat stinging my eyes, causing hot tears to trickle down my
damaged cheeks. 
When my eyes could finally find focus, I simply strolled past him, trying to avoid
any eye contact before he yelled again. I was infuriated. I wanted to flee this doomed
land. I wanted to hit him where it hurt, badly. But I couldn’t, because if I did, he could
grab any edged object to kill me, like he has attempted to do. I’m a slave here with no
power whatsoever.  
Forget being a slave. I can’t take this anymore. This man must die. 
I make my way to the kitchen and prepare the tea as I would on any other day,
only that today ended up being different. Dangerously different. 
I bring the water to a boil and pour it into a mug, letting the contents of the teabag
dissipate into the water. Next, I pour precisely three tablespoons of milk into the tea and
stir. The king always has tea with sugar. I remember this because I was nearly unalive
when he flung a mug across the room, aiming for my face, because I forgot to add
sugar to his tea. I cannot afford to near death again because even though life is cruel
under this man’s roof, I’m sure of one thing: I must outlive this cruel man. 
The sugar is usually kept in a glass jar with the label: SUGAR on it, but when I
got to the shelf, yes, I did see a glass jar containing white crystalline particles, but not
labelled. I searched other compartments of the shelf, no sign of sugar. The sugar must
be here, somewhere I thought. They couldn’t have just removed the label out of
nowhere? I checked other cupboards but no sight of a labeled jar. I shrugged the
thought that it could be something else, and I scooped two generous tablespoons of the substance out of the jar, and into the King’s tea. 
As I plated the tea, a fellow concubine came in, demanding that she wanted to
serve it herself. 
“You can be plotting to kill him for all I know!” she ranted. 
As much as I would love to watch him die, there’s no way I could do it. Not now
at least. 
I refused to reply, but she wasn’t taking no for an answer. She snatched the mug from
the plate I was holding, and stirs the tea vigorously, trying to see if sediments suspend
from the tea, to prove that maybe I’m a murderer. When she doesn’t get anything, she
finally takes a sip of it. Still nothing. 
She places the mug back on the plate she snatched it from. Seconds later,
something feels off about her. It’s like she was trying to say something, but the words
couldn’t make their way out of her mouth but transformed into groans as they escaped.
Her eyes rolled sheepishly, and she kept bobbing her head backwards till she fell to the
floor.  
What just happened! 
 She couldn’t have collapsed suddenly? No! Maybe she was sick, and she cannot hide
the illness any longer. 
Or maybe I’ve killed her? 
I do a mental scan of all the ingredients I put in the tea: Tea bag, Water, Sugar… 
Sugar. 
I rushed to the shelf and pulled out the jar I supposed was sugar. I checked the
sides of the jar, hoping I’d find the nutritional value, or was blind and the name of the
substance was boldly written there. How could I be this careless! 
I turned the jar upside down; where I saw a little note pasted there: 
WARNING 
CYANIDE 
DO NOT TOUCH 
Extremely toxic, large amounts could lead to DEATH 
I paused for a moment, making illustrations with my hands to piece together
these bizarre events: 
I put cyanide in the tea. She drank the tea. She’s dead. 
I began restlessly pacing around her lifeless body. What am I going to do? As I turned
around to resume the pacing, a thought dashed through my head, and I started piecing
that together. Fortunately, the answer to my miserable life lay in the puzzle. 
I put cyanide in the tea. The King drinks the tea. The King dies. 
With that, a smirk appears on my sweaty face. I pick up the plate with the mug of tea,
and head up to the king’s chamber…