Two Homewood-Flossmoor High School students are now published authors, with their works having been published in the October 2018 issue of Teen Ink magazine.
The poem “Let This Love Be a Lesson” by Jada Seaton was done for a class assignment, and the essay “I Have Two Names” by Oyindasola Chelsea Ayorinde, a senior, is her essay for college admissions that she started as a sophomore in a creative writing class.
Two Homewood-Flossmoor High School students are now published authors. Their work appeared in the October 2018 issue of Teen Ink magazine.
The poem “Let This Love Be a Lesson” by Jada Seaton was done for a class assignment, and the essay “I Have Two Names” by Oyindasola Chelsea Ayorinde, a senior, is her essay for college admissions that she started as a sophomore in a creative writing class.
The students submitted their work with encouragement from Creative Writing teacher Sahar Mustafah. When Teen Ink was delivered to H-F, the teacher distributed copies to the class, and that’s when they saw their works in print.
Jada said her class assignment prompt was to write a piece that gave a sense of “beautiful brutality, and so we were supposed to take something unpleasant, not happy, and write it in a way that made it more acceptable.”
She said the poem is “partly happy and partly sad” as she describes being “really happy to be with this person, but sometimes it’s tough to be with this person.”
Jada, the daughter of Tanya and Len Seaton of Flossmoor, is in the Creative Writing class at H-F. Her latest assignment was a short story that required a problem and a solution. Jada chose the topic: How to love yourself. In it, “the narrator is attempting to do things to sort of make you feel better about yourself, but at each step she lost self-esteem.”
“I presented it to the class and they were really affected by it,” she said.
“I just love writing poetry, short stories,” she said, and intends to major in creative writing in college.
Chelsea’s essay relates a story about the Anglo name she uses, but she wants to keep her Nigerian roots that she carries with her given name Oyindasola.
She wrote the essay as a sophomore in Creative Writing for an assignment about experiences and life experiences and “that was one of the most profound for me.” In junior year, she needed an essay about identity and “I built upon that essay and added a couple more things. A lot of my lines come from my junior year of high school.”
“My senior year the work was already there, it was just refining it and going over it,” she said. What is published is a rough draft version. “The completed version I submitted for my college application essay.”
“I’m definitely trying to take advantage of schools that have great creative writing programs so I can build on that and also refine my work and grow as a writer,” she said.
But her college career will be nursing, emulating her Nigerian grandmother and her mother, Fulake Ayorinde of Homewood, who are nurses. Her father, Akin Ayorinde, lives in New York.
“I also see that (nursing has) impacted my mom’s life in a positive way,” she said. She has been by her mother’s side at her job and witnessed how she interacts with patients.
“She works with older people in nursing homes and she talks about how profound they’ve been and changed her life, so that’s also like trickled down to my experience and what I’ll do,” she said.