Mac Rouse ’16 Wins Scholastic Silver Medal for Poetry

Congratulations to Mac Rouse ’16, recipient of a Scholastic Art & Writing Silver Medal in poetry.

Mac’s poem, “If the Grand Canyon Could Talk” will be included in the Art. Write. Now. 2016 National Exhibition in New York, June 2-12. The poem will also be published in Missouri Youth Write in June.

The Scholastic Art & Writing awards received a record-breaking 320,000 entries; medalists were selected from among the 2,200 regional Gold Key recipients.

“If the Grand Canyon Could Talk” is based on the geological history of the Grand Canyon, layered research into that history with personal narrative, blending the two together in the metaphor of the canyon as a 1.8 billion year old man who has endured much and bears the scars of that history. Chris Rappleye, Mac’s English teacher at MICDS, said the poem “uses a lot of the concepts and techniques that we emphasized in creative writing, combining them in a novel way to help us see something new about our relationship to the environment and how our resilience and scars make us beautiful, and does so without negating the real pain we’ve encountered along the way. In his initial envisioning and then in the revisioning process, he made what might have been a dry intellectual exercise–a geological tour of the canyon– into something we can connect to both intellectually and emotionally.”

As a writer, Mr. Rappleye continues, Mac “has the openness and willingness to experiment, risk, reconsider and refine his work to heighten the effect he is after, qualities common among creative people and perhaps too rare among the general population. Mac’s worthy recognition by the Scholastic Writing Competition celebrates this process and the resulting product in a much a wider context, confirming his thoughtful creative process and intelligence.”

Enjoy Mac’s poem here.