Juniors Dania Bressler and Lenny Metlitsky Published In Anthology

Note: Lenny Metlitsky is a web editor for The Spectator.

Juniors Dania Bressler and Lenny Metlitsky were recently published in the anthology ”Connecting Across Cultures: A Collection of Writing by Ten Jewish and Muslim American Teens” after participating in Writopia Lab’s Connecting Across Cultures program. In this program, they worked with other teenagers from around the country and shared stories about their own lives and wrote collaborative pieces.

The Connecting Across Cultures program included 10 Muslim and Jewish teen writers, who met on Zoom every week. The program was intended to facilitate the introduction and collaboration of teenagers from different backgrounds with hopes of understanding each other better by sharing their burdens, hopes, and dreams. The program was appealing to Bressler, who joined because she wanted to connect with others of similar and different cultures. “I saw this and thought, ‘oh, this would be a great opportunity to talk to people, learn about their point of view, [and] find community in a difficult time,’” Bressler said.

During the program, students shared their cultural experiences with each other in breakout rooms both verbally and through writing. Since the program was on Zoom, Bressler and Metlitsky were able to meet and hear the experiences of other teenagers from all around the country. “There were people from a lot of different places from all around the country, so we got to connect that way. We did a lot of writing in addition to talking so that’s how we were able to publish that anthology in the end,” Bressler said.

The program first focused on building relationships between participants so they would feel comfortable talking to each other and get to know each other better before delving into harder topics. While Metlitsky signed up expecting to talk about the war, the first meeting was about a simpler topic—foods of different cultures. “So I was paired with a Muslim girl—she’s actually Pakistani—and we talked about Biryani for an hour, and obviously that’s not what I expected when I first joined a program to talk about the war,” Metlitsky said.

There was a great emphasis on collaboration, with students working on collaborative pieces with one or two groupmates. The piece was especially memorable to Bressler, who thought it was interesting how she was able to interlock her story with the two other people in her group. “I wrote the beginning section and someone else wrote the middle section and we used small pieces of our story to connect with each other. It was a really cool way of writing because I’ve never written with other people like that before, in a collaborative piece,” Bressler said.

Metlitsky wrote an individual piece about his childhood experiences. The piece came from a writing prompt about childhood memories, with him writing about his experience in a Jewish summer camp. “I talked about how I missed it and how that community kind of doesn’t exist anymore,” Metlitsky said.

At the end of the program, Bressler and Metlitsky had their works published in the anthology, with each participant publishing one individual piece and one collaborative piece. The anthology is available for purchase on Amazon with paperback and Kindle versions available. Bressler and Metlitsky read their pieces at a final reading on March 5 before working with their teachers separately to format and put their pieces into the book, which was then published by Writopia. “We did a ton of revision over and over. Then Writopia has a publishing lab so that’s how it got published,” Bressler said.

The final reading at the end of the program was also very important, as the participants read their work to the rest of the cohort, parents, and teachers. Originally, the participants didn’t know that there would be an anthology published, but they thought the final reading was the culmination of their work. “Now, the reading ceremony is what the program was really about. It was less about the book at first, it was about this reading ceremony,” Metlitsky said.

In the future, Writopia Lab is likely to do similar programs to Connecting Across Cultures with other cohorts. “If anyone from Stuy is interested in doing something like this, there are going to be other cohorts, hopefully it’ll expand and there’ll be more published anthologies coming up,” Bressler said.

Overall, Bressler and Metlitsky seemed to enjoy participating in the program—they liked how they were able to meet with different people and hear about each others’ ideas and experiences. “It was really great, I loved every part of it. It was really nice getting to meet other kids once a week,” Bressler said.