A good cry. A long walk or run. A venting session with a trusted friend. We all deal with our biggest stresses and most complicated feelings in different ways.
Senior Ally Frank’s go-to coping mechanism is writing. Writing poetry, specifically.
“I’ve been writing as a way to release emotions for a very long time,” Frank said.
Since the age of about 11, Frank has been chronicling her most intimate and poignant feelings about the events of her life through poetry. This fall, in her Creative Writing class with Mr. Robert Zagorski, Frank had a poetry assignment that led her to revisit some of those old poems and compile them into a collection with some of her more recent poems.
That was the catalyst for a project that Frank could have never expected: a book. And within just about a month, Frank was suddenly a published author.
On Nov. 29, Frank’s book, “late night thoughts & all the things I never said” was officially available for purchase on Amazon.
“I used to hate poetry,” laughed Frank, who published the book and designed its cover herself. “If you had asked me years ago if I were to publish a book what it would be, poetry would be the last thing I would have said. But my book is modern poetry. It’s not Shakespearean poetry, it’s not prose, it’s modern poetry where the feelings and imagery lead the message.
“There’s something so releasing about being able to sit and stare at a blank piece of paper or a blank document on a computer and being able to say whatever you want. I wanted to make this book relatable to everyone. Even if they didn’t go through the same experiences I did, they are still able to read the book and say, “This is something I relate to.’”
Frank, who uses the tagline "the weight on my chest dissipates when i take the time to write down all the things i never said" to describe the book on Amazon, writes about tough times at school, the agony of inexplicably being dropped by friends, and many other delicate issues that tweens and teens often face.
“It’s a good representation of the way I have felt growing up,” Frank said. “When the book was being edited, I remember saying to the editors, ‘Please don’t edit for content. I want you to read for grammar and spelling but I don’t want any content edits because that content is my unedited thoughts.’ And they would tell me that some things didn’t make sense. And I would tell them, ‘Well, if you look at it this way, it does.’ And that’s the way I intended it.
“And that’s OK because that’s what poetry is. If someone takes it one way and I meant it another way, that’s perfectly fine. All that matters is that you take it in a way that resonates with you.”
There are more than 100 poems in Frank’s book, with about one-fourth of them being from her youngest years (ages 11 and 12) and the rest being more current. She is already working on her second book of poetry, “telephone line,” which delves into the meaning of connection and disconnection, centering around the imagery of a telephone, while examining why both connection and disconnection is important. That book is due out in February.
And yet, Frank isn’t even the most published author in her family. Her older brother Jeremy Frank, a 2019 Stevenson graduate, has already published two books and is about to publish a third. He writes about interesting and obscure statistics in Major League Baseball. Jeremy Frank is now a student at Purdue, which is where Ally is hoping to attend college and double major in clinical psychology and American Sign Language Interpreting.
“My brother was a great help to me in getting everything published,” Frank said. “It helped that he had done it before. But it was still such a whirlwind. I was not thinking I would do this, and it all kind of came together. But I’m glad it did. It’s been pretty cool and I’m excited about the next (book).”
Frank’s book is currently available on Amazon. The paperback version is $10.99 and the Kindle version is $8.65.