PAGE Curating Spaces for Youth
The PAGE (Partnership for Appalachian Girls’ Education) program, founded in 2010, was developed to inspire and empower underserved rural girls through education entering grades 6-12. This summer, the PAGE leadership team, including Literature Program Coordinator Amy Stemann and five college interns, worked together to create literary opportunities for a group of young women to develop their writing skills and love for literature. Featured below are notes from PAGE’s Programs Director, Maia Surdam, and college intern, Gabrielle Maryland (a current student at Appalachian State University) about their work, as well as a collection of literary pieces written by some of the girls in this program.
From Gabrielle Maryland
This past summer I had the privilege of becoming an intern at PAGE, otherwise known as the Partnership for Appalachian Girls’ Education. It is a nonprofit organization based in Marshall, North Carolina.
A small town carved by the banks of the French Broad River and the expansive mountain ranges that give way to rolling hillsides–Marshall is a community steeped not only in its centuries-old history. But also its collective attempts for continued communal progress.
In a post-Helene landscape, towns like Marshall can be found throughout the Western range of North Carolina–but what makes this place and its people so unique is the sheer amount of local organizations aimed at helping and empowering their neighbors.
PAGE, whose mission is to ‘educate and empower girls so that they can become leaders in an ever-evolving Appalachia’, is responsible for serving over three hundred local youth as they navigate their middle and high school aged years.
This summer I had the amazing opportunity to work with many of these young people during my tenure.
It was an honor to watch as a cohort of well-educated and experienced facilitators worked with my group of interns to craft curriculum and teach the student participants STE(A)M and Humanities based modules aimed at expanding their embodied knowledge of the projects explored.
I was able to watch as teams of students engaged in scholarship that perpetually lended to local and global academic gains in the fields of ecological field research and oral history preservation within the region.
As a byproduct of witnessing this inspiring work, I, along with many in my cohort, were tasked by PAGE’s Literature Program Coordinator, Amy Stemann (a Berea College alum from 2023), to design unique projects to culminate our intern-led summer literature groups. With our respective literary selections, each of us took the initiative to encourage our students to create works that challenged their grasp of the chosen material. For my group, I asked my students to write original prose that subverted the existing tropes of female-oriented stories, particularly as it pertained to Young Adult fiction.
The result was an assortment of stories that defied the banality of the form, and did so with witty, outlandish, experiential fantasies that pushed the boundaries of the underlying horrors of growing up.
Though this project was only a small part of my time at PAGE, it was an utter delight to lead these students in the creation of their projects, as they did so with such empowered and daring perspectives. It is for this reason, and for so many more that makes the work that PAGE does an irreplaceable addition to the community of Marshall, and I dare say, to the framework of a future Appalachia where girls are not only educated, but emboldened to take up space.
From Maia Surdam
Our Literature Program has been a staple of PAGE since we began in 2010. One goal of this program is simply to cultivate a love of reading among our students. In small book groups, the girls read a story, use journaling to explore their thoughts, and engage in dialogue with each other about all of it. Over the past 15 years, girls in PAGE have had countless literary adventures together, guided by college interns who choose the books, prepare activities and discussion questions, and design projects that allow the girls to explore the books’ themes in creative ways.
This past Summer, Gabrielle Maryland’s group wrote original pieces of fiction after reading the novel, Guardian by AJ Messinger. Zelda Hoek’s piece, “Maggot,” came directly from this experience. The two other pieces submitted, poetry by Maria McDaris and Maribel Flores, were inspired by their literature group, led by interns Josie Fields and Peyton Mozer. We hope you enjoy hearing the unique voices from these young writers.