I Miss You, August
Written by the students of 826LA's 2025 Winter Writers Workshop, hosted by The Green Bus Artspace
Introduction by Trevor Crown
I have always been drawn to old photographs. As a kid, I loved to find pictures of my grandpa from before I was born, and before my dad was born–from before my grandpa had even met my grandma. I loved the way those pictures forced me to reckon with the fact that, despite their being black-and-white, he had lived in color, and despite the length of his shorts, his shirt wasn’t all that different from mine, and despite the fact that he had now passed away, he had once gone to school and played with his friends and dreamt about his future just like I did. It made sense of the friendship I felt with his memory, to think that in some other life we might have been third-grade classmates and gotten along famously, whether in his century or mine.
Watching the students of 826LA’s Winter Writer’s Workshop interact with the magnificently curated 20th-century found photos of the Green Bus Art Space––and reading the writing that these photos inspired––I saw them reach back across time to give total strangers their due, befriending them through imagining their stories. I was moved again and again by these young authors’ ability to inhabit the thoughts and emotions of people born a hundred years before them. In the devastating vignette “I Almost Never Have What I Want,” Sky R. writes from the perspective of a girl in a dress “as sparkly as the stars and as green as rich fresh grass” but who despairs of the imminent pressures of womanhood: “posing for a picture I don’t want to take, looking proper when I just want to be silly and free.” In the stunningly evocative poem “Young, Wild, and Free,” Demi Grace F. writes in the voice of a World War II soldier at the announcement of armistice: “never again will we walk in the blood-stained fields,” and “for the first time we will dance in the gleaming lake.” In his poem “Flood,” Isaac M. interrogates the purpose of revisiting memories that bring us pain, with his narrator gazing into a picture of all he’s lost, asking, “why do I still have this photo?”
We still have these photos because they allow us some communion, some shared experience with people, places, and things that have otherwise disappeared from the earth––even those we never knew. They are proof of life, of laughter, of the fact that times have changed and will change again.
Now to that same end we have these blindingly beautiful and stupendously silly stories and poems, which might one day provide their authors with a similar portal back in time. I hope you enjoy them as much as I have, and find a friend of your own among these characters.