Shayna's poem "How to Pretend" won third place in the January 2017 issue.
She is a senior at Columbus Torah Academy in Columbus, Ohio.​
This is her first entry into The Bedford Ledger, along with another masterful poem "Infinity."

Tell us a little about yourself.
     I have lived in Columbus, Ohio my entire life. I have an older brother, Max, and a younger sister, Gillian. 
    In my spare time, I love reading, writing, and playing sports - especially volleyball and basketball. I am also a musical theater lover who is always ready to spontaneously burst into song. In the case of Hamilton, I can also spontaneously burst into rap, but definitely not very well.​

When did you first start writing poetry?
      I first began writing poetry when I was in second grade. The first poem I remember writing was about Thanksgiving. I was probably just was inspired because I had found some word that rhymed with "turkey," and that started a spiral toward where I am today. It was a terrible poem - the kind where I obviously could not find rhyming words that actually connected to each other(like "gravy" and "Old Navy" - yeah, that happened) - but the principal still asked me to read it onstage at my school's Thanksgiving show. I cringe when I think about it now, but it was a great moment for me at the time.
      Honestly, I do not know why I continued writing so consistently since then, especially after hitting my prime at the aforementioned second grade Thanksgiving show, but it made sense. I was always the kid in the classroom who just wanted to read, so it was only logical that someday I would want to make reading material of my own.

Who or what inspires your love for writing/poetry?
​     There is something to be said for making something beautiful out of something terrible. I have always loved the idea of creating from destruction, something good coming from something bad. Like a phoenix - the old, faded form of the phoenix burns up, and a younger, more radiant one rises from the ashes. Similarly, I love the idea of taking something I am struggling with, or something that bothers me, and using it to write something that is new, and that is capable of making people happy. It almost makes the bad things seem a bit better, if I can at least create from them. So, I guess what inspires me is the idea of using the bad in the world to try to make something good.

Do you have any favorite poets or poems that you like to read or have influenced your style of writing?
         I love to read the writing of Edgar Allan Poe and T.S. Eliot. The two are very different, but I think the reason I love them so much is that they were both among the first poets to whom I was exposed. 
When I was four, my grandma gave me a copy of "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats," the T.S. Eliot book that inspired the musical Cats (I was going through a cat-loving phase), and I managed to memorize several poems in that book - I would wander around the preschool classroom reciting "The Naming of Cats."
        A few years later, when I was in third grade, I had already been writing poetry for a bit over a year, and I decided it was time to find some poetry in the school library. During my free time, I randomly selected a collection of Poe's work, and randomly flipped to "Tamerlane." The words confused me, but then I found "The Raven." I adored the story, the language, and the symbolism - not to mention the fact that it was centered around my favorite animal at the time - and I was completely hooked.

     Since then, I have expanded on my ability to judge poetry, but I still love the two poets - now with a much stronger basis than I did before. I love the way Eliot plays with sounds and language, and I admire Poe's dark style and metaphors.
         I also have become drawn to watching videos of poetry slams - the passion in the poets' voices adds so much to the emotion of the poetry. As much as I love to read poetry, seeing and hearing a poet's emotion as they recite their poem is a completely different experience.

Give us some background on your writing - do you only write poetry? Do you write for pleasure? Have you won any other contests?
      In addition to poetry, I love to write short stories. I tend to prefer fiction over nonfiction, because I love the endless possibilities of creation within a fictional universe. When I am writing within a character, story, and place of my own creation, I feel like I can do anything.
      Also, as I prepare to go to Israel for seminary after high school, I have been looking for small ways I can maintain my love of writing when I am in a non-English speaking country, so I have taken to journaling in the form of writing haikus every day, inspired by Tyler Knott Gregson's "All The Words Are Yours," in which Gregson published a year's worth of daily haikus about love.
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What was the inspiration or the story behind your winning poem?
​    In the summer of 2015, I went to Poland on an NCSY summer program called JOLT. JOLT inspired me to write a lot of poetry about the Holocaust and about the experience of being Jewish and having pride in my Judaism.
     When I was in Poland, I saw what remains from the horrors of the Holocaust. In addition, I was shocked by the way Poland had lived on, surrounding the very spots where my fellow Jews were murdered. Children skipped down the sidewalk, holding hands with their parents, as they passed the walls of the Warsaw ghetto. A group of teenagers sat at the entrance to Majdanek, a fully intact concentration camp, eating lunch and taking selfies on their cell phones. 
    I could not understand how the deaths of six million people could be nothing more than the background of people's daily lives. I was insulted that a tragedy for my people was just a place to eat lunch for these people. Additionally, I feared that this ignorance would someday grow into a complete lack of knowledge. As painful as the past is, if we forget the past, we are doomed to repeat it.
      My poem, "How to Pretend," compares the world - especially countries that turned against the Jewish people in the time of the Holocaust - to a tree. World War II and the Holocaust were like a cold, bitter winter on the world, and now the world is growing again, sprouting leaves, flowers, and fruit, as if this winter never happened. In this era of a "diamond spring," beautiful and fruitful, it is so easy to pretend that our past - the horrible "winter" - never happened: the desperate, outreaching "branches," people who were broken and longed to be free, and the young "leaves," the children who were murdered before they had the chance to make their mark on the world. 
     If you ignore the ugly, dirty roots of a tree, it makes the tree look prettier, but a tree without its roots cannot survive. Similarly, if you pretend the dark past of the world never happened, it makes the present time look better, but humanity can not survive in this way. We need to remember the past, no matter how much it hurts.​