American Turtles

By The Students in the Art of Neil Gaiman

A class of students at UCLA focused on the work of master storyteller Neil Gaiman. For inspiration, they set out for the day into a hidden garden on campus, a place of prehistoric ginkgoes and mysterious streams, and began to write. This collection of thirteen original short stories inspired by the works of Neil Gaiman is the result of that sunny winter day. Stories by Melanie Gharehptian, Cynthia Huang, Kimberly Juarez, Alexander Kim, Erik Knall, Rachel Maples, Brandon Pham, Ranger Saldivar, Melissa Smith, Dalia Sherif, Shabnam Tabesh, Andrew Takeda, and Shuming Wang.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tara Prescott
• Release date: May 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781310354595

The Students in the Art of Neil Gaiman

In the winter quarter of 2016, nineteen students enrolled in Honors Collegium 87W: The Art of Neil Gaiman at the University of California, Los Angeles. This writing course, designed and taught by Dr. Tara Prescott, introduced students to a wide range of Gaiman’s texts, including his jewel-like short stories.Honors 87W Editorial Board: Melanie Gharehptian, Cynthia Huang, Kimberly Juarez, Alexander Kim, Erik Knall, Rachel Maples, Brandon Pham, Tara Prescott, Ranger Saldivar, Melissa Smith, Dalia Sherif, Shabnam Tabesh, Andrew Takeda, Shuming Wang

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American Turtles

Short Stories Inspired by the Works of Neil Gaiman

By Students in Honors 87W: The Art of Neil Gaiman at UCLA

Copyright © 2016 by Tara Prescott. All rights reserved. Please note: The copyright for each story contained in this volume is retained by the respective author.

Smashwords Edition

Honors 87W Editorial Board: Melanie Gharehptian, Cynthia Huang, Kimberly Juarez, Alexander Kim, Erik Knall, Rachel Maples, Brandon Pham, Tara Prescott, Ranger Saldivar, Melissa Smith, Dalia Sherif, Shabnam Tabesh, Andrew Takeda, Shuming Wang.

This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author(s) except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Prescott Publishing

PO Box 951384

Los Angeles, CA 90095

For

the

Queen

of

Melanesia

Acknowledgements

We would like to extend our thanks to UCLA’s Writing Programs, the College of Letters & Science Honors Collegium, and the Honors Faculty Advisory Committee for supporting Dr. Tara Prescott’s proposal for a writing course dedicated to the work of Neil Gaiman.

Thank you to Wendy Morris, Director of Programs at UCLA’s Mildred E. Mathias Botanical Garden, for arranging a tour for this project, and Phillip Kwan and the talented group of volunteer docents who share their passion for conservation and conversation in the garden. If you’re ever on the UCLA campus, you simply must stop by the Mildred E. Mathias Botanical Garden. It’s a treasure.

Thank you to Marty Brennan, the Copyright and Licensing Librarian at UCLA, who advised our class about permissions for their creative work. If you are interested in publishing any of the stories in this collection, or want to ask the authors to see more of their work (or to offer them jobs!) please contact Dr. Tara Prescott or the individual authors.

And most importantly, thank you to the brave and bold writers who shared their stories in this collection. They dedicated a lot of time to analyzing Neil Gaiman’s work, dreaming up their own stories, and completing several rounds of revisions. Thank you Cynthia, Melissa, Erik, Shabby, Alex, Kim, Mel, Brandon, Shuming, Ranger, Dalia, Rachel, and Andrew (whose story lent its title for this collection). If life were a Gaiman story, you’d clearly be the everyday students suddenly thrust into UCLA Below, ready to conquer the Beast of the Trojans and save the incoming freshmen, all in time for a cup of tea.

Table of Contents

Introduction by Tara Prescott

Penny for Your Thoughts by Cynthia Huang

Wendla and the Boy Next Door by Melissa Smith

The Moments That Haunt Us by Shabnam Tabesh

Lunch with the Gardens by Erik Knall

A Flash and a Pop by Alexander Kim

The Silence of Silas Shaw by Kimberly Juarez

I Am Matt Gallagher by Melanie Gharehptian

The Man of Sand by Brandon Pham

81 Verses by Shuming Wang

Nightmare Fuel by Ranger Saldivar

After Cinnamon by Dalia Sherif

Acknowledgments by Rachel Maples

American Turtles by Andrew Takeda

About the Contributors

Introduction

Tara Prescott

I grew up loving and respecting short stories. They seemed to me to be the purest and most perfect things people could make: not a word wasted, in the best of them.

—Neil Gaiman, Trigger Warning

In the winter quarter of 2016, nineteen students enrolled in Honors Collegium 87W: The Art of Neil Gaiman at the University of California, Los Angeles. This writing course, designed and taught by Dr. Tara Prescott, introduced students to a wide range of Gaiman’s texts, including his jewel-like short stories. The class met twice a week to talk about stunning stories and scary tales and what lessons students can learn about their own writing by reading Gaiman. They wrestled with Reddit, read picture books on the floor to each other, and even held class on their own one day when their professor was stuck in a meeting.

Learning to write requires a lot of reading, and one of the best ways to improve your writing is to read writers you love and try to practice a bit of their magic on your own.

So that’s what the class set out to do. On January 28, 2016, the class met at the Mildred E. Mathias Botanical Garden on UCLA’s campus for a special writing assignment. The garden is named for a former professor in UCLA’s Department of Botany (one of the few women faculty members at the time), and director of the Botanical Garden from 1956 through 1974. Dr. Mathias was a horticulturalist, environmentalist, and champion for the protection of tropical forests and her legacy lives on in the garden, which is open to the public and hosts events to promote knowledge about biodiversity, environmentalism, and appreciation for nature. The Mildred E. Mathias Garden is a living museum filled with trees, flowers, plants, grasses (and yes, turtles)—an essential resource that contributes not only to UCLA’s teaching and research mission, but also to the well-being of its students (http://www.botgard.ucla.edu). We all need a place to connect with nature, especially when living in a metropolis like Los Angeles.

On that day, the class met in the Nest, an outdoor classroom, and volunteer docents took students on a