Our future depends on stories. As the world advances, literature has the ability to ground us—in our humanness, our imaginations, and our enlightenment. Fueled by the need to interpret the past, to explore the present, and to imagine the future, each generation shapes the world of books. In order to preserve this, we must have a new generation willing to share their stories. The support young writers receive is vital to whether they keep writing, and it fuels the stories yet to come.
However, this support does not always exist. Growing up in Aligarh, India, I had limited resources for sharing my writing. There was no platform for me to receive feedback or advice, and I struggled to find sincere reviewers. I kept writing, but many children do not. This problem drove me to where I am today. With the vision of supporting young writers, I started the annual Lune Spark Short Story Contest in May 2017. It is open to writers between the ages of ten and sixteen.
A Window to Young Minds is the first of the contest’s yearly anthologies, Short Stories by Young Writers. The twenty-three wonderful stories in this book are handpicked from 2017’s entries. The talent of these young writers shines in their command of storytelling and their unique take on genre—from telling a pirate love story to re-creating the Hindenburg disaster that happened on May 6, 1937, in New Jersey.
If the future depends on stories, then our future looks bright indeed.
