From time to time, Downhome receives stories and poetry written by our younger readers and the editors thought it would be a wonderful idea to encourage more of that. So we issued a challenge to all our elementary, junior high and senior high school students. We asked them to write something (everything ranging from stories about who inspires them, to what "downhome" means to them) during the 2009-2010 school year and send it along.

In the end, we received over 60 stories, essays and poems (both fiction and non-fiction) from all over the province and country, and since it was so hard to choose a winner from all of the excellent entries, we put everyone's name into a bag for a random draw.

So...congratulations to 10-year-old Emma Hussey, a Grade 5 student at Eric G. Lambert School in Churchill Falls, NL, who won a laptop computer (valued at approximately $599)!


Young Writers Challenge winner Emma Hussey with her teacher Ms. Bryde Bolger-Howell.

Check out Emma's "ABC Poem" below. To read all of the other fantastic submissions, click here. We'll publish as many submissions as we can in upcoming editions of Downhome magazine, so keep your eyes open!