“It is easier to imagine the end of the world than
it is to imagine the changes necessary to save it.”
Why is that?
The book you hold in your hand is the result of the continued partnership among 826LA, Paramount Pictures, and Students in the Cinematic Arts & Creative Technologies Magnet Center at Helen Bernstein High School. Through the Kindergarten to Cap & Gown program, employees from Paramount Pictures have provided more than
10,000 hours of mentoring to 500 students at Helen Bernstein High School, Le Conte Junior High School, and Santa Monica Boulevard Community Charter School and STEM Academy over the last 10 years.
Working through lessons designed and led by 826LA, students wrote stories of utopian memoirs—memories of a perfect place or moment in time, of utopian advocacy—arguments for improving or protecting places sacred to them, and finally utopian fiction—descriptions of yet-to-be-realized ideal places.
In their acts of remembering, of advocating, and of envisioning, these stories are templates for reclaiming the past, critiquing the present, and ensuring the future. And in writing them, these student authors ultimately challenge the idea of a “natural order,” that there are no alternatives to the way things are. In the words of the late British cultural theorist Mark Fisher, these stories, “reveal what is presented as necessary and inevitable to be a mere contingency [and] what was previously deemed to be impossible seem attainable.”
