2 Friday, July 6, 2018 brooklintowncrier.com Ernest Hemingway rewrote the ending to A Farewell to Arms at least 39 times. In 1958, 29 years after the novel's publication, "Paris Review" editor George Plimpton asked him why so many. Hemingway replied, "To get the words right." Which is to say recent Brooklin High School grad Emilie Surette is in rather good company. Her fledgling career as a writer includes dabbling with short stories whose endings remain, well, unfinished. "A lot of them don't reach completion," she said with a smile after the grad ceremony on June 28, "because I don't like endings. I can't write them well. I have to figure where I want to end those." Surette won the Brooklin Town Crier award that afternoon, which carries with it a $400 bursary. It'll be put to good use when she attends Queen's University in the fall to study English. The award is given annually (beginning last year) to the graduating student planning to pursue English, media or communications technology studies in post-secondary. Surette also won the school's English Department award. Creative writing really blossomed for her in high school when she entered the grade 9 drama program at Donald A. Wilson the year before Brooklin High opened its doors. She wrote the school play The Flipside last year and was part of the writing team for this year's production about mental health, To Alex with love. A highlight that, she says, has really helped her writing was the grade 12 Writer's Craft course, which exposes students to various forms of the craft, from fiction and poetry to non-fiction. For those like her with a writing bent, it's the crown jewel of high school English courses. "It was absolutely fantastic," she recalls. "I loved it. We wrote all this poetry. I was never a big poet but now I have a whole new apprecia- tion for it. It's quite transformative." Listening to her talk about her passion for writing would be inspiring to any young person even remotely interested in putting words on a page. Surette is open minded enough to know that, while at Queen's, a new world for writers opens up. She wants to lap up as much as she can, "taking something of everything" in order to best determine where to go forward. "There are lots of opportunities there," she says. "Like the school newspaper. I'm interested in non-fiction as well. In school, we do a lot of essays but you don't write a lot of article type pieces. It's something I really want to try out in the future." She's spent a lifetime in Brooklin and is looking forward to meeting new people in Kingston. As for writing, she'll discover soon enough if Hemingway was correct. "There is nothing to writing," he once said. "All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed." When endings become beginnings Less than Half the Picture By Richard Bercuson