Featured Publication · 2026 Bechtel Prize Honorable Mention
“A Pagoda”
Feelings, needs, and cultural identity as the building blocks of storytelling
A reflective essay on teaching creative writing in Cambodia, and the closest thing to a manifesto I have published. Its argument is its method: students don't need to borrow stories from elsewhere to become writers. They need a classroom that treats their emotions, families, languages, and cultural memories as literary material, and a teacher who listens first.
The classroom
The essay opens in a crowded classroom that loses power mid-lesson, second-to-fifth graders on a concrete floor, mothers and grandmothers sitting in, a miniature pagoda visible near the doorway. From there it builds a writing course from the inside out: a read-aloud of Lydia Branković's The Grand Hotel of Feelings; a feelings-and-needs inventory that gives students an emotional vocabulary before anyone mentions grammar; identity trees branching from “I am”; letters to their mothers written in vivid, sensory language; and finally, students transcribing Cambodian folktales in both Khmer and English, their own oral tradition becoming their first literature.
The idea
The title holds the pedagogy. Writing, in this classroom, is treated as construction, each chosen word a stone, fitted with care, the way a pagoda is built. Students who live with real instability get one space that is wholly theirs to design: the page. Before anything can be built there, though, they have to believe they have a voice worth writing with, which is why the course begins with feelings and family, not vocabulary lists, and why the teacher's first job is to listen.
Key themes
- Multilingual literacy and Khmer-English learning, English as expression, not replacement
- Emotional vocabulary as the foundation of narrative voice
- Identity writing: family, memory, and culture as literary material
- Oral tradition entering the classroom, folktales as first texts
- The teacher as listener; the classroom as a safe place to experiment with voice
Where the philosophy went next
The same arc, from naming feelings to writing to mothers to transcribing folktales bilingually, became the model for Lumen Education Program: multilingual children's books co-authored with Cambodian youth, printed and placed in libraries the children can reach.
Students named in the published essay are not identified on this site.