News on the March!

Will made the paper the other day -- twice actually.

But more importantly, I found out that Will made the paper a long time ago.

Samuel F. Pickering Jr., a professor of English at the University of Connecticut, also found much to praise in the work of his student, William Griggs, a 16-year-old junior at Hartford Public High. "He wrote a story about how the food in the school cafeteria turns into a food monster, and this chap goes out and kills the monster," said Mr. Pickering...

The young writer "has a very nice style, with good crisp sentences," said Mr. Pickering, who teaches several writing courses at UConn and is the author of seven books. "And he told the story with taste, which in such a story can be hard to do. I took out some excess wordage, but told him, 'Look, we all get edited and rewritten, no matter how long we've been around.' " 'Will, Willie, Bill, Billy'

Mr. Griggs, whose family moved back to Hartford two years ago after living in Lubbock, Tex., for eight years, said he was thrilled at having Mr. Pickering as his mentor. "It's great," the young man said. "My English teacher told me about him."

On entering the program, each student wrote a brief biographical sketch. Mr. Pickering said he got a kick out of Mr. Griggs's, which began, "Greetings, I am William Griggs (A.K.A. Will, Willie, Bill, Billy, Billy the Kid, Tex, Texas, Texano and Texan Ice of Hartford Public High School.)"

Mr. Griggs described his writing as "an exciting mix of cemented yet creative imagination and bombastic language." He added, "Stories of strange creatures or parodies of great documents often find themselves being written and rewritten on a computer in my school."

Ha-ha. I might change the name of the blog to "Sitting Behind Texan Ice."