Towards the end of each month, 826LA drop-in tutoring students know there's a party coming up of prehistoric (or perhaps posthistoric) proportions. It's their release party, and it's an achievement they'll anticipate after ferocious weeks checking math, identifying nouns, and constantly laboring over original writing. Their pieces evolve from dog-eared drafts into a peer-reviewed, bound, and published-in-house chapbook, which passes through the writing lab curtains to great fanfare as we dine on cake. The student anthology for September is the opening edition of Dogtown Books, Partner-Ships, written entirely by the young minds at 826LA West in Venice, California.

Here at 826LA, we know writing can be long and frustrating. That's why every week, our tutors and students keep their sights set on the final draft box, that which hangs above the work-in-progress boxes on our writing lab wall. Ultimately, we think all the painstaking revision is worth the chance to see our masterpiece waiting on a warm, fresh-pressed page: our verses sound great when the whole writing lab is applauding them. Mikale, 14, may have put it best.

My poetry glows like moonlight off an owl's eyes, like water droplets ringing the leaves of roses at dawn; it enchants like the chartreuse green of fragrant maple blossoms falling on the February lawn. That's how poetry smells and looks and sounds, and today you can almost taste poetry.