Along The Way, We Saw The World
Along The Way, We Saw The World: A 20th Anniversary Collection of Prose and Poetry was written by the 826LA Community: students, volunteers, staff, educators, donors, and community partners, and published in 2025
Introduction, Maddie Silva
In honor of 826LA’s 20th Anniversary, Along The Way, We Saw The World celebrates 826LA’s past, present, and future. In the following pages, you will see work from 826LA students, volunteers, educators, community partners, staff members, and board members. In response to the prompt, coming into your own as a way of transforming the future, this collection of work represents authors devoted to their authentic selves, a hopeful future, an honest and preserved past, and all the moments of unbridled joy in between.
826LA is a transformative place. Inside our red-bricked Writing Labs, within our Time Travel Mart aisles, and through the school hallways across Los Angeles, we have spent 20 years reaching out for our community and bringing it in tight.
We are both a third space and a beyond space.
Our third space, the Mar Vista and Echo Park Writing Labs and our Writers’ Rooms across the city serve as a nexus of brainstorming, writing, revising, and life-telling. It is where students, volunteers, educators, staff, and community partners come together to indulge in the legacy of stories.
Our beyond space is duly transcendent of time and place. It is all the ways we stretch past our centers and classrooms and ripple into the lives of our future. Through voices lifted, truths uncovered, confessions made, loads lightened, darknesses held, creativity expressed, confidence built, minds changed, and opinions formed, we make up our library bookshelves, our city newspapers, our speeches before listening crowds, our protest chants, our everyday conversations, our inside jokes, our diaries found, our world’s archive.
Thank you to all the people, past and current, who have contributed to 826LA’s becoming. As you well know, and for those who are about to find out, where there is 826LA, there is magic. Where there is 826LA, there is community.
Where there is 826LA, there are stories.