Tides of Change
Tides of Change: Stories from Within was written by the students from the Paramount Pictures Writers Workshop in 2025
Introduction - A Long Goodbye
Transformation is a fitting theme for this anthology. The book you hold in your hand is the product of the Paramount Picture Writers Workshop, a partnership between 826LA, Paramount Pictures Studios, and the Cinematic Arts & Creative Technologies Magnet at Helen Bernstein High School, a partnership that has just completed its sixth year.
Three years ago, the project underwent a major change. We had just come out of the lockdown phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the original cohort of students that the project started with were about to graduate out. That year also we saw an influx of a whole new cohort of students, including a group of amazing sophomores.
This year, those sophomores that started that journey with me three years ago are now graduating. Additionally, the project has seen another influx of new students - the most since the turnover of the original group. Another shift is taking place.
This book was written in another moment of upheaval. While no longer actively contending with a global pandemic, the future nevertheless still seems all the more uncertain. What we’ve taken for granted has suddenly disappeared overnight, institutions are being uprooted, and the very essence of who we are is being brought into question, for better and for worse. The times, as they say, are a’changing. Again.
These student authors are all too aware of this, and it shows up in this anthology. It’s there in a story about a path of destruction laid out by a god gone rogue. In a vision of the future under a dirty sky and full of tall, dirty buildings in which an army of robots build unseen and unused marvels while humans lurk in the shadows. In the claustrophobia of a toxic relationship, or the taphophobia of being trapped by the inevitable.
And yet, there is hope. Darwin famously said, “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.” In these stories and poems are also powerful moments of adaptation. Changes are initiated through the excitement of new relationships: with teammates, family members, a newfound friend met at the bus stop, and an unexpected ally in the fight for the future. They are also initiated through the bittersweetness of saying goodbye, of letting go, and in the acceptance of that which we cannot control.
This anthology captures the lives and imaginations of students brave enough to confront the forces of change thrust upon us, and courageous enough to adapt to them. It is one of the reasons why I have faith in those sophomores-now-seniors leaving this project and going out into the world at large. It is why I’m excited to embark on a new journey with a new cohort, and to see in what unexpected directions their hearts and minds will take this project. For as this book teaches us, the flower will bloom. The sound of the footsteps walking away are steady, and headed toward a future that they are capable of changing.
- Mike Dunbar, May 13th 2025