Miracle Thornton is a brilliant young writer, and we're fundraising money for her tuition to attend Interlochen Arts Academy as a creative writing major for her junior year.

Miracle has a blazing talent for writing, and a passion to see her projects through. In every genre she's taken on—fiction, poetry, nonfiction—she's created brave, complex art. Even though she's just finished her sophomore year, she's already been recognized nationally for her writing by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards and the Nancy Thorp Poetry Prize at Hollins University. This year, at Interlochen, she received a Fine Arts Award, one of the school's highest honors.

Miracle has been a student at Interlochen since her freshman year. Though she's received financial aid, she won't be able to finish her high school career here unless we put together the money to make up her remaining costs—around $11,000. Any additional money raised over this amount will be applied to transportation costs (it's a long way for her to Michigan!) and to tuition for her senior year.

You can read Miracle's story to get to the center, published in the Interlochen Review.

You can read Miracle's poems my man's a lumberjack and on the cliff edge  at Up North Lit.

Please help us send Miracle back to Interlochen!


The Writing House, at Interlochen, where creative students take classes.

Thank you so much for supporting Miracle — it means the world to us!


We'll let Miracle tell you about her passion for writing and for Interlochen in her own words:

For me, writing isn’t just putting words down on paper for the sake of entertainment, it’s a study, a conversation about things I can’t quite seem to wrap around in real life. While my poetry reflects on how I view my identity and my family, my fiction grapples with the wider topics that I feel affect everyone at some point in their life. Ultimately, when I write I want to strip everything raw, look at the things that make me feel some type of way, whether it be uncomfortable or happy or moroseful. I want to question them and I want other people to do the same thing. There are aspects of life, natural things, that are passed over daily, details that I like to focus in on, make the reader look at because they should. When I write about someone’s toe hair being different than the hair on their head, I want you to think about why that is and apply that same level of detail to everything you look at in a piece of mine or otherwise. Subtlety, ambiguity, underlying intentions are constantly subverted in my writing because it is a part of the reason why I write. If you don’t look at every last detail of something, do you really understand it? That is what I am writing for.  

Interlochen has essentially given me the tools to do this exploration, both through the curriculum and the overall community. Before Interlochen, I was wrapped up in the same town, the same school, the same home. Almost everything in my life was stagnant ,and because of this so was my writing. The environment I was in stifled my creativity.

But ever since my first ever creative writing class at Interlochen, Elements of Fiction,  I’ve been able to grow much more than I could’ve hoped. Dissecting the different elements of craft, both in fiction and poetry, made me realize how important it was to unravel. This analysis has transformed my understanding of what it is to be a writer, how I see myself as not only a writer but a person. The experiences I’ve had at Interlochen and otherwise have been subjected to this analysis and as such I’ve been able to write more fruitfully than ever. Growing as a person and as a writer will forever be linked; my time at Interlochen and the time I hope to spend at Interlochen has made it a healthy, overwhelmingly positive journey.

Looking back to how I was starting freshman year, to sophomore year, to now, I am in awe. Before, I was a wrecked with anxiety and therefore secluded myself. The warmth that faculty, staff, and students spread quickly made me realize that Interlochen is a safe place to plant my feet and grow. Academically, I’ve prospered, in the arts, I’ve prospered, yet there is still so much more for me and I think Interlochen is the best place for that growth to continue. There is much more I want to learn about myself, about the world around me. Next year and in the future, I want to further explore the relationship between different arts areas, a subject that has become increasingly compelling due to my time at Interlochen. I aim to do more collaborative works and explore hybrid genres, screenwriting, playwriting, and utterly everything to do with writing until I can say that I truly understand.

I hope, and know, that I can use what I’ve learned at Interlochen, what I still have to learn, moving into the next stages of my life. The future isn’t fixed, but I know that writing will continue being a huge part of my life; my love and appreciation for it has been marked by my time at Interlochen. I hope that one day my writing will be a part of the everlasting conversation, that someone will be inspired to do something, evaluate the choices they make and how they affect each other.