At 10 years old, Dhara Alston has been published three times now and said she is looking to make it five.
Her winning essay is now on display at the Coconino Center for the Arts during the Youth Art Exhibition. Alston’s previous publishing experience came from winning an advertising contest at a local tire dealership and making it into her school newsletter.
“We did a STEM project in our class leading up to this essay where the kids created their model water filtration systems highlighting the importance of water conservation,” said Kelly Cadigan, Alston’s fourth-grade teacher at West Sedona School. “[Alston] was our only student who took this experience and decided to enter this writing contest.”
“There’s a limited supply of water and we need to be really careful and resourceful with it, and also that it’s really hard to [filter], it’s not as easy as it looks; it’s really hard to get every single pollutant trapped so it’s drinkable,” Alston said, explaining why people should care about access to clean water. “Because it’s called a non-renewable resource, and there’s only so much of it you can’t just go to a factory and build it [because] factories don’t make water; earth makes water. Because all living things need water and without water, it would be pretty hard for anything to live on earth.”
“We’re always getting compliments on how she’s a real intellectual,” said Alston’s mother, Erica Day. “When we’re talking just with people at restaurants or even her grandpa, we are always amazed at her vocabulary and her sentence structure. She comes up with these ideas, and will write the stories and sometimes [draw] pictures. This one time she wrote a story, almost a historical romance, about two guys that were in love with one woman … it was way over the top for her and I was asking, ‘Wow, where did that come from?’ Other times, it’ll be silly, like a snake and frog are friends in a junkyard and their trials and tribulations.”
One of the challenges of raising an articulate child, Day said, is that Alston will “use reasoning against us.”
Alston says that she wants to be an entrepreneur and sees herself owning a chain of hotels, but she is unsure how much growing up in Sedona influenced that potential career choice.
“One day I thought I want to own hotels, and that’s what I’m going to do when I grow up,” Alston said. “ I might sell hotel merchandise and stuff like that … it’s really expensive to stay [in hotels] and I want to make it affordable and I want to give people good rooms and stuff. So people have nice places to stay for cheap prices.”
She doesn’t yet know when her next work will be published, but “whenever an opportunity pops up, I’ll probably take it,” Alston said.
