A Posse ad Esse by Kaley

A Posse ad Esse by Kaley - June 2014 Scholarship Essay

Science Fiction, Fantasy, Historical Fiction, Adventure, Romance. These are only a few of various genres that a book can fall into, and only a glimpse at the types I have read and have contemplated writing. Books for me have always been a safe haven and an escape from reality. I love the connection I make with the characters, people I will never forget for the years to come. I become engrossed in the stories and lives the characters live and my heart aches with every loss they suffer, and quickens with every obstacle they face. The stories that books carry can be so riveting that I pick them up again and again just so I can glimpse back into their universe once more. For all of the reasons that I have stated, if I were to write a book, it would be a story of fantasy and filled with adventure, and my characters would represent people of strength and mystery.

Fantasy adventure books have always been my favorite genre, because they are the stories that I fall the most easily in. The characters live in worlds I can only dream about and their strengths and individuality are represented through unique and wondrous powers. My fantasy, adventure would focus on one young woman named Faith, who is about 18 years old and has just graduated high school in the small town of Bethel Minnesota. Faith will be starting her first year of college at an Ivy League college for art, located in New York in a couple of weeks. She has been drawing since she could hold a pencil, and so, ever since she met her best friend Cole, he has been pressuring her to turn her talent into a career and attend a promising art school. Yet, when Faith finally finds the college of her choice, she finds it in the most unconventional way.

One night, after a long day at work, Faith passes out on her living room couch and dreams about drawing her ideal college. As she is drawing, the picture begins to reveal a Gothic mansion with ivy crawling along the gray stone walls, high steeples and stone statues situated at either side of the entrance. The statues look like God’s avenging angles with their faces pointed to the sky, their wings outstretched in symmetrical arcs, and their hands clasped around broad swords, frozen in mid swing. As Faith continues to draw, shading and adding dimension, the picture takes life and she is sucked into the picture. Inside her drawing, Faith attends the college and finds that her drawings have magical properties. She draws an apple, and once it is finished, she blows on the page and the apple rises as if surfacing from under water and rolls off of the page, revealing the name and address of her destined college; A Posse ad Esse, From Possibility to Actuality. Immediately after waking up, Faith looks up the name on her computer and finds there is a new artistic college in New York under that name. When she runs to Cole to tell him the good news, Cole is dumbfounded by how she found such a college, and doubts it’s real. He looks it up and finds nothing, but Faith has already applied and is determined to go. She feels destined to go, because there is nowhere else in this world that she feels she belonged more than she knows she will belong at A Posse ad Esse. Yet, after Faith starts attending the college for the first week, she is already wrought with anxiety when she feels that she may be going insane. Her professors are doing magic tricks on white boards with drawings dancing across the boards, and they are speaking to the students as if they are the world’s saviors for an apocalyptic theory that Faith has never heard before.

As the story progresses Faith finds that her talent for drawing is more than just a talent, or a passion, but a weapon against evil that was blessed upon her from God himself. An apocalyptic event instigated by all the evil in the world, human and mystical, is about to begin and Faith has been called to join her fellow students to be God’s avenging angels. Her drawings have transformed from drawings of possibility to power and strength of actuality.

I would write this type of story, because I have always believed that all forms of art have some type of magic properties in them. Art reveals the most inner thoughts of its creator and encourages people to connect on a deeper and more transcendent level. That in itself is magical. I also would write this story because of the fact that Faith’s passion for art has the ability to transform into a superpower that has the potential to save the world from impending doom. This ability represents my belief that everyone has a gift, whether it’s writing, drawing, or dancing that can be used to represent a memory, or a moment of importance that can influence anyone to make a difference in their own lives or in the lives around them. I believe we have the ability to save ourselves and each other by simply expressing ourselves through the purity of our talents.