Tullahoma Sophomore to pitch novel in NYC
BRADY FLANIGAN
Staff Writer
There’s a human impulse to stare at bright things–Fifth Avenue, Bourbon Street, the Vegas Strip–to the point there’s leftover neon beneath one’s eyelids before lying down for bed. Attention has shrunk. Artistry comes in little electric hits–five second TikTok dancers, Snapchat shoutouts. Here in Tullahoma there’s a young woman seeking to challenge this trend, somebody still emboldened by longform fiction. Her name is Ella-Gracin Bennett; she’s fifteen years old and just published her first historical fiction novel, The Candle in the Darkness.
That was July, 2024. A year ago. Snows melted. Storms came. Some were buried and some born. Ella-Gracin is a sophomore at Tullahoma High School now, and she’s been gazing at bright things. Now she’s careening toward one.
In September, she’s bringing The Candle in the Darkness to the concrete canyon—Fifth Ave., New York City—to participate in a program called Write to Pitch. It’s a week-long bootcamp hosted by the Algonkian Writers Conference. It’s designed to give amateur authors a chance to polish their voice and explore the guts of the publishing world among a group of professional editors, critics, and literary agents.
Before it was westernized, the Lenape people called Manhattan “manna-hata.” The “island where one gathers bows.” It seems long before the island grew concrete and pierced the clouds, the soil was cursed with the ambition of hunters. It’s an island built on pursuit and pitch—often peril. She’s following the tradition.
Ella-Gracin has spent the last year working on her second novel, The Blood Stained Roses, which she hopes to finish soon. It’s another work of historical fiction.While The Candle in the Darkness followed two teenagers through the Holocaust, The Blood Stained Roses unfolds in the shadow of the American Revolution. An eleven year old girl sees her father killed by the British. For six years her rage builds until she decides to trade blood for blood. She goes on a killing spree, and somewhere amidst the violence she finds herself caught in a love triangle.
“It’s kind of hard to explain without giving away the major plot twist. That’s all I can say,” Ella-Gracin said.
Write to Pitch only allows authors 18 and up, and they’re only allowed to pitch one book. She’s not 18 and not going to pitch one book. But great deeds are usually wrought at great risks, as Herodotus says.
“I’m still trying to figure out if I’m going to pitch my first book and then try to get them to get it and then give them my second book, or if I’m just going to try pitching both, but I’m not sure. They told me I can only pitch one, which I have to work around that,” she said.
While all this has been going on, she’s already been plotting the sequel to The Candle in the Darkness, which she hopes to have out in a year or so. The first book has done well for a self-published work. Her mother estimates she may’ve sold 500 copies already. At one author signing she went to, every copy she brought was gone within an hour. Nothing left but a writer and her table.
The panel she’ll stand before in New York consists of publishers from HarperCollins, St. Martin’s Press, Kensington Publishing, Blackstone Publishing, editors from Simon & Schuster, recipients of the Philip K. Dick award, Pushcart poets, NYU professors.
That last one is noteworthy, as she’s got her eyes on New York University as her mecca. That’s where she wants to go to college, with Belmont lingering as a side attraction if NYU doesn’t work out. That’s some years down the highway though. In September, Ella-Gracin will be among editors and publishers on the island of pizza-rats and trash heaps, where one gathers bows.
