Between stories of murderous mailboxes, runaway carrots and Minecraft updates, a new Easthampton newspaper is covering it all — and every single writer is a kid. Based at Somehow School, an after-school creative writing program at 83 Main St., young authors ages 7 to 18 create newspapers, stories, zines and more.
The school sits in an approximately 500-square-foot space that was previously the location of Source, a vintage store that has since moved to Northampton. For Somehow School Founder and Director Nora Claire Miller, the space — tucked inside one of Easthampton’s oldest commercial buildings — was an ideal fit. Miller, who is an author and educator, felt the architecture’s historic character lent a natural sense of legitimacy and importance to the students’ creative pursuits.
Art studios and dance studios, they pointed out, are often in “beautiful spaces, spaces with high ceilings, spaces that really take the study of the craft seriously and say, ‘We’re going to be somewhere nice to do this,’ and writing classes aren’t usually like that. I wanted something that felt as important as this work is.”
The space is a patchwork of eclectic decor, including lava lamps, posters with text written in a fictional language similar to Morse code, a wooden duck, a large painting of two sailboats and artificial fruit. A larger-than-life frog sculpture hangs above the water cooler.
A vibrant red and yellow newsstand makes the school easy to spot from the street. It was painted in honor of “The Strawberry,” the newspaper that one of the school’s classes creates. Miller took the idea for the name from multi-disciplinary artist Laurie Anderson, who told them that the part of the brain responsible for speech and language is the size of a strawberry.
This is far from a traditional newspaper. The most recent issue at the time of this writing featured a survey asking participants, “Is a tortilla chip your hat?” Answers included “Not on Tuesday,” “Not when it rains” and “Yes[,] because somebody can make it like a tortilla.”
Other pieces included a story about carrots who escaped to Dubai to avoid being eaten, advice columns written by a dog, short reviews of Pulse Cafe and Witchwood Farms, and an advertisement for “canned luck.” Every student writes under a pseudonym. While some stick to their first names, others lean into the surreal with aliases like “Laser Guy Twelve” or “Captain Funky Socks.”
“The premise of Somehow School is that unlike a school-based creative writing class, I never tell people what to write or how to write it,” Miller said. “If somebody doesn’t want to write in words at all, they don’t have to. I’ve had people write in made-up languages. The idea is to create a space that is freer than other types of creative instructional spaces insomuch that they exist at all.”
During a recent visit from the Gazette, the room was alive with the rhythmic click and ding of typewriters. One student was busy documenting their successful campaign to get “nuggie pizza” — pizza topped with chicken nuggets — on a school cafeteria menu. Another student polled the room on a more political note: whether 14-year-old gubernatorial candidate Dean Roy should officially lead the state of Vermont.
“Writing is one of the oldest technologies in the world, and I don’t think that we need the newest technology to do it,” Miller said.
Miller encourages the use of typewriters and vintage laptops as much as possible because they create “friction” — an intentional layer of tactile challenge that sharpens creative thinking.
“Technology is really easy today. You can press a button on a phone and talk, and the phone will record what you’re saying, and it will look like grammatical English when it’s done. You can open a Chromebook and use some kind of A.I. speech suggestion to write a page in half the time” it would take a person to do so, Miller said.
“But what makes art interesting is the opposite,” they continued. “It’s about how difficult it is to say things. And the interesting part of writing is that it’s specific to the person who’s doing it and that it’s not a one-to-one translation. When you’re working on a typewriter, it changes the way that you think about the work.”
Throughout Miller’s conversation with the Gazette, students frequently came over to ask questions and get feedback. One, in fact, came over several times to announce, “I made a mistake!”
“You made a mistake?” Miller replied. “Good job!”
“One of our philosophies here is that mistakes are good,” they explained. “You should try to make mistakes, because when you’re making mistakes when you’re writing, it means that you’re actually writing. You’re not thinking about precision; you’re thinking about what you want to say. You can fix mistakes later, but if you fix mistakes as you work, oftentimes a person will become discouraged from actually making anything else.”
Every time a student at Somehow School makes a mistake, they get a star. If they collect 10 stars, they get a sticker.
Fittingly, the school’s very name was born from a mistake.
Last year, Miller knew that they wanted to establish a creative writing school, but they couldn’t decide on a name. In April 2025, while in New Orleans, talking to a group of other poets, they floated the idea of calling it “The Somewhere School,” but none of the poets were fans of the idea. As more names were tossed around, one mentioned liking the idea of “Somehow School.”
“I was like, ‘Wait, you didn’t say Somewhere School; you said Somehow.’ And she was like, ‘Oh, whoops, I misspoke,’” Miller recalled. “And I said, ‘No, that’s perfect.’”
The school’s website attributes the name to an Emily Dickinson poem, but that was “a justification that came later,” Miller said. “I felt that I wanted a mythology, and so that was convenient — but no, really, it was just [a mistake].”
Miller chose the newspaper format for a creative writing class specifically for its reach. “[It’s] a way of connecting to a larger community,” Miller explained, noting that such public connection is something writers “get less and less of in the digital age.”
Besides that, though, “I think the world would be a better place if people listened to kids more,” they said.
In creative writing classes for kids, Miller said, what often happens is, “Everyone writes brilliant things, and then those things go home to sit in a drawer for 50 years until somebody finds them again and says, ‘Wow, I made this when I was a kid.’ And I think, instead, that the brilliant things that [kids] have to say should be out there right now.”
The school’s eight-week classes offer sliding-scale tuition ranging from $0 to $280, with each session capped at eight students.
To learn more about Somehow School and Nora Claire Miller, visit somehowschool.org and noraclairemiller.com, respectively.
