About
Encouraging and nurturing Brookline High School students with a passion for nonfiction writing.
This Whipple Writing Program has been generously funded by the Gladstone/Whipple family, in honor of their son, David Whipple, who graduated from Brookline High School in 2012 and died in an automobile accident in 2019. David was an exceptional student at BHS. He was actively involved in a number of communities, including Jazz Band, Cross Country, and SWS. His junior year, he won the AP United States History Curtin Prize for his research paper titled, “America, the War and the Game: World War II, the Postwar Years and Our Relationship to the National Pastime.” This paper is still used as a model research paper for students in BHS history classes. David’s passion for writing continued to grow after high school, as well, leading him to work as an editor of the Yale Daily News and eventually to pursuing a degree at Yale Law School. In order to honor David’s love of the written word, David’s family and former teachers worked together to create a writing program to encourage students to develop and hone their skills as writers. Our hope is that Whipple Fellows learn to love writing, as David did, and embrace the pleasures and power of the written word.
Meet the Staff
Our Story
Personal statement from Ben Whipple & Carol Gladstone:
Our son David’s death in an automobile accident in 2019, at age 25, was a devastating loss for our family. The loss was shared by a wide circle who knew David as a generous friend, talented musician, skilled birder, Red Sox fan, and impressive thinker, writer, and wit. He was bound for Yale Law School that fall, and we could anticipate the exceptional lawyer he would become. He would “use my words” as preschool David once said, to make the world a better place.
That spring, we met with two of his favorite teachers at Brookline High School, where David had thrived. Was there some way, we asked Dan Bresman and Jen Martin, we could use his law school tuition to help BHS in a way that would honor David and make him proud? Given school needs and David’s love of words, we quickly settled on supporting student writers. The Whipple Writing Fellowship was envisioned as an intensive summer program. Students would be competitively selected and supported by teaching staff to produce an excellent piece of writing. They would be paid, underscoring the seriousness with which we took them and their future as writers.
That first year, the first summer of the pandemic, over 70 students applied for the Fellowship, and the commitment from the first group of eight was beyond anything we expected. The student writers produced a range of works, including fiction and poetry as well as creative non-fiction.
The next year, we gave the program a clearer focus on creative non-fiction, the genre that David loved best. We initiated a summer visit to our beach home in Westport, giving the Fellows a chance to spend time together and go to the beach, and for us to meet them and learn about their topics. Each year since has followed the same basic structure, but with important improvements. We have grown to [a dozen] students, now supported by two outstanding BHS English faculty. Author visits provide additional inspiration. The writing and topics, and the seriousness the writers bring to their work, continue to impress us.
With the Fellowship as a foundation, Jen and her colleagues have been imagining other programs to reach more BHS students. The most visible so far is BHS Story Hour, when another group of competitively selected students (8 this year) tell stories they have worked on for a month with faculty help. These are stories from the heart; some funny, some poignant, some both, offering a window into the world of teens today and showing the excellence they can achieve working with terrific BHS teachers.
We know from the kids and their parents how much these programs have meant to them. We see it and hear it in our meetings with the kids, in testimonials on the web site, and at the public events where the students present their work.
What we want you to know is how much the Whipple Writing Program means to us. We have the delight of seeing the diverse, talented, and committed student writers of BHS deliver their best. We have the joy of collaborating with Jen, Evan and Emma, and seeing our BHS faculty get the best out of their students. And we get a chance to remember all the things that make us proud of David, what he accomplished in his too short time on earth, and the impact we make in his memory for the future.