Ben Grabacz/Daily Mining Gazette Grace Dee puts a book back into its place during her shift at the Calumet Public Library. Dee is winner of the Dandelion Cottage Short Story Contest and the Silver Key Regional winner of the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards.

CALUMET — Sophomore Grace Dee of Calumet High School took second place in the Dandelion Cottage Short Story Contest with her work to be published in their anthology. Dee is also the Silver Key regional winner in the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards within the short story category.

The Dandelion Cottage Short Story Contest is a competition through the Upper Peninsula Publishers and Authors Association to motivate young writers to practice their craft. Dee had received second place for her story, “Skies.” The story was written in a prose to act as if the characters are going through a dream.

“The way I intended it to be read was when you finish reading it, it’s almost confusing but in a way that shows the purpose of it, because sometimes when you wake up from a dream, you don’t really know what it was about,” Dee said.

The story Dee wrote for the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards was also dream themed, with the main protagonist becoming irrationally terrified for no explainable reason. Dee said the fear ties back to a nightmare the protagonist had the night before but cannot recall.

Dreams are an influence for Dee’s pieces, using them as a way to explore the confusing emotions she has when she wakes up unaware of what happened to cause those emotions. The stories began as class assignments from her teacher, Julie Antilla, who said Dee’s ability to think outside the box allows her to create quality writing.

“I think, for Grace, it’s her ideas,” Antilla said. “They’re fresh and they’re new, and she’s not afraid to express herself in different ways. With her being a prolific reader, she’s very well read and loves reading, and she’s very well versed with grammar and spelling, and might be a little bit more perfectionist and in that which is always good.”

Dee says she enjoys writing and expects to pursue it as a passion in her spare time. However she is set on exploring electrical engineering, which she believes her familiarity with writing will assist her in the technical writing that comes with the engineering field. She is currently working on the first draft of her first novel, which, she says, is about three-fourths done.

“I figure if I can manage to write like that around school, then I could probably work it around a job,” she said.