BY JESSICA STEELEY
Clarkston News Staff Writer

Bringing together his love of writing and World War II history, Clarkston High School Senior Alexander Gavulic won a Gold Key award in the 2017 Midwest Scholastic Art and Writing Competition.
“There were only a handful of kids who received these awards,” Gavulic said. “It was an honor to be able to get such a prestigious award in this competition – top seven percent in the Midwest region.”
The short story Gavulic wrote is a historical fiction piece about a former German WWII soldier who returns to Berlin at the end of the war and sees the destruction done to his home.
“The story really emphasizes like a change in the characters thought process,” Gavulic said. “Going from a former Nazi soldier to realizing, you know, what the whole thing was about and I intended for it to be both a reflective piece and a historical piece because I’m very interested in World War II history.”
Gavulic’s piece focused on what he knew about WWII and the aftermath when the Soviets came to Berlin and stared sectioning off the city.
“The particular idea for it actually came from a song that I had heard,” Gavulic said. “It was like an orchestral song, but, basically the art for it was a Roman soldier walking through Rome after it had fallen 2,000 years ago and when I saw that I thought ‘What would it be like to return to a once grand, mighty city, maybe once where you lived, and see it have fallen, for a new era to have begun’.”
“The End of an Era” is a short story Gavulic began his junior year and mainly worked on for two months before submitting it.
“I really wanted to both capture that returning feel and the feeling that the main character has, that thought process where all this news is coming out about the atrocities that the Germans had committed
in the war that he knew nothing about when he was in the army,” Gavulic said. “I just really wanted to explore that in the piece and, so, it was just a combination of that World War II history that I love and that idea that I had for the story.”
His Advanced Placement Literature teacher, Laura Mahler, encouraged his class to enter their writing in the Scholastic competition.
“It ended up being a pretty cool competition, the more I looked into it the more I wanted to enter my piece,” Gavulic said. “I think it turned out really well in the end, I really enjoyed it.”
Though Gavulic plans to major in political science, he’s going to continue writing. In college, he wants to try to publish a book series he’s been writing for several years.
Gavulic didn’t win anything when his piece went on to the national competition, but he was amazed by the competition’s talent.
“It was a very great experience to do this and I would recommend it to anyone else who hears about it in future years,” Gavulic said.