Eight teenage girls sat at a table in Ventura's H.P. Wright Library this week, thumbing through a newly minted paperback containing short stories — their short stories.

"This is so unreal! This is like, Ah, I wrote that!'" bubbled Angela Madsen, 18, of Ventura.

"That's amazing! Oh my God!" breathed Esther Gonzalez, 15, as she ran a finger down a page of words crowned with her name.

Sara Tabatabai, 16, held the book up to her cheek and closed her eyes. "I love you," she said to the book. "You're my favorite friend."

Ventura editor and literary consultant Mary Embree beamed at her stable of young authors, fingering the green cloth bag from which moments before she had pulled the books, still smelling of ink and fresh paper.

It was exactly the reaction she wanted.

The book of short stories, titled "Out of Our Minds," was the result of a project Embree started to promote literacy among young people.

The writing project was one of three youth literacy projects rooted in a nonprofit organization Embree founded a year ago, called the Literary Arts Society of Ventura County.

"My dream for many years was to get children writing," she said.

Embree is among many who are concerned about what appears to be dropping literacy rates among young people. The girls in Embree's writing project love reading and writing, but statistics from the state's Early Assessment Program suggests teen fans of the printed word are the exception rather than the rule.

Results released this week by the California Department of Education indicate students in the state have improved their English proficiency by 8 percent over the past five years, with 43 percent scoring advanced or proficient in English, compared with 35 percent in 2003. But there's still cause for concern, according to State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell.

While all racial subgroups have improved since 2003, the wide gap in literacy improvement was unchanged among the races, with whites and Asians on the high end and African-Americans and Hispanics on the lower end.

"These are not just economic achievement gaps," O'Connell said in a press release. "They are racial achievement gaps. We cannot afford to excuse them; they simply must be addressed."

O'Connell is forming task forces to find out why these gaps exist and to figure out how to close them.

CSU Northridge journalism professor José Luis Benavides suspects one of the cultural reasons for general low achievement among Hispanic youths could come from their parents. "They are in an environment in which they are not surrounded by books," he said. "I came up from Mexico. There was a family culture that really doesn't foster the value of reading or writing at an early age."

Crossover help

Benavides said he believes bilingual education will strengthen literacy as poor readers and writers are generally poor in both languages. Strengthen literacy in one language and you strengthen it in both, he said.

Another CSU Northridge journalism professor, Marcy De Veaux, was surprised to learn about the low scores among black youths. De Veaux, an African-American who lives in L.A.'s Crenshaw district, has a special interest in targeting youths in communities of color who do not excel and helping them.

The African-American youths she works with are excelling, she said.

"These kids are bright and well-read, have excellent communication skills and are excelling in every area imaginable," De Veaux said.

That's not to say some black youths are not struggling, De Veaux said, but she believes part of the solution lies in focusing on those who are doing well and giving them every opportunity to excel.

CSU Northridge elementary education professor Kathleen Rowlands, who directs the university's Reading Institute for Academic Preparation, said she believes the reasons for low literacy rates are multitiered. The institute is a state program that teaches high school teachers techniques for reading and writing instruction.

"It's a very complicated problem," Rowlands said. "It has to do with all the other pulls on people's time. You've seen the iPods and television. We do not have a culture of readers emerging."

Working parents who are not home to read to kids also could be a factor, as well as our region's high immigrant population.

"In this particular geography, people come from different places that may have never been literate," Rowlands added.

Much ado about nothing?

Others, such as UC Santa Barbara cultural studies professor Constance Penley, counter that when it comes to literacy among youth, there's entirely too much hand-wringing going on.

"They're reading; they're writing," she said, "just not in the ways we think of it."

According to Penley, we need to see video images and text messages as an evolution rather than a devolution of literacy.

Penley's colleague Alan Liu, an English professor, agreed: "Our kids are reading and writing like crazy," he said.

In 2005, Liu launched a UC-wide project, Transliteracies project, which has scholars studying the evolving definition of literacy in the digital age.

Among the things that make online reading unusual is that it adds a social dimension to literacy, Liu said. "We're researching what reading and writing is becoming if you redefine it to include this whole, thick social zone."

"We need to learn from them (teens)," Penley said. "Transliteracy is not starting from, It's bad,' but, What is reading in the digital era?'"

The answer to that question depends upon whom you ask.

While Liu believes there is a wealth of imaginative and critical activity going on in the blogosphere — albeit undisciplined — others, including Illinois State University English professor Curtis White, believe the surface-skimming nature of Web reading is a problem.

"It tends not to allow for linear arguments," White said. "It tends to be satisfied with bullet points. ... The culture as a whole has lost the capability of attending to or creating extended arguments."

In 2004, White wrote a book published by Harper Collins called "The Middle Mind: Why Americans Don't Think for Themselves." In it, he asserts that Americans' imaginations calcify when they don't read.

A poverty of imagination leads to a poverty of critical thought, which leads to a nation of compliance, he surmised.

Local writing effort

"Everything is wrong. My eyes open and I am nothing. There is nothing to see. Nothing to hear. Nothing at all. The quiet frightens me, it threatens to jump from behind and eat me alive, bite by painful bite, its clean teeth ready to be soiled with my desperation."

— From "Metal And Flesh, Life and Death" by Esther Gonzalez

Gonzalez, 15, was thrilled to see a tale of a girl contemplating suicide published in "Out of Our Minds."

The Ventura teen has always loved to read but didn't start writing until about two years ago. She learned she loved it — especially stepping into the skin of her characters.

"I'm not suicidal," she said with a laugh, "but I want to be able to know what she (her character) is going through. For, like, part of it where she's stumbling out of the room, I actually physically did that so I could know what she was going through."

Seeing a teen this excited about writing is a pleasure for Embree, who oversaw Gonzalez and seven other girls for seven weeks this spring at Wright Library as they wrote about whatever they wanted. Then, Embree had the stories professionally typeset and published.

Embree said she believes kids write differently when the opposite sex is around, so she tries to avoid coed writing groups, but she does plan to run a writing group for teen boys, too.

She conducts and funds her writing programs through the Literary Arts Society of Ventura County, which she created after noticing how few kids came to a book festival she organized last year.

"We had a children's corner and three kids came," she said.

After forming the society a year ago, Embree began a coloring-book project in which she invited 5- to 15-year-olds to contribute drawings for publication. She figured getting drawings published in a book would increase their interest in books.

Boys & Girls Club project

Last fall, Embree gave kids the option of drawing or writing when she began a seven-week book project at the Boys & Girls Club of Ventura County.

At times, it was like pulling teeth. "I finally said: Write about your dog. Write about your cat, your mother, your trip to Mexico,'" Embree said.

She then had the comedies and tragedies the kids wrote about published in a booklet called "Stories and Pictures from Our Lives."

Ten-year-old Alejandro Garcia wrote about riding on a roller coaster called The Devil's Rush.

"It went up and down and swirled," Alejandro wrote. "By the time we got down, my cousin and I went rushing off to the bathroom. We both puked for four minutes."

Andrew Wilson, 10, wrote about his baby brother, Gunner Root.

"All I wanted for my birthday was my baby brother," Andrew wrote.

Andrew drew pictures of Gunner and of his dad Andrew's dad and Andrew in front of their house Andrew's dad and Andrew's uncle.

But it was the last picture of Andrew's dad that left Embree speechless.

"He slid this picture across the desk to me," Embree said, tears pooling in her eyes. "It was his dad in a coffin."

"He never did want to talk about it, but the drawing was very clear," said retired social worker Anne Escobedo, a project volunteer. "That was what he chose to draw above anything he could have selected. He must have really felt that loss."

When families get involved

Escobedo said she believes families that value reading tend to have richer communication, and fewer and less volatile conflicts. "But unfortunately, in many families there isn't that verbal communication, so there is physical communication," said Escobedo, "a lot of it negative."

Takako Morita of Ventura has always stressed reading with her three children, and it's paid off. Her son, Aysen Tan, 11, checked out the latest Harry Potter book from the Wright Library last week, so anxious to read it that he flipped open the first page while the librarian was checking it out.

"I'm not a reader, so I wanted them to be readers," Morita said.

Her 3-year-old daughter, Kiena, held two thin, pink Barbie books; 8-year-old Sachi also held a stack of slightly thicker books.

Young readers interviewed for this story said their parents read to them from an early age.

"When I was little, my mom and I would go to the library and we would bring back 50 pounds of books and she would read them to us," said Angela Madsen, 17, one of the young women published in "Out of Our Minds." "She used to read Dr. Seuss to us every day," she added.

Annabelle Warren, 12, of Ventura contributed a drawing to the LASVC coloring book. Her sister, Charlotte Warren, 14, had a short story published in "Out of Our Minds."

Both girls love to read.

"I like to go on the Internet, but at night when I'm sitting there, it's really nice just to read a book," Annabelle said.

Their mom, Barbara Warren, had no special tips to get kids to read, except this:

"Let 'em read the trash books," she said. "If they like to read the trashy, sappy novels, so what? They plow through those. They have stuff that addresses the 14-year-old angst, like how to date the popular boys."

Scholars are on the same page.

"I don't care what they read," Rowland said. "Yes, indeed, I'd like to see them move forward to something more sophisticated, but if they can't read Nancy Drew, there's no point in making them struggle with Romeo and Juliet."