Cold Spring Harbor Whaling Museum Runs "Sea Glass Fiction Contest"

By Leader Staff

The Cold Spring Harbor Whaling Museum & Education Center, hosted its annual "Sea Glass Fiction Contest," a creative writing competition for Long Island youth. 

The contest is designed to inspire students to craft original short stories based on a single image chosen for this year’s contest: a brilliant blue shard of sea glass bearing the partial word “selt.”

Now in its second year, the contest saw more than double the number of entries from the previous year from students in grades 3–12 across Nassau and Suffolk Counties.

Writers were encouraged to craft an original short story that connected creatively to the image prompt. Judges evaluated submissions based on originality, relevance to the prompt, story structure, and quality of writing.

"With 100 entries to go through, we were amazed by the range and depth of the stories submitted, from pirates and krakens to stories of memory, friendship, and magic," said Nomi Dayan, Executive Director of The Whaling Museum. "These writers captured the spirit of sea glass as a fragment of the past washed ashore, reimagined with meaning.”

The selected winning stories were honored at the Museum’s Sea Glass Festival on Sunday, July 20th.

The winners are:

1st Place: Dean Connolly of Oyster Bay Cove – Grade 4 - “A Day at Dewey” - A heartfelt tale in which a shard of sea glass sparks a powerful memory.

2nd Place: Daniel Lam of Huntington – Grade 4 – “An Ancient Land”- A rich, mythological world of Eselts Ossie.  

3rd Place: Emma Harkinish of Huntington – Grade 5 - “The Piece that Deserved to Be Seen” – Personified sea glass struggles with invisibility.