ASA DALTON

Creative. This is the word to describe one of our wonderful students, Asa Dalton. Many people love movies and good stories, but Asa has a passion for writing them. Asa has been a student here at CPA for 3 years and is graduating this year. Asa and his brother, Luke, have also been very active in our school community in the Writing Club. On top of balancing school work, clubs, and missionary work, Asa has also been involved in multiple screenwriting guilds in which he has entered and placed in their competitions. Despite this complex balancing act, he has made waves, not only in our school but in the world of screenwriting. In fact, the Dalton family are missionaries in Rapallo, Italy, actively planting churches in their community.

Asa and Luke, both having a passion for writing screenplays and movies, started the Cinema club here at our school three years ago. They switched gears a year later and started the Screen Writing Club. The Dalton siblings used to lead that club in writing screenplays and scripts for short films for about a year, before joining the Creative Writing Club this year, forming the Writing Club. Before all this, Asa, when he was around 13 or 14 years old, joined multiple professional screenwriting guilds. In those guilds, he joined a competition to write a short screenplay. To his memory, the screenplay he wrote was a drama about a paraplegic, meaning they had paralysis in their legs, who wanted to become a famous rapper but also faced a struggle between his aspirations and his friendships. Asa submitted his screenplay to two different professional writing festivals. His screenplay was highly placed in one of the festivals and the other considered his screenplay for placement but did not place. This was quite the achievement for Asa who described this event as a fun learning experience. Asa continues to write screenplays for fun with the Writing Club and has participated in some other competitions in a screenwriting group.

Along with writing screenplays, Asa has also had a chance to put his screenplay into action. With a friend who had some acting and short film experience, he and Asa wrote a screenplay in Italian and took it one step further to start turning it into a short film. Together, they gathered people for a small cast and started filming. About ten percent of the way into the making of the film, they experienced some technical, motivational, and scheduling difficulties which halted the filming of the screenplay. Eventually, and sadly, they realized that due to their difficulties they were probably not going to be able to complete the filming of this short film and had to stop, letting this film never see the light of day.

This creative energy has played into his planning for his years after high school. Although he is still undecided, Asa plans to take a gap year before pursuing a degree in either philosophy or child psychology. His interest in philosophy began with the exploration of apologetics and pristine arguments, which led him into the rabbit hole of philosophy. He started studying metaphysics and meta-ontology both of which he enjoyed. With a philosophy degree, Asa hopes to be able to teach at a university level in a country like Italy, which does not have prominent resources for such fields of study. As for child psychology, his interest stems from a dual enrollment course he took last year. Through the general psychology course he took, he realized that he liked developmental psychology. Coupled with the fact that he enjoys hanging out with children younger than himself, he feels like he is being possibly led toward child psychology. If he pursues child psychology, Asa hopes to be able to invest and make a difference in kids' lives, especially kids with troubled backgrounds.

Asa is extremely thankful for CPA and the experience it has given him. It has allowed his family the flexibility required for their ministry and for Asa to pursue his interests in screenwriting and philosophy. One of his favorite parts about CPA is the community here. He states that the students and teachers here are great. They are very encouraging and always working to build each other up. Although he has not been able to connect as much as he would like to this year, Asa is grateful for the experiences and people he has met through this school. His family is currently stateside, doing fundraisers for their ministry back in Italy for some extra support that they currently do not have. Without CPA, he is not sure what he would do for school between traveling across the country and to Italy. As he moves on to the next phase of his life, he will always remember CPA and the impact the school has made on his journey.

This article was brought to you by Sara Navarrete