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Sample Essays

(Use these as a reference point but please don’t feel limited to this style!)

Example One: Short Form

Title: Քանի լեզու գիտես, էդքան մարդ ես։ How many languages you know is how many people you are.

Author: Matt Todd

Walk through the bustling GUM market in central Yerevan and you will hear sellers bargaining with tourists through broken English or Russian with taglines such as “very tasty” being very popular. You will see people smiling, laughing, and often showing pride in their products – ranging from freshly butchered pigs, pickles of every type, sun-dried apricots from Ararat, stacks of cured meats, piles of fresh green herbs, and these guys in the picture. Honestly, I am not sure what the name of them is, but I do know they are made with dried fruits on the outside and stuffed with a variety of crushed nuts. The color and shape of them drew my eye on my morning walk through the market and I stooped down to take a picture. Naturally, the owner of the stall made a joke that the picture would cost me 1000 dram. Instead, I offered in Armenian – much to his surprise – to buy two pieces of the item instead. The man was happy to meet a foreigner who spoke Armenian and, much to my embarrassment, brought me to his friends and commanded me to speak Armenian with them. I obliged and was then sent away with two pieces of the snack free of charge and a smile on my face.

Example Two: Short Form

Title: Purple Mountain Magic

Author: Madeline Marquardt

I used to run in the midsummer heat as the sun slipped finally behind the mountain, watching dust float in the air and catch the light. “Oor es gnoom?” / “Where are you going?” an older woman would call after me and I would reply “I’m running!”, which doesn’t really answer the question.

“But what from?” She asked me one day, and I didn’t know how to answer but I laughed so hard I stopped running. She caught up to me and I agreed to a cup of coffee and apricots on her porch and explained in slow and broken detail that I work in the school, and when it starts to cool down, I run to the church at night because I can see the mountains turn purple. 

She nodded and wished me luck in my search for purple mountains, and from then on, I always took a coffee break around mile two. 

Example Three: Long Form

Title: Burnt Red Hills

Author: Madeline Marquardt

It didn’t dip below 100 degrees for two weeks straight that summer, and I don’t even like running. The cramp that builds under my ribs, the pins in my knee, sucking down dry air— I don’t like any of it. I don’t like the heat either.

I had thought that Armenia, a mountainous country bordered Georgia, Azerbaijan, Iran, and Turkey, would be cold. I was wrong.

It was hot. That summer, my English clubs started early in the morning, at a different time every day. Time in the desert seems to be more of an abstract concept, as if clocks have melted in the heat. Within the first few minutes of my club, the small of my back would be damp. Chalk would scrape down the blackboard and I could feel salt on my face. I had wanted to have English clubs later in the day too, but no students would come. Their parents wouldn’t let them outside in that kind of sun.

English club would end an hour before lunch, and my students would leave the school immediately after, still shy of me. I would walk back to the green door I called home and have coffee, soortj, and watermelon with my host mom and sister. I’d struggle through small talk in basic, clunky Armenian. 

“Ashakertnere vonces ein?” My host mom would ask every day, like clockwork. How were the students?

“Narank lav e,” I would say. They is good.

“It’s very hot, yes?” She would add.

“Ayo, shat.” Yes, very.

“We’ll stay inside then, and relax.”

I would nod. It was too hot to be out in the daytime. In town, men stood in the shade smoking cigarettes, staring at me as I passed. I am strange, and blond, and unmistakably foreign. I flushed red like a sunburn every time I spoke fumbling Armenian in my tin foil accent. Then there were the sandflies, and scorpions, and I kept hearing the phrase “toonavor odzer” which I quickly worked out to be venomous snakes. 

Inside and relax was fine, with hour after careful hour of lesson plans, or making posters, or reading in the shade. I would practice writing in the looping Armenian script while my host sister patiently coached me on my grammar. Then the light would start to fade and the heat with it, and I would be restless and desperate to move.

I would gather my hair back, slide into long and loose black pants and a tank top, and brave my strange new home alone. 

I ran past blocky Soviet apartments and groups of kids playing volleyball, watching me shyly. I pushed up into the foothills of the Gegham Mountains where time melted in the heat, toward the red stone church that claims it was once a Silk Road outpost. Dust swirled up around me like gold and bright desert songbirds with spots and long feathers darted from tree to tree. The distinct outline of Mount Ararat and its snowy slopes would shimmer in the heat like a mirage, commanding the entire valley below.

Every night, the heat broke like a fever while my feet drummed at dusty roads, winding through apricot groves with the sky lit pale peach pink. I would drink that time, feeling strong and capable of something, even if it was just a run. In that liquid gold hour, I wasn’t the American, or the foreign English teacher, or the girl with the ugly accent. I was just me; I was nothing. I was a speck on the burnt red hills. 

I ran almost every night that summer despite the heat and the men who started. Little by little, kamats kamats, my Armenian evolved into something functional, and speaking it became less intimidating. My English clubs grew into something I was intensely proud of, and my students started staying after to talk with me and practice English. The group of kids I passed on my runs started stopping me to play volleyball with them, and every now and then one of them would run alongside me for a while. The heat faded and autumn came and the big, scary desert with its snakes and scorpions became a home. Still, like clockwork, I would run the hour before sunset and drink time.

Questions? Contact me via email at madelinmarquardt@gmail.com or dm me on Instagram or Facebook (Maddy Marquardt)