A teenager in baggy jeans walked onto the stage, hair rumpled, big glasses, carrying an oversize ukulele.  At the

first notes, the noisy audience quieted.  As Hazel began to sing, she morphed into a Presence.

 

Hazel's six-year-old brother quit demonstrating his kung-fu moves and pasted himself against the stage lip, staring up at his sister, sometimes mouthing the words of the song.

 

And though the worms chew the pages 

Of the books I once read before bed

And though I might not see the body,

I remember why we break the bread

‘Cause it’s hard to love thy neighbor

If your neighbor wants you dead

So let’s talk about worms and the bible

And sing hymns about the stories that have yet to be written …

 

Hazel Lafrate is 17 now.  (It's Eye-a-frate, not Lafrate or Ya-frate or Ee-a-frate.) 

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Last summer, Hazel was the opening act for Kentucky's Mama Said String Band. “They were just hooting and hollering backstage, while she performed,” Hazel's mom, Emily Sarkees, remembers. “They couldn’t believe that was a teenager

they were hearing on the stage.”

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“So much talent, yet so normal,” said Morgantown High School teacher, Katie Leone. “Hazel’s the kind of writer that doesn’t need to have a brash, outlandish personality.

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“Hazel does a lot of very introspective writing. Subjects that have to do with coming to terms with identity, family relationships, sometimes loss and grief. With messy emotions," she said. "Often, hours later, I think about something Hazel wrote in class that day. Everything’s so clearly straightforward, Simple, but heartwrenching at the

same time.”

 

Untitled 3

I had long hair for a long time,

but it got tiresome after a while.

I could run my fingers through all the      grief that was tangled in it.

 

A writer's beginnings​

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Hazel's musician dad, Michael, wrote songs he sang to little Hazel. She wrote her first song when she was four, she says. “ Fishie’s nice. Fishie’s nice.

Fishies, Fishies are nice.” 

 

“Hazel always liked to write and make

up stories,” her mom said. “When she was little, she was always assigning personalities to things. I’d crochet creatures for her, then a whole story

life would spring up around those creatures.”

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By age five, Hazel was stapling pages together to make her “books.” Her first-grade teacher at Morgantown’s Mountainview Elementary gave her

the First Grade Future Author Award.​

 

 

 

 

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That same year, Hazel brought a bunch of rocks inside the house and set them up in rows.  Instead of scolding, mom and dad showed interest. “She assigned each rock a name and told us the back story of each rock and where

it was going in its life,” her mom said.

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When she was 11, “She had a set of scented pens, and she made a character profile for each pen, then drew pictures of them with that pen. She made up a personality for each color.”

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“It all came out of her little girl theater mind."​

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In third grade, she started writing graphic novels called Fairy Fields. “I

was a fairy, my friends were fairies,

and we were always fighting with each other.”  All the Fairy Fields are

preserved in a big pile of notebooks.

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“Those stories were my outlet for figuring out how I wanted to go about friend dynamics situations,” Hazel

said. “Part of me feels I was teaching myself how to behave, in writing those stories. Sometimes I was the good guy, and sometimes I was stealing people’s

diaries, to figure out why they were

mad at me.”  

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“Hazel's always been processing her real life with her writing,” mom Emily said.

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Her musician dad, Michael Iafrate, got her started with music. He died in

2021 when Hazel was 12. She writes

about him again and again. In 2023, her seventh-grade teacher sent Hazel’s

essay, “Funerals Never Made Me Cry,”

to the West Virginia Young Writers competition. It won a first place.

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“… I flash back to that old breakfast

place where he used to play. I

remember him standing in the stage corner, playing this song as I sat watching, the cords tangled at his feet, looping round his equipment like

thread tying it all together. I was too young and innocent to care about anything in the moment, other than 

that they were out of jelly.”

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Does she think of herself as a writer?

 

“I do. It took me awhile to get to the point where I could confidently call myself a writer. During the past couple of years, I’ve had more confidence in

that title, writer. Instead of saying, ‘Oh yeah, I’m kind of a writer, I dabble,’ 

it’s ‘Oh yes, I definitely am.’

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“It wasn’t that, one day, I was suddenly a writer.  It was just that I saw that I had always had been one.” ​

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A web of support

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Hazel, her mom, stepdad and brother and sister live in one of the wooden frame houses that cling to Morgantown’s steep hillsides. They and their large dog rotate through the kitchen and living room. Upstairs, Hazel stores her writing notebooks. Sometimes she digs through them, “mining for inspiration.” She puts post-it notes on the Fairy Fields pages, critiquing her 10-year-old  writing from an older point of view.

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“She was read to, from the time she could hold her eyes open,” her mom remembers, “and I guess I’ve always assumed that a lot of this was sparked there, being a little kid who had lots of books at home, was read to and given writing notebooks and materials as

soon as she could handle them.”

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In 9th grade, she and her friends

created “The Chaos Documents,”

Hazel’s invention. They’d gather at a local bubble-tea shop and go at it. “You all write it together, and you each

choose a color before you start.” Each person types in the part they dreamed up, in their own color. “So it’s this

huge, candy-colored, mismatched document.”  She still has it.​

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How does she write now?

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She writes just about anywhere, she

says. Sometimes lying on the floor. Sometimes sitting still like a stone, waiting for inspiration. Sometimes in class when she has a few minutes. She thinks about her pieces in class, in the shower, in the hall.  “I think most of the kids at school don’t know I write,” she said.  “But I’m always writing.”