This month, I’ll be celebrating the second birthday of Make Writing, the little book that could. When I wrote it, I never imagined that I would get to meet and learn from so many of you who I’ve come to call my colleagues and friends over the last two years. This has been a rewarding journey, and each bend in the road has surfaced new and important questions about making and writing and the relationship…
Here’s what I know: when many young writers face sit down to confront flat, empty screens and pages, they freeze. These are the writers who experience frustration and even defeat as they wade into procedures that often feel contrived using tools that are completely intangible. Over time, these tensions perpetuate a sort of quiet trauma as well: these children begin to believe that they can’t write, and then they stop trying. All of this has…
I founded the WNY Young Writer’s Studio eight years ago. A community of writers and teachers of writing, Studio is a place where writers of all ages and experience levels come together to study and produce real things for real audiences free from the constraints that schools typically impose. This makes it a phenomenal place for teachers to study writers and the development of writing, and over the last four years, I’ve had the opportunity…
Many children and adults will tell you that writing is quite literally out of their grasp. They can’t wrap their hands around it, and since this is how they learn best, writing remains beyond their reach. Many writers need to move, and they need their writing to move as well. They need to write out of their seats and on their feet, spreading their ideas across whiteboards and tables, lifting pieces of them up with…