Rewind: Three writers on their process

From October 2010 – At Wordstock 2010 in Portland, Oregon, the writers’ panel What Works for Me was probably the single most useful hour I spent at the event. We got to hear from three seasoned writers — Karen Karbo, Joanna Smith Rakoff and Heidi Durrow — about their writing processes and the quirky things they do to generate ideas or sharpen focus or enforce self-discipline. My notes from the session are below (gotta love the smart phone), and here are the three key points that have stuck with me in the weeks since the event:

1. Writing is hard. It is WORK. It requires discipline and perseverance at least as much as inspiration and talent.
2. Writers often carry a great sense of anxiety surrounding their work. The blank page is daunting, and even moreso when you are expected to fill dozens, or hundreds, of them with original brilliance.
3. When you honor your craft enough to develop a process and writing routine that works for you, the work of serious writing can become a downright pleasurable activity.

And, now, my session notes from Karen Karbo, Joanna Smith Rakoff and Heidi Durrow:

• It takes three weeks to create a habit. Apply this to your writing discipline.
• Enforce your own deadlines.
• It really is excruciating to write about things you don’t care about.
• Read The Artist’s Way and figure out which of its routines work best for you.
• Think about which paying writing gigs you can afford to do. Make sure the money matches your time and energy.
• Make a clear distinction between your paid writing and your personal/hobby writing projects.
• Look into writers colony options. Imagine being in a place where all you have to do is write! The short-term experience can change your writing process for the long-term. (If anyone has suggestions for this, please let me know.)
• Let writing become your most enjoyable activity, something you look forward to and actually make time for.
• Break a goal down to where it seems manageable and doesn’t bring anxiety.
• Be sure to visit the writing every day, even if its only to read what you’re drafting.
• Keep a happy file with notes, emails and blog comments of encouragement about your writing.
• It’s OK to step away from a piece and get a sense of control before you return to it.
• Identify the activities that help you do subconscious problem solving. These activities should NOT include checking email, Facebook and the like. Think folding laundry, going for a run, calling a friend.
• Challenge: Do one thing that gets your mind going (for one writer, calling her mother), then write while the energy is fresh. Do this thing every time before you write.
• Give yourself achieveable goals
• If you’re stuck in editing a sentence before you finish it, turn off your screen or change your font color to white for a set period of time.
• Crying while writing something personal (even fiction) is common and means you are writing about something that matters. Don’t be afraid of it, but don’t get stuck in it. Let it be a vehicle to move your writing forward.
• When it’s time to create, don’t edit. When it’s time to edit, don’t create. You can only do one thing at a time.
• Read poetry when you’re gearing up to write prose. Poets’ careful word choices, concise phrasing and rich imagery will rub off on your prose.

Now, go forth and write!

Rewind: Classroom Publishing — Books, Blogs and Beyond

From December 2010 — Right now I’m in conversation with teachers about turning their fourth-grade students into members of an elementary school newspaper staff. The 9- and 10-year-olds would be responsible for interviewing each other, writing stories, editing each other’s work and establishing the design concepts for a quarterly publication. There’s a method to this madness, I promise.

Classroom publishing was the theme for this fall’s Wordstock for Teachers conference in Portland, and I was fortunate to assist with a workshop conducted by the Classroom Publishing team from Ooligan Press at Portland State University. The key concept from this workshop was that there are lessons all through the publishing process that translate to multiple content areas and skill sets. Here is a breakdown of the Ooligan workshop:

Acquisitions

• Before you do anything, identify your publishing intent and audience. This will help get students invested in the project and help your team shape its style, voice and format.
• “The content and the form of expressing it need to match.”
• Students can evaluate potential content for their publications by using criteria that they have established themselves. In turn, they learn to look at their own work more objectively.
• The process of acquisitions helps students understand how literary anthologies and textbooks are put together, and makes assignments involving bibliographies, quotes and citations much more relevant to students.

Editing

• It’s easy to get stuck at this stage if you don’t have a clear plan.
• Emphasize to students early on that revising is a necessity in the writing process, not a punishment. Remind them that their work is worth revising.
• Developmental editing is the first round, and involves looking at the foundations of each piece and the way it is constructed.
• Copy-editing is what we usually think of when we hear the word “editing.” It involves checking for grammar and spelling.
• Make time for fact-checking.
• Proofreading comes after a piece is laid out on a page or website, prior to final publication.

Design

• The style and execution of your design will depend on who is creating your publication and who it is for. A publication that is made for students and by students will likely have a different design than one made by students for parents or by students for the community.
• Design can go way beyond the printed page! Consider a website, a blog, a podcast, a web video, etc.
• Web-based classroom publishing projects are a way for students to build a positive presence on the internet. A college scholarship committee will likely take note of a student with a web-based publishing project more than a student with a public Myspace page, etc.
• Let design serve as a visual metaphor for your entire publishing project.

Production

• This can come in many forms (paper, internet, digital presentation on a CD, etc.). When choosing a production method, consider your audience, intent and, most of all, your project budget.
• Here is a great list of publishing and production resources from Wordstock for Teachers.
• Contact local businesses and community groups to see if in-kind donations or financial assistance is possible for your production efforts.

Marketing

• Marketing is often a dirty word to artists and educators, but a book that doesn’t get marketed doesn’t get read!
• Marketing is more about connecting your audience with your project than it is about making money. But if you want to use a publishing project to raise money for another educational effort, it can’t hurt.
• Ideas for marketing efforts include having students to read from their publication over the school intercom, having students design posters and bookmarks for the project, hosting readings and open mic events, hosting book fairs, and connecting with groups online that are conducting similar projects. Relationships can begin with something as simple as students students from different schools commenting on each other’s blogs.
• Marketing is a great way to practice important writing skills such as persuasion, summarizing and identifying a target audience, and it requires clarity and conciseness.
• Your project should have a hook and pitch. A hook is a short, attention-grabbing phrase (such as “Take student work beyond the classroom”) and a pitch is similar to an elevator speech — about 40 words that clearly describe your project.

Is classroom publishing really worth all the effort? As a writer who is about to make classroom publishing into a career as a Journalism and Language Arts teacher, I am inclined to answer with a resounding YES. Sure, I’m biased. But I’m biased because of the pride I felt in third grade when my teacher laminated the drawings I made to summarize The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I’m biased because of the pride I felt when my sixth-grade teacher stopped the entire class to read my poem aloud (reading aloud is a form of publishing, too, because it brings work to an audience). I am biased because working on my high school newspaper staff taught me a variety of skills that have had direct applications to my paying work in public relations, nonprofit administration, journalism, and even parking permit services (that one’s a long story).

To learn everything you ever wanted to know about turning your students into publishers, visit Ooligan’s Classroom Publishing site and get a copy of their practical guide for teachers.

Rewind: Portland’s artisan economy, Q&A with Charles Heying

From October 2010 — “We know, we know. Portlanders love bicycles and microbrews. Portlanders love all things artisan. Portland loves Portland, and the city is making a name for itself in the world.

But does that mean anything apart from providing unique options for an afternoon out?

It means plenty, according to Charles Heying, the author and editor of Brew to Bikes: Portland’s Artisan Economy. Heying is an associate professor of urban studies and planning at Portland State University, and his book posits that Portlanders’ way of working and spending money is reflective of a larger economic trend—one that brings liberals and conservatives together in support of local, and often small, businesses in order to enhance their own quality of life. …”

This week NeighborhoodNotes.com published my interview with the above-mentioned author and editor Charles Heying, whose book I was connected to this summer through my work with the student staff of Ooligan Press at Portland State University.

The more I dig into this book and Heying’s research, the more I am fascinated by this approach to boosting the economy. Can we really pull everyone up by supporting the little guy and pursuing quality over quantity? We shall hope, and we shall see.

Here is a link to my interview, along with a couple of other recent stories mentioning Heying:

• NeighborhoodNotes.com: The new face of Portland’s economy
• The New York Times Portland Journal
• The Oregonian
• Brew to Bikes launch party

Rewind: Radiolab — Everything has a name

On the August 2009 episode of Radiolab, there’s the story of Susan Schaller and a 27-year-old man she worked with who was born deaf and did not realize that people interpreted the world through sound, let alone words. He assumed that everyone interpreted the world through visual cues, as he did. One day in Schaller’s sign language class, this man realized that everything had a name. And his world was changed.

This radio piece is put together so beautifully. It’s science that feels like story. Schaller asks, “What is it that happens in human beings when we get symbols?” and Radiolab answers: “Somehow (a new) word changes the world in some fundamental way.” The word allows us to communicate with others, as well as with ourselves, and to understand objects, people and places in ever-increasingly complex ways. The hosts explain that the basic process of living means, “You’re going to get filled up with all these things which you have to express, but can’t, until you get those words. Then BOOM! The door opens.” Everything has a name!

Here is the podcast episode.

Later in the segment Radiolab also discusses the idea that Shakespeare behaved more like a chemist than a writer — smashing words together as though they were elements, rather than layering them as we typically do. Both of these segments work quite well in lessons introducing high school students to Shakespeare.

Am I just a word nerd, or is all this stuff really exciting?

Rewind: Publishing as Pedagogy

From December 2010 — I still have a few crayoned, laminated, hand-bound books that I wrote in elementary school. In  many ways, the drawing and writing I did in those books was no better than the work that made it onto my mom’s fridge, or the work that cluttered my bedroom and was thrown away. But the fact that they were published means that pieces of my childhood were preserved, and that I felt a sense of legitimacy in my work, even as I was still practicing D’Nealian handwriting. Even if no one read the books, the sense of accomplishment they brought was similar to what I feel today when publishing a well-read news article or blog post, or even when I see that I’ve been “retweeted” by a stranger on Twitter.

As I mentioned in an earlier post about the future of the publishing industry, self-publishing is no longer considered a last resort for serious writers, but is becoming an increasingly legit way to share your work. This shift in thinking opens the doors for teachers and students to use new classroom publishing platforms and tools, and to share their work with increasingly wide audiences. All publishing industry issues aside, when I think of the way technology impacts publishing from a teacher’s perspective, fireworks go off. The possibilities for quality work are endless.

Classroom publishing was the theme for this fall’s Wordstock for Teachers conference in Portland, and I was fortunate to assist with a workshop conducted by the Classroom Publishing team from Ooligan Press at Portland State University. The event’s keynote speaker was Erick Gordon, formerly of the Student Press Initiative at Columbia University. Below are notes from his motivating presentation:

• Publication is no longer for elite students only, but also for students who are at risk.
• Publication raises the bar for all students involved in a project.
• Explore the idea of publishing as pedagogy. Allow it to expand your ideas of what kids can accomplish.
• Get linked up with teachers who are involved in publishing with the Student Press Initiative’s Ning.
• “This work can set you up to really know who kids are.”

If you’re interested in the Student Press Initiative, check out the organization’s website for classroom resources and inspiring project videos.

Stay tuned, because highlights from the Ooligan Press workshop on Classroom Publishing are in the fryer.

Rewind: Going electronic with a student newspaper

From March 2011 — Several weeks ago, the newspaper staff at my student teaching placement site learned that they would have no allotted budget for the coming school year. To save money and to propel their newspaper into a new era of publishing, our team got innovative and put the newspaper on Issuu.com. The results (as seen here) have been fantastic:

• The publication has the look and feel of an e-magazine.
• Our team saved money by printing only four pages (which were distributed throughout the school) and including teasers on those pages to lead readers to an additional six pages online. (I should note that this idea came from our student team, and was a key part of moving our team in this new direction.)
• Within a couple of days, the online publication had about 200 views. There were about 400 views within a week, equivalent to a quarter of the student body.
• The online publication is in color, allowing for more emphasis on photography and new options for our page designers.
• The Issuu.com account that allowed us to do all this was free.
• The viewer statistics we receive from Issuu.com will be used in advertising sales packets. And the opportunity to publish additional pages online means there will be more room for ads.
• We are already planning online extra issues in between our major scheduled publications. This allows us to memorialize a student who recently passed away, to provide sports updates, and to be available for other breaking news reports.

We have our current issue up online, along with two archived issues in black and white. You can see them all right here. We plan to use Issuu.com at least for the rest of the school year, hopefully in conjunction with a news website that a student is developing.

I know this blog is getting a lot of traffic from readers who are interested in classroom publishing and student journalism. Are any of you using Issuu.com? Which online resources have helped you and your students save money or reach new audiences?

Rewind: My student featured on Smithmag.net

From April 2011

I love memoirs. And I love brevity. So when Smith Magazine rolled out the Six-Word Memoir project, I knew it would be part of my life in some way.

Oddly, I’ve never posted my own Six-Word Memoir on SmithMag.net. But I bring it up in conversation and compose mini-memoirs in my head all the time. It’s a brilliant vehicle for sharing personal stories that are razor-sharp.

This month, as a warm-up for their writing exercises, I started asking my high school English students to write six-word memoirs at the beginning and end of our free-writing sessions. I hoped that my students would eventually find meaning in the practice, and I soon found out that one student had taken ownership of the six-word craft in a way I hadn’t expected.

“Ms. Thompson, I love six-word memoirs!” she said when she came to class one morning. “My mom grounded me from my computer, but I told her I had to log on to SmithMag.”

A week or so later, she came to class radiant.

“People are reading my six-word memoirs now!” she said. “I’m getting comments and people like what I’m writing. One of them recommended that I write posts on SheWrites.com.”

Today we were preparing for our last day of the in-class state writing test. I was trying to cross a hundred ‘t’s while dotting a thousand ‘i’s before we started our session. But my mentor teacher asked me to pause and hear some good news from this student.

“They gave me the featured memoir of the day!” our student reported.

I was about to tell her how proud I was of her when she showed me the chosen memoir. Now I’m more than proud of her. I am awed. And grateful.

This is happening! Kids are reading books and liking it

English teachers, tell me if you’ve seen this happen. You plan to start the period with a round of silent reading. 15-20 minutes of bliss, right? Everyone is quiet, minds are active, worlds are expanding, knowledge is building. Until you look at their reading journals and see that they are pretty much empty.

Working with two remedial English classes this year, it became clear by Winter Break that if I didn’t change this pattern quickly, my students would actually hate reading more than they already did. Having been an avid reader since about age 5, I’ve had to work to understand my students’ relationships with books, but I have gotten the sense that they feel a period of silent reading is like a period of falling into an abyss.

Imagine starting every class period falling into an abyss. Not a good way to kick things off.

In December I asked both classes, “What would you guys think if the whole class read the same book at the same time? What if we had the choice to read it out loud, to listen to it on CD, or to read it silently?” And both classes were all for it.

Raiding the school library, I found out that two killer YA novels were available — Rumble Fish by S.E. Hinton and Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson. Each class voted for a book to read — one picked Rumble Fish and the other picked Speak. So when we returned from Winter Break, we plunged in. As luck would have it, I found an audio version of Speak for students to listen to in class, but Rumble Fish is old and obscure enough that we had to read it out loud.

In any case, both approaches with auditory learning have worked fairly well. When I ask students to take notes or answer questions about a section, they’ve been on track. Much more so than they seemed to be when they were reading silently. So I was surprised today when about half of my first period class asked if they could do today’s Rumble Fish reading silently. The rest of the class seemed on board, so we went for it.

I was ASTONISHED. They read it. They totally read it! On their own. Silently! And completely! I didn’t have to stop them even once for being off task. We were breaking classroom behavior records all over the place.

Then came the best part:

When one student finished reading his assignment he said, “Ms. Thompson, can I finish reading this book at home?” To which I responded, “Of course!” Then he said, “Does this author have any other books like this?”And I said, “YES! The Outsiders is amazing.” He asked what it was about and THEN (get this!), one of my most reluctant students chimed in and gave an impromptu summary of The Outsiders, like we were at a book group meeting or something.

I am still so amazed by this that I’m laughing with joy as I write.

The first student said, “Can I go to the library right now to get a copy of The Outsiders?” to which I responded with so much enthusiasm that I probably scared him. I told him that his response was one of the most important things that’s ever happened to me as a teacher. And I sent him to the library.

Since we’ve moved through Rumble Fish so quickly, the class agreed that they wanted to try and finish The Outsiders before the end of the semester in a few weeks. As I write these words, I can hardly believe them. A transformation has happened. They are still reluctant when it comes to grammar lessons and writing. But they have found an author that they connect with, and we are making progress. They are having a positive experience with a book, and I feel like all of our lives have been changed because of it.

The students who are reading Speak have also surprised me in wonderful ways, but that is a story for another time. Please keep reading (however sporadic my posts are), and please share any stories, questions or suggestions you have about struggling readers.

Why is this baby in a bird bath?

I found a vintage photo of a cherubic-looking baby sitting in a bird bath. I don’t know what he’s doing there — do you? Help me write a story about it! I’m collecting video anecdotes on VYou.com.