My student featured on Smithmag.net

I love me some 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.

On William Stafford, Katy Perry and a grave teenage illness

“The Way It Is”
By William Stafford

There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.

 

 

 

Last week I was all geared up to teach a journalism lesson when an email brought me and my mentor teacher to a screeching halt.

We learned that one of our students landed in intensive care over the weekend for an infection that sneaked up on him quietly and powerfully. Even in the last class we held before he went to the hospital, I was marveling at his positive attitude and academic performance.

My students put together a stack of get-well cards for their friend and I was fortunate to meet his family when I delivered the cards at the hospital. His mother told me that they had seen small improvements in his condition, but that they were still taking things minute by minute. These are scary times.

I think about this student often — every time another student asks how he’s doing, every time I come across one of his assignments, or sometimes when my mind drifts. We don’t know what will happen to him, and it is hard to accept that he might not have the future we imagined (I was convinced he would at least become a high school news editor, but likely much, much more). It’s even harder to tell his classmates that we’re not always hopeful.

During my 45-minute commute home from the high school, I was thinking about all this when Katy Perry’s “Firework” song came on the radio. Usually, I’m irritated by this song and its ubiquity on the radio waves. But on this day it reminded me of the high school assembly I’d seen where a student was playing this song on guitar and another was singing its chorus, his voice completely earnest. The school auditorium was filled with at least half of the student body, and the entire crowd erupted into song, supporting their friends on the stage. I know that if they thought their friend in the ICU could hear them, they would sing this song again for him.“Do you ever feel already buried deep, six feet under scream, but no one seems to hear a thing … Baby, you’re a firework. Come on show ‘em what you’re worth…”

So much of a high school teacher’s work involves wrangling teenagers’ overpowering social tendencies. Developmentally, teens can’t help but see the world through a social lens — to them friendship is often more important than anything else. This can be irritating for a teacher who has an academic agenda to follow, or for a parent who is trying to instill values of discipline. But when I think about my students’ concern for their friend in the hospital, and when I think about hundreds of teenagers bursting into song to support a friend singing on stage, their compulsion to friendship strikes me as remarkable, even miraculous.

Perhaps this is why people reflect so often on their teenage years — for many people, they are a time when friendship is more important than anything else. And when friendships are rich, life is rich.

Already I get funny looks from people when I tell them that I’m choosing to teach high school as a career. I always tell them that I just like teenagers, but I haven’t figured out why. But now I can be clear on at least one of the reasons — I enjoy being in a work environment where friendship and community are a top priority to most of the people in the building. I appreciate a teenager’s compulsion toward friendship.

Neighborhood Notes: Fashion trucks give business a new spin

I just published a story at NeighborhoodNotes.com about people in Portland who fix up old trailers and buses and turn them into  vintage and resale clothing boutiques. Can we say “most-super-fun-story-subject-in-forever”?

(Full disclosure: I have been a vintage clothing collector since coming of age in the thrift store-laden 1990s. Here’s a photo of me the 1920s dress I bought with one of my first-ever paychecks.)

Thanks to Lodekka, Wanderlust, Showvroom, Heather Zinger and NeighborhoodNotes.com for their collaboration on this piece. Now go read it and check out the photos!

Wordstock for Teachers: Publishing as pedagogy

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.

Wordstock: Three writers on their process

Last month I had the pleasure of attending several workshops and panels at Wordstock 2010 in Portland, Oregon. While the entire weekend was useful and invigorating for writer/teacher types like myself, 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!

Read Scott Dannemiller!

My buddy Scott Dannemiller is on a roll with his blog, The Accidental Missionary. He’s the kind of writer who makes you get teary-eyed and think about the big picture, all while revealing the fact that he once peed in a Big Gulp cup while driving. Read it!

To give you a flavor for his blog, here is a photo of me (far left) in 2004 at a Guatemalan textiles museum with Scott (guy in the back) and his amazing wife, Gabby (front and center), and our dear volunteer friends, Jennifer (lady on the right) and Brian (also on the right). All wrapped up in Guatemalan culture and laughing hysterically. Par for the course.

Thursday – Anecdotal Evidence: A Storytelling Series

This Thursday evening I’ll do my first storytelling piece with Anecdotal Evidence in Vancouver, WA. I’ve been impressed with the group’s talent, humor and remarkable sense of community, and am excited to work with them. This month’s theme is “Be True to Your School” and I’ll be sharing a story about my bewilderment with teens and their text messengering. (Which is ironic, since I’ve spent all weekend getting to know my smart phone.)

Here are the details for this month’s show. Typically, the larger the audience, the more animated the storyteller. So we’ll see you there!