In This Issue

Alumni Notes
Online Resources
Bechtel Prize
Workshops
Magazine
Books
Coalitions
2020 Visions

Addressing the Challenges of a New Year

Dear Friends,

This first month of 2009 brings with it the typical feeling of a fresh start with the added excitement of the historic Obama presidency. Of course, 2009 will also be a year of tremendous challenges. Certainly the nation has been through severe and long-lasting economic downturns in the past, but the nature of the current situation is unprecedented.

In New York City, the epicenter of the global financial crisis, schools are experiencing draconian budget cuts at the same time that corporate support is disappearing. Many foundations are able to provide less funding for schools and organizations they’ve worked with in the past and are not offering grants to groups they aren’t already supporting. The result for T&W and our school partners, as well as many other arts-in-education programs and schools around the country, is an extraordinarily difficult climate for funding creative-writing programs for young people.

It’s a cliché, but it’s true: Your support for T&W and the work of writers-in-the-school (WITS) programs is more important now than ever. We need your help, and there are lots of ways you can get involved.

• Make a donation: Individual donors to T&W are essential to making all our work-including our publications and 2020 Visions reading series, as well as writing programs-possible. Go to our website at www.twc.org/support/donate to learn what your tax-deductible gift will support, or call Loyal Miles, T&W’s director of development and marketing, at 212-691-6590 to discuss making a contribution.
  Promote T&W and other writing programs to schools and community groups: Many creative-writing residencies and workshops happen because of good word-of-mouth. Let your friends, family members, and colleagues know why you think writing programs for young people are important, and tell them about good programs in your area. Learn more about T&W’s workshops and residencies on our website at www.twc.org/workshops, or contact us at workshops@twc.org, 212-691-6590. To find out about other programs in New York and across the U.S., go to www.twc.org/resources/links.

• Network with other supporters of arts-in-education and creative-writing programs: Tens of thousands of individual teachers, students, and parents have been touched by the work of writers who have shared their love of literature and the craft of writing through organizations such as T&W. By connecting with one another, you will form a powerful constituency to ensure that support for initiatives that foster and provide opportunities for self-expression continue to thrive. See the articles in this newsletter about T&W’s forthcoming “Alumni Notes” and WITS Alliance activities at next month’s AWP Conference for ways you can make those connections.

• Share your success stories and your challenges: At a time of shrinking resources, it’s essential to learn from and to build upon the work of others. Beginning this month, we are making some of the outstanding lesson plans and best practices featured in the last 30 years of T&W publications available-for free-via our website. And to help build our catalog of resources for the future, please consider submitting an entry for the 2009 Bechtel Prize, awarded annually in recognition of an exemplary essay about teaching creative writing or the literary arts. See “Online Resources” and “Bechtel Prize” in this issue for more information.

• Spread the word about T&W resources: Teachers & Writers magazine and our catalog of more than 60 books about the teaching of creative writing offer valuable resources for classroom teachers, for writers teaching in schools and community sites, and for individuals who want to improve their own writing skills. Go to www.twc.org/publications to browse our book catalog, to read excerpts from recent issues of the magazine, and to order books or a subscription to Teachers & Writers.

Thank you in advance for getting involved and for supporting the work of T&W and other programs that bring the arts to schools and community programs for children and teens. We are grateful for your commitment.

Best wishes,

Amy Swauger, Director

ALUMNI NOTES

Call for T&W Alumni News

Been busy? Tell us all about it! To help T&W members, supporters, and both current and former teaching artists and students stay connected, we invite you to share your writing, teaching, and other professional successes-recent publications, awards, or recognition. Send your stories to 2008-2009 T&W Fellow Jenny Williams at alumninews@twc.org.

And if you haven’t yet done so, sign up for the T&W Alumni Network at www.twc.org/about/tw-alumni-network. We’d love to hear from you!

ONLINE RESOURCES

T&W’s Greatest Hits and Haiku Interviews Available Online

Starting this month, Teachers & Writers Collaborative is making writing exercises and ideas that have been used successfully in classrooms and highlighted in T&W publications over the past 30 years available on our website www.twc.org/resources/techniques. Each original article will appear along with a short plan summarizing the lesson, and new articles and plans will be posted at least twice a month. At the beginning of every month, we’ll introduce a posting of warm-up exercises to get your students going. We’re hoping these exercises will be useful tools to support your fantastic work!

January’s postings include:

• “Crafting a Narrative from Life,” by Karen Ulrich, a look at how to guide high school students through the first stages of writing autobiography.

• “Poetry Inside Out,” by John Oliver Simon and Michael P. Ray, an article about the work of an organization that guides elementary school Spanish-speaking children to translate poems into English.

• “Minimalism’s Grace,” by Mark Mills, on how to teach very short story writing to high school students.

• “The Quintet Recipe,” by Corie Feiner, a resource on teaching the poetic form of the cinquain to special-needs youth.

Please contact 2008-2009 T&W Fellow Christina Olivares at webresources@twc.org if you’d like to see a resource posted on any particular subject, theme, or genre.

In addition to the lesson plans and best practices posted to the website, you’ll find additional ideas for the classroom in “Haiku Interviews.” These short Q&A discussions provide a forum for writers who teach for T&W and others to share tips about teaching and views on how their own writing is influenced by the teaching they do.

Read “Haiku Interviews” at www.twc.org/resources/haiku-interviews.

BECHTEL PRIZE

Submission Guidelines Available for 2009 Bechtel Prize

The submission guidelines for the 2009 Bechtel Prize are now available on the T&W website at www.twc.org/publications/bechtel-prize. Submissions must be received by 5:00 PM (Eastern), Tuesday, June 30, 2009.

T&W initiated the Bechtel Prize in 2004 to recognize an exemplary essay addressing important issues in the areas of creative writing education, literary studies, and/or the profession of writing.

This year T&W is seeking Bechtel Prize submissions that explore the teaching of creative writing in combination with another artistic discipline, such as dance, media arts, music, theater, or the visual arts; or with another academic discipline, such as math or history. We are looking for essays that shed light on the nature of the creative process and want to read your stories about viewing the art of writing through a different lens, and your take on the benefits and challenges of such cross-disciplinary work.

The recipient of the 2009 Bechtel Prize will receive a $1,500 honorarium, and the winning essay will be published in Teachers & Writers magazine. Authors of essays selected as finalists for the award will share honoraria of $500, and those essays may be published in the magazine.

Questions regarding the Bechtel Prize should be directed to bechtel@twc.org.

WORKSHOPS

T&W Works in NYC’s After School Violence Prevention Program

Student work from District 75 ASVP program participant P371 K Lillian Rashkis High School; facilitated by T&W writer Ilka Scobie.

For the last five years, Teachers & Writers Collaborative has served five District 75 schools as a participant support organization in the After School Violence Prevention program (ASVP). District 75 in the New York City Department of Education provides citywide educational, vocational, and behavioral support programs for students who are on the autism spectrum, are severely emotionally challenged, and/or have multiple disabilities.

The ASVP program serves high school-aged students who attend the workshops voluntarily. T&W programs not only support development of students’ reading and writing skills, but also provide creative and positive outlets for students to tell their stories and learn about themselves and each other in a safe workshop setting.

Sea Life

Sometimes I wish I could just glide in
the water
ride on the current of the sea, swim like
a jellyfish
with no destination.
I could be as big and graceful as a whale or
large
and aggressive like a tiger shark.
When I am hungry, I’ll eat any and
everything
getting in between me and my path.
Sometimes I wish I could hide in my
shell,
like a hermit crab, to protect myself
from the rage of the world.

-Kevin M.

At the beginning of each year’s program, T&W writers and the coordinators at each of the five schools brainstorm activities that students are likely to enjoy and commit to attending, and that will also support classroom learning. This year’s after-school workshops include performance poetry, playwriting, and hip-hop lyric writing. Past programs have engaged students in newspaper reporting, writing graphic novels, and scene and scriptwriting.

Breeze

The air, the wind, the hollow we
Breathe
The breeze that touches our sacred
Skin
Full of power and love, no word
Can describe
The thought that follows beneath a love
Of roses and chocolate
Everything changes

-Felicia V.

The District 75 programs have enabled T&W writers to develop expertise in working with special needs populations. Some of the writing that comes from these workshops is the most profound from all of our programs, while the experience for both the students and T&W teaching artists is particularly rewarding. Each year, T&W writer Ilka Scobie brings her District 75 students from the Lillian Rashkis High School in Brooklyn to the City College Annual Spring Poetry Festival, where students perform and compete with high school poets from all over the city.

Am I Proud?

This evenly matched singer attracts a
crowd from out loud.
I may look good, but am I proud?
Outside my mask is a smile,
at home my smile melts down.
My home should not be somewhere I do not
want to sleep.
Family, mine loves me, I love them
more.
Some friends turned foe.
Anger is a part of me; it never lifts up off
of me.
But ‘til I rise to be an even better guy,
I just let them smile, some mistakes I
made myself.
To find something better, then love.
How to be responsible.

-Shateek W.

T&W writers have experience working with the spectrum of special needs students, as well as gifted and talented classes, English language learners, and regular classrooms in grades K-12. If your school is interested in a workshop for your students, either during or after school, please contact workshops@twc.org or give us a call at 212-691-6590.

TEACHERS & WRITERS MAGAZINE

2008 Bechtel Prize Winner Featured in Winter Issue

The winter issue of Teachers & Writers magazine features the 2008 Bechtel-winning entry, an essay titled “Within Words” by Minneapolis poet and high school teacher Michael Bazzett. In this piece, Bazzett describes his hands-on creative efforts to get his students to “inhabit the poetry he teaches, arguing that a deeper understanding of poetry will expand his students’ horizons.

A lively interview with T&W Board member Phillip Lopate, author of Being with Children, follows. The conversation between Lopate and 2008-2009 T&W Fellow Jenny Williams delves into Lopate’s life as a writer and teacher. An excerpt from Being with Children, recently reissued by The New Press, accompanies the interview. The excerpt offers a fascinating glimpse of Lopate’s stint as a T&W writer-in-residence in an early 1970s-era New York City public school.

The issue also includes a timely piece by Karen L. Lewis describing how the financial constraints that compelled three arts organizations in Buffalo, New York, to share resources also opened the door for her to develop an exciting and successful collaborative curriculum combining photography and poetry. Lewis provides examples of her students’ poems and photos, as well as some practical classroom exercises for teachers wishing to try their hand at such collaborative work. We wrap up the winter issue with T&W poet and teacher Bertha Rogers’ succinct primer on the pleasures and rewards of teaching-and writing-sonnets. Rogers gives examples of the sonnets she uses in the classroom, and shows us the wonderfully inventive work they inspire from her young students.

We invite you to take at look at the issue on our website, www.twc.org, where you can read Michael Bazzett’s article, order a single issue, or subscribe to the magazine. And let us know what you think by e-mailing us a note for our letters to the editor section at letters@twc.org.

BOOKS FROM TEACHERS & WRITERS

The Dictionary of Wordplay

The Dictionary of Wordplay provides a fun and exciting way to engage kids in writing, poetry, and creativity. Here, author Dave Morice reflects on his own students’ experience in writing from The Dictionary of Wordplay.

Just as my work on the Dictionary was in its final week, I went to class and asked the fifth- and sixth-grade students to write some poems using several forms from the Dictionary. This was my first school visit of the new millennium. After discussing wordplay forms that appear in the Dictionary, I suggested to the students that they write a poem, prose poem, or story based on wordplay and return to it in the next few days.

Two students, Sam and my son Danny, asked if they could write a story together. It revolved around the oxymoron, a form of wordplay in which a single term has contradictory parts, such as “fresh frozen” and “pretty ugly.” They become so intrigued by the oxymoron that they made a list of ones they came up with and looked up others in a wordplay book. The also discussed last-minute changes to their story on the phone before reading it to their parents.

The Untitled Title

Once there was a mad scientist named Bubba. One day he was sitting in his lawn chair eating jumbo shrimp and reading the old newspaper about the Civil War when he met a spider monkey in a baggy swimsuit who claimed he invented the Internet. The monkey took the mad scientist for a walk, and they saw his best friend George Bush, the honest politician. They were all walking when suddenly a smart jock with an athletic scholarship hit the spider monkey with a football. The mad scientist picked up the monkey and took him to his house. He gave the monkey some Diet Coke and played some soft rock. The monkey was so unhappy he was happy until the beginning of the end.

-Sam Offut and Daniel Morice

Two other students chose to write “Alphabet Sentences,” which are 26-word sentences composed of words that begin with each letter of the alphabet in sequence. The first word begins with A, the second with B, and so on to Z. Such a sentence becomes more difficult as it approaches the end of the alphabet.

A Big Cow

A big cow departed East from Germany having impatience just konked lancing many nonsense occupied people questing Research Science tests unless venturing west Xeroxing yellow zippers.

-Libby

To order The Dictionary of Wordplay and to explore T&W’s full catalog of publications for classroom teachers and for writers, go to our website at www.twc.org/publications.

T&W IN COALITION

Join T&W and the WITS Alliance at AWP in Chicago

The WITS Alliance, a nationwide consortium of writers-in-the-schools programs, is a sponsor of the 2009 AWP (The Association of Writers & Writing Programs) Conference, which will be held February 11-14, in Chicago. Meet representatives from T&W and our partner organizations from across the country at WITS Alliance-sponsored events and panel sessions, including the following. (All rooms are in the Hilton Chicago.)

Wednesday, February 11

• 4:30-5:45 PM: WITS Membership Meeting-Private Dining Room, 3rd Floor

Thursday, February 12

• 9:00-10:15 AM Panel: My Voice, Wide as the Sun: Preparing to Teach Creative Writing in K-12 Classrooms-Lake Ontario, 8th Floor
• 1:30-2:45 PM Panel: From the Ground Up, Developing a Writers-in-the-Schools Program at Your College-Joliet, 3rd Floor
• 7:00-8:00 PM: WITS Alliance Reception-Marquette, 3rd Floor

Friday, February 13

• 9:00-10:15 AM Panel: Recruiting and Supporting Students through Summer Workshops-Continental A, Lobby Level
• 12:00-1:15 PM Panel: Building Online Literary Communities: An Overview and Case Studies-Boulevard Room A, B, C, 2nd Floor

Saturday, February 14

• 9:00-10:15 AM Panel: A Room of One’s Own: Student Writing Centers-International Ballroom South, 2nd Floor
• 4:30-5:45 PM Panel: Best Practices: Teaching Expressive Writing with Hospital Populations-Astoria, 3rd Floor

To learn more about the WITS Alliance, visit booth #218 at the AWP Book Fair, Southeast Hall, Lower Level; or go to www.witsalliance.org.

2020 VISIONS

2009 2020 Visions Readings Series Launches This Month

The weather outside has been frightful-or cold, at least, in New York City-but you can warm your soul and hearten your spirits at 2020 Visions, T&W’s reading series that highlights both established and new writers working in a wide variety of genres. Doors open at 7:00; the readings begin at 7:15. 2020 Visions events are free and open to the public.

Upcoming events will feature:

• February 4-Lynne Procope is a poet and teaching artist from Trinidad and Tobago. She is a founder of the New York-based nonprofit, the louderARTS Project Inc. and a director of its Workshops and Outreach Program, as well as curator of the experimental performance workshop, synonymUS. Procope is co-author of the collection Burning Down the House, and her work appears in the Summer/Fall 2000 Drums Voices Review: Poetry Slam Anthology and How to Read an Oral Poem. Laura Yes Yes is the 2008 Individual World Poetry Slam representative of Berkeley, California. She also participated in the National Poetry Slam as a member of Team Berkeley in 2008, and Team San Francisco in 2007. She created and edits her own zine, Nth, which features underground writers and artists from around the world.
• February 18-Eva Kollisch, rescued in childhood from the Nazis by a Kindertransport, is professor emerita at Sarah Lawrence College, where she taught German and comparative literature for more than 30 years. In her first memoir, Girl in Movement, Kollisch dealt with several years of her radical youth inside the Trotskyist Workers Party after she came to America. In her newest memoir, The Ground Under My Feet, she looks back at different periods of her life, including her youth growing up Jewish in Austria. Carol Ascher grew up in Topeka, Kansas, as the daughter of European refugees. Her recent memoir Afterimages, as well as her novel The Flood, depict her complicated Midwestern childhood. Ascher is also the author of Simone de Beauvoir: A Life of Freedom. Her stories and personal essays have appeared in New Letters, the Kenyon Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Shenandoah, as well as in numerous collections.
• March 4-Justin Taylor has published fiction and nonfiction work in numerous journals, magazines, and websites, including The Believer, Slate, and Oxford American. He is the editor of two books, The Apocalypse Reader and Come Back, Donald Barthelme. His short story “The Jealousy of Angels” was included in Best of the Web 2008, and his essay “Fort Smith, Arkansas-A Monologue” was an honorable mention in Best American Essays 2007. Andrew Porter is the author of the short story collection The Theory of Light and Matter, which won the 2007 Flannery O’Connor Award in Short Fiction. Porter’s award-winning fiction has appeared in One Story, Epoch, the Antioch Review, the Threepenny Review, and the Pushcart Prize Anthology, and on NPR’s Selected Shorts.
• March 27-Jean Valentine, the current State Poet of New York (2008-2010), was born in Chicago, earned her BA at Radcliffe College, and has lived most of her life in New York City. She won the Yale Younger Poets Award for her first book, Dream Barker, in 1965. Valentine’s most recent book is Little Boat. Her previous collection, Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems 1965-2003, was the winner of the 2004 National Book Award for Poetry. Kate Greenstreet is the author of case sensitive and three chapbooks, Learning the Language, Rushes, and This is why I hurt you. Her second book, The Last 4 Things, will be published in September.
  Read more about the authors at www.twc.org/events.

2020 Visions readings are held at T&W’s Center for Imaginative Writing, 520 Eighth Avenue (between 36th and 37th Streets), 20th floor. For updates on upcoming events and directions to T&W, e-mail events@twc.org, call 212-691-6590, or go to the T&W website: www.twc.org/events.

If you are unable to attend events at T&W, you can listen to podcasts from the 2020 Visions series at www.twc.org/events/podcasts.