In This Issue

Workshops
T&W Fellowships
Books
Online Resources
Teachers & Writers Magazine
Thank You!
Alumni Notes
Bechtel Prize
2020 Visions

Letter from the Director

Last night while we were eating
we heard a few love stories
samosas and Shiraz
and “this is how we met.”

Out of ashes into fire,
“I knew that very moment,”
(even the waiters listened)
“it was a miracle I met you.”

-Sherry Robbins, February 2009

Dear Friends,

Professional development sessions don’t usually result in poems about the wonders of spicy food, red wine, and love at first sight, but the writers who gathered at Teachers & Writers Collaborative in February for a convening of teaching artists from around New York made sure the meeting was anything but typical.

The idea to hold the convening grew out of discussions of the Writers-in-the-School New York (WITS NY) project team, a group supported by the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA). The WITS NY team has met for the last several years to share information and to develop strategies for marketing and advocating for the importance of writers working in schools. T&W, Adirondack Center for Writing (ACW), and the Just Buffalo Literary Center have been part of WITS NY from the beginning, and collaborated to plan the pilot teaching artist convening, with financial support from NYSCA. Our goals for the pilot session were:

• To provide a mechanism for teaching artists working in diverse parts of the state to share best practices.
• To equip the teaching artists with information and material to be used in leading professional development sessions for other writers and for teachers.
• To get input from experienced and newer teaching artists on needs of the field.
• To initiate a community of writers working in WITS programs around the state.

Participants in the convening included three teaching artists from each of the organizations, along with WITS program staff from each group and representatives from NYSCA’s Arts in Education Program. The loosely structured agenda mixed conversations about the current status of WITS programs statewide with demonstration lessons led by one writer from each organization. Bill Patrick from ACW offered strategies to get reluctant students to start writing. Just Buffalo’s Sherry Robbins arrived with a bag of cards, toys, and other tangible, tactile tools to prompt poetry. And Bertha Rogers, a long-time teaching artist with T&W, focused on how formal structures like the Malaysian pantoum can introduce young writers to the joys of writing within set rules. When everyone at the convening wrote their own pantoums, the stories told over dinner at an Indian restaurant the night before provided the subject matter for more than one poet.

The teaching artist convening was a reminder of how much talent and knowledge the writers who teach for T&W and our partner organizations bring to our work. Each of the teaching artists at the convening could have shared their own best practices, and the three experienced writers who led sessions agreed that they had learned new strategies not only from one another’s presentations, but also from the questions and responses to their own lesson plans. Whether leading professional development sessions for other writers or for classroom teachers (See the “Workshops” article below.), these literary artists have a wealth of ideas and strategies to make studying and teaching writing meaningful and fun.

We hope to repeat and expand the teaching artist convening next year, but in the meantime we’ve achieved our goal of creating a community of teaching artists. The nine writers who took part in the first convening have already been connecting to help one another deal with new challenges and opportunities, and-I suspect-to share the latest chapter in the stories they started to tell over hot Indian food on a cold February night.

Best wishes,

Amy Swauger, Director

WORKSHOPS

Professional Development Workshops Engage Teachers as Writers

Although Teachers & Writers Collaborative is well known for our creative writing work with young people, our program offerings also include professional development sessions for teachers. In November, T&W writers conducted back-to-back workshops for teachers from Aviation Career & Technical High School in Long Island City, Queens. The workshops were held in T&W’s Center for Imaginative Writing, which offers a library of books for teachers of writing and a venue for literary and educational events. Although professional development workshops are more commonly held at schools, holding workshops at the Center is a fun and refreshing way for teachers to experiment with writing and work with their colleagues in a pleasant out-of-school environment. Booking a professional development session at the Center comes at no extra cost to the school.

In November, 20 teachers from Aviation High first participated in a two-hour, hands-on poetry writing workshop with Dave Johnson. Dave is a veteran writer-in-residence for T&W and an accomplished poet and playwright. He lectures at Yale University and is a visiting faculty member in the MFA program at The New School University and an instructor at The Cooper Union School of Art.

Dave’s workshop focused on connecting the language in poetry to music, visual arts, and foreign language writing. Teachers wrote poetry in response to jazz and blues music and paintings by Chagall and Kandinsky, and practiced transliteration of foreign language poems by Neruda, Goethe, and Bei Dao, and even the Egyptian Book of the Dead. Dave’s goal was to inspire the teachers to convey visual and sound-based communication in written imagery effectively demonstrating how to use poetry in support of interdisciplinary studies.

Carmen Rivera, co-founder of LEFT (Latino Experimental Fantastic Theatre), is an
internationally recognized and Obie award-winning playwright, as well as another T&W veteran teaching artist. Following Dave’s workshop, Carmen led the teachers in a playwriting workshop, stepping the teachers through the same process she uses with her students. Teachers paired up in an assignment to create a dialogue between two characters, one of whom wanted to stay within an imagined boundary that the other wanted to leave. Teachers wrote scenes on resolving this conflict. At the close of the workshop, the teachers performed their skits for their peers, discussed ways in which to implement the lesson with their students, and left with handouts containing relevant vocabulary and follow-up exercises.

With each workshop the writers demonstrated how they use ideas and lessons from a T&W publication in their classroom residencies. Each participating teacher received a copy of The Teachers & Writers Handbook of Poetic Forms, edited by Ron Padgett, and Herbert Kohl’s Making Theater: Developing Plays with Young People to keep and use with their classes. Receiving a T&W publication is a component of every T&W professional development program.

Aviation High School was so pleased with the workshops that they have booked the Center again in June for professional development workshops on graphic novel writing and journalism. To schedule a T&W workshop for teachers or a creative writing program for students, e-mail workshops@twc.org or call 212-691-6590.

T&W FELLOWSHIPS

Our T&W Fellowship Experience

by Christina Olivares and Jenny Williams

As Teachers & Writers Fellows, we are blessed with an opportunity many writers dream of-the chance to explore and deepen our craft while surrounded by a community of people who share our passion for literature and the imagination. Since October 2008, when we began our tenure as fellows in curriculum (Christina) and communication (Jenny), we have had the pleasure of learning more about T&W’s work and about ourselves as writers.

Planning the 2020 Visions reading series for 2009 has been a tremendous joy-how many times in our lives will we have an excuse to contact our favorite established writers and give emerging writers the chance to read for the first time? Our spring events have been intimate evenings full of great literature and great conversation, and we are excited about our upcoming readings (www.twc.org/events).

In addition, Jenny has pitched herself pen-first into Teachers & Writers magazine, interviewing Phillip Lopate and profiling Urban Word NYC in recent issues. Christina has also worked with the magazine, mining through decades of back issues to select articles that will best serve the teaching artist population, and posting those pieces online as free resources.

As much as we’d love to immerse ourselves entirely in T&W activities, we’re also here to write-and there’s nowhere better to do so than in our bright yellow office, looking out onto the Hudson. Fueled by M&Ms and each other, we are each making progress on our own projects: Christina is working on a series of poems called “shine” and beginning a memoir, and Jenny is doing preliminary work on a novel based on her experience as an aid worker in northern Uganda. We will continue working on those projects in early June, when we have a two-week residency at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund’s Pocantico Conference Center near Tarrytown, New York.

It’s amazing (and sad!) to think our tenure is already more than halfway over-but even when our fellowships come to an end, we know our place within the T&W community will not.

_The T&W Fellowship Program is made possible through the generous support of the Edward and Sally Van Lier Fund in the New York Community Trust and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. For more information about the fellowship, including the 2009-2010 fellowship guidelines and application form, go to www.twc.org/about/tw-fellowship or e-mail fellowship@twc.org

BOOKS

Be Prepared for National Poetry Month

April is National Poetry Month, so why not get some poetry writing tips from some of our best-selling poetry books? We suggest:

Handbook of Poetic Forms By Ron Padgett
This best-selling reference guide includes 76 entries on traditional and modern poetic forms. Defined in alphabetical order, each entry offers examples and histories of-and ideas for using-each form. Great for writers as well as teachers.

Poetry Everywhere: Teaching Poetry Writing in School and in the Community
By Jack Collom & Sheryl Noethe
The dazzling second edition of this “tremendously valuable resource” (Kliatt) contains 65 writing exercises and more than 400 example poems. It also discusses how to integrate poetry writing into the English class and essential topics such as sound and rhythm, traditional poetic forms, inventing and adapting exercises, revision, and publishing.

The Alphabet of the Trees: A Guide to Nature Writing
Edited by Christian McEwen & Mark Statman
The Alphabet of the Trees is a superb collection of essays about teaching all aspects and forms of nature writing, including poems, field journals, fiction, and nonfiction. It is a practical handbook; an introduction to nature writing, nature poetry, and fieldwork; and a guide to some basic strategies for teachers at all levels. This is a terrific resource for anyone looking to explore nature through writing.

To order these books or other titles from T&W’s full catalog of publications for classroom teachers and for writers, go to our website at www.twc.org/publications.

ONLINE RESOURCES

New Exercises Available in March and April

Teachers & Writers Collaborative offers free writing exercises and teaching 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. As needed, original articles appear alongside a short summary of each lesson plan. 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!

New postings include:

March

• “The Right to Inquire: Approaching the Civil Rights Movement through Poetry” by Laura Gamache, which explores how one teacher used the questions “Where am I from?” “What is freedom?” and “What is a hero?” to make the Civil Rights Movement relevant to her students through poetry.
• “Arrival Diaries: Teaching Students to Write Arrival Narratives” by Bushra Rehman, on teaching writing to young immigrant students through reconstructing their arrivals in the United States in short prose pieces.
• “Writing with Family Album Photos” by Harry Greenberg, an exploration of how to kickstart the imagination of young children by creatively using family album photos as writing prompts.
• “I Remember Poems” and “Metaphor Poems,” both lesson excerpts from Poetry Everywhere, by Jack Collum and Sheryl Noethe, in celebration of National Poetry Month!

April

• “What I See in Children’s Writing” by Jack Collum, an elegant and insightful meditation on what is remarkable about middle-school-aged student writing.
• “Learning to See” by Barbara Danish, an excellent collection of short lessons on teaching high school students to describe their world in vivid detail.
• “Thinking Outside the Box: Promoting Family Literacy in Prison,” in which Jane LeCroy talks about the impact of the family literacy program Read to Me’s work in a Virginia State Prison to provide resources for inmates to make books for their children.
• Two articles on the poetic form haiku that can add inspiration and context to your lessons: “Haiku: The Discipline of Language,” by Anne Cherner, and “The Haiku Connection: Countering the Misconception of the Syllabic Nature of Haiku,” by Adele Kenny.

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.

TEACHERS & WRITERS MAGAZINE

Spring Issue Highlights Range of Creative Writing Ideas

The spring issue of Teachers & Writers magazine features a wonderful collection of articles illustrating the range of what creative writing instruction can be and do. Barbara Feinberg’s piece on Story Shop, the creative writing program for young children she started many years ago, describes how she supports her young students’ organic creative impulses by giving them room to play, to tinker, to build a physical space where their stories can live and grow. An article by T&W Fellow Jenny Williams on Urban Word NYC details how the teenagers crafting spoken word poetry in this program are finding and honing their voices as an act of personal and political empowerment. Poet and translator Bill Zavatsky tells how teaching his students to write “dream poems” allows them to forge a connection to this deeply personal language, mining the rich images to be found there for poetic inspiration. And a piece by T&W teaching artist David Stoler on Gary Glazner’s Alzheimer’s Poetry Project shows us that for the men and women who participate in this program, poetry is a lifeline to the world, allowing them to connect, through the dark erasures of the disease, to memory and meaning.

Though vastly different in their approaches and goals, each of the programs profiled in this issue offers its students something similar: connection and engagement-with oneself, one’s community, one’s world. To do this well requires that the teachers respect the individuality of the creative process, allowing their students to find in it what they need, be it challenge, communication, consolation or something else entirely.

We invite you to take at look at the issue on our website, www.twc.org/publications/magazine, where you can read an article from this issue, order a single issue, or subscribe to the magazine. And let us know what you think by e-mailing us at letters@twc.org.

THANK YOU!

T&W Thanks Our Supporters

Even as Teachers & Writers Collaborative continues to seek new support to help us meet the challenges of these difficult economic times, we would like to salute the individuals and institutions who so generously support T&W.

This fiscal year, our support from individuals has increased! This is thanks in part to two individuals who recently made significant contributions to support T&W’s publication of print resources for teachers of writing. Also, more than a third of donors who responded to our annual appeal mailing in the fall were first-time contributors or individuals who renewed their support after not donating last year. As always, we are especially grateful to our long-time individual supporters, who each year help to make T&W programs possible.

T&W is also grateful to our institutional funders. Please visit www.twc.org/about/funders where we recognize all T&W’s institutional supporters. In previous e-newsletters, we have highlighted programs made possible by funders including the Charles Hayden Foundation, Edward and Sally Van Lier Fund in the New York Community Trust, E.H.A. Foundation, Lily Auchincloss Foundation, and Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

T&W is also grateful for the general operating support provided by Agnes Gund, Bydale Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, and William Randolph Hearst Foundation. General operating support is critical to supporting the behind-the-scenes work that makes T&W programs successful. T&W also thanks One Source Visual Marketing Solutions, which selected T&W as one of the New York City nonprofits featured in Ten, a book which celebrated One Source VMS’s tenth anniversary and spread awareness about T&W among the company’s corporate clients.

Finally, T&W thanks our government supporters, including the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts. On a local level, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs continues to provide generous support for T&W writing programs in city schools and our publication of resources promoting innovative teaching in creative writing and the literary arts. Project grants from the Bronx Council on the Arts and Queens Council on the Arts are also supporting T&W partnerships this spring that will integrate creative writing in standards-based, classroom curriculum in two schools serving special education students.

Thank you to all our supporters!

Please contact T&W at 212-691-6590 or lmiles@twc.org if you would like to learn about ways to support T&W’s work to educate the imagination of young people and promote innovative teaching and improved student learning in the literary arts. To make a donation now, go to www.twc.org/support/donate..

ALUMNI NOTES

T&W teaching artist Allison Amend’s book Things That Pass For Love has been named one of the ten best collections of short fiction for 2008 by the Kansas City Star. (www.allisonamend.com)

Youme Landowne’s book Pitch Black (with Anthony Horton) was listed as one of the American Library Association’s 2009 Top Ten Great Graphic Novels for Teens. (www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/yalsa/booklistsawards/greatgraphicnovelsforteens/09top10.cfm)

Former T&W senior editor Christina Davis was chosen for a 2009 Witter Bynner Fellowship for poetry from the Library of Congress. (www.loc.gov/poetry/bynner.html)

T&W writer Frank Ingrasciotta’s new play, “Blood Type: RAGU,” opened Off-Broadway at the historic Actors’ Playhouse in Greenwich Village on March 5. (www.bloodtyperagu.com)

Are you a writer, teacher, or student with a tie to Teachers & Writers Collaborative? Let us hear your news! Send the latest on your publications and other professional accomplishments to us at alumninews@twc.org. And sign up for the T&W Alumni Network at www.twc.org/about/tw-alumni-network. We’d love to hear from you!

BECHTEL PRIZE

2009 Bechtel Prize Entries Due June 30

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.

This year’s Bechtel Prize entries should 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. 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.

2020 VISIONS

2020 Visions Reading Series Continues at T&W

T&W’s 2020 Visions reading series that highlights both established and new writers working in a variety of genres will continue this spring. Bring a friend, and come hear a favorite poet or discover the work of a new author. 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:

• March 20-Alistair McCartney is the author of The End of the World Book: A Novel, which is also an encyclopedia, A to Z, of obsessions, memories, and philosophic/homoerotic fixations. McCartney, who was born in Perth, Australia, has been published in Fence, Bloom, James White Review, and other literary journals. Mike Albo is a Brooklyn-based writer and comedian. His first novel, Hornito, was published in 2000. Albo wrote his second novel, the cult humor classic The Underminer: The Best Friend Who Casually Destroys Your Life, with his longtime friend Virginia Heffernan. Paul Lisicky’s novels include Lawnboy and Famous Builder. He has recently published work in Five Points, Gulf Coast, Subtropics, Hotel Amerika, Hunger Mountain, Seattle Review, Elimae, and Truth in Nonfiction.
• 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.
• April 15-Hannah Tinti’s short story collection Animal Crackers was a runner-up for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her first novel, The Good Thief, was a finalist for the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize. Tinti is co-founder and editor-in-chief of One Story magazine. Kate Hill Cantrill’s writing has appeared in numerous literary publications, including StoryQuarterly, Believer, Quick Fiction, Pindeldyboz, Mississippi Review, Diagram, Drunken Board, and Swink. She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and was awarded residencies at Jentel and Yaddo.
• May 20-James Hannaham is a writer, critic, and occasional performer who has written for publications including the Village Voice, Spin, and Salon, where he was on staff. His first novel, God Says No, is forthcoming from McSweeney’s. Anthony Tognazzini’s first book, I Carry a Hammer in My Pocket for Occasions Such as These, was published in 2007. Tognazzini’s work has appeared in numerous journals and in the books PP/FF: An Anthology, Sudden Stories: A Mammoth Anthology of Miniscule Fiction, and Online Writing: The Best of the First Ten Years.

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.