I’ve used many prompts to kick off and inspire WITS lessons, from odes to art postcards to flash fiction to graphic novel selections. I’ve occasionally written alongside my students, even sharing my work afterwards. But I’ve never used my own writing as an actual prompt – until now.

It started out as a happy accident. I’m wrapping up twelve wonderful weeks with my fourth and fifth graders at the B.F. Day School. Our goal? To write and revise an adventure story that takes place on a magical island. Students started with a “message in a bottle,” writing a distress call to jumpstart the plot. The story follows from there, as creatures magnificent and terrifying swoop, crawl, and swirl their way into the stories to help – or hinder – the main character(s).

I’d never taught a single project like this, and I quickly discovered its challenges. While it offers students a great, visceral experience of the writing process, it’s also daunting for less-confident writers. And, despite the infusion of games and other activities (verbs charades, anyone?) it was sometimes hard to keep up momentum. Like all writers, everywhere, my students didn’t always feel like sitting down and making the story work after the initial excitement faded.

I discovered that joining them in this task provided the best motivation of all. At first, I used examples from well-loved young adult novels, like A Wrinkle In Time and Harry Potter, but I wanted something more targeted. To create a real message in a bottle, I wrote a mysterious letter set in a misty valley, doctoring the paper with mint tea and blueberry juice so that it appeared stained and worn. I let it dry and rolled it into an antique glass bottle. Voila: magic. The students couldn’t wait to touch the letter and examine its details, which I expected, and to find out what happened next, which surprised me.

I didn’t plan to continue the story I’d started. I had focused on what I wanted to model for the students, including a strong first-person voice, sensory details, good pacing, and rising tension.

“Who’s coming? What’s making that sound?” Students asked me after I read the message.

“I have no idea,” I answered.

They were amazed at this. Wasn’t it my story? We talked about how most writers rarely know where they’re going, how stories offer surprises to their creators, and I promised, by the end of it, to keep going.

From there, I wrote the story in pieces. I brought in the handwritten pages, my messy ideas scrawled across the page, and the students loved each new installment. It helped that I could strategize with them, modeling brainstorming and talking through possible ideas before settling on the most exciting ones. For instance, when sketching a six-panel comic to plan their stories (thanks to Greg Stump for that idea), students first helped me puzzle through my own comic.

“Who should come and help?” I asked them.

“A white gorilla!”

“A talking cloud!”

We discussed possibilities: would this new character be friendly, or frightening? What did they have to offer the narrator? How might they behave in unexpected ways? Afterwards students invented their own remarkably entertaining characters, from a financially-savvy lobster, to an opinionated magic carpet, a sassy talking book, and a pair of sinister goats.

I began writing a draft of my own story, dashing off pages during my ferry commute. I settled on a warrior butterfly as a secondary character and wrote about a magical cave with a legendary tree. I kept modeling voice, sensory detail, and pacing, as well as new concepts I’d introduced, like action verbs, or ending on an intriguing image. We talked about my various writing decisions. I didn’t share pages every session, but when I did, the silence and attention was palpable.

It was a win-win, frankly. I felt uninhibited by my usual doubts as I wrote. I had a concrete goal and I wasn’t worried about being derivative or hackneyed: I simply enjoyed the humor and the magic. I don’t usually write anything fantastical, much less for a younger audience, and I felt enormously liberated doing both. I borrowed liberally from stories I’d loved growing up.

“Ms. Irene, you could write a trilogy!” One student exclaimed when I finished.

I laughed. “So could you!”

The truth is, I have no plans for a trilogy or even for finishing that story. What I loved most of all was sharing the process with the students. As they embarked on revision, I showed them an original scene and a revised version from my story, pointing out everything I’d added and subtracted. They were to choose their favorite scene and rewrite it; enthusiastic students could rewrite as much as they had time for. I faced the usual resistance, but not as much as I expected. Students had become deeply invested in my story and in their own work, their dragons and phantom horses and dark swamps and fairies. They brought in details from their own lives, fears, and beloved stories, and turned these into something new.

We are finishing these projects by attaching the rewritten scene to a larger

piece of paper and including an illustration opposite. For our most recent session, I took out a bag of markers, sat down at my kitchen tab

le, and – for the first time perhaps since my own fifth grade year – embarked on a drawing.

Twelve weeks is a relatively short period of time, and not all students completed their stories. Yet everyone produced at least one scene they’re proud of, and everyone experienced a slice of the writing process: laborious, mysterious, and rewarding by turns. I’m impressed with the work the students have put in, and hope they take with them not only memories of their fantastical worlds, but also of the way their stories took shape, slowly and deliberately, over a period of time.

The semester – and likewise my three awesome WITS classes at Ballard – will soon draw to a close. The end of a writing class almost always means only one thing. We’ve done free writes, learned tactics, shared ideas, and generated work. We’ve seen students open, some slowly like flowers and others in a lightning flash moment. We’ve watched them find their voices, some in the structure of rhythm and rhyme and others in a voiced-up frenzy akin to performance art. We’ve seen smiles of recognition and been called the “writing ladies.”

And so, that brings us to what I truly believe is the hardest tool of the trade: revision. After doing all that work and breaking through to the voice and trusting a piece of paper with word-shaped bits of one’s soul, then we demand even more. Cut it. Change it. Make it better.

Better? But how can it get any better? This is my soul here, you know. Clearly it’s the best thing ever, duh.

Duh, indeed.

However, revision does offer a gift of sorts. In the first place, it offers the chance to write anything you want, because you can always revise it later. Then it offers a chance to play with what you’ve already made, arranging and rearranging the piece to see how they work or what different things you can make them do. Much like apprentices learn how things work by taking them apart and examining their parts, so, too, does revision offer this opportunity.

It also offers the chance to see something with new eyes, possibly with eyes you didn’t even have when the thing first came into being. Which brings me to the other kind of revision, the root of the word, the concept of second sight or seeing again. As my time with this set of students – my first WITS classes – draws to a close, I am not just helping them look back at their own work, I am looking back at my own work and the work of the lovely Rachel Kessler.

Despite only seeing these kids once a week, they’ve left their mark on me. In many ways they’ve probably impacted my writing as much I’ve impacted theirs. And now it’s almost time to let them go.

I’d like to be devastated by this. I’d like to lament and pout and refuse to get out of bed. I’d like to resist this necessary closure, but I can’t. I’m too busy. I’m too busy laughing (out loud no less) at their hilarious poems, too busy reading their riddles to friends and MFA classmates, too busy trying to formulate articulate responses to their questions, comments, and expressions of angst. In short, I am too busy having fun with them to mourn what I know is inevitable.

And so what if it’s inevitable. I might have to let these students go, but the past few months have given me something else, something that the end of the semester can’t take away.

What’s a word bag and how can it change your writing? I found out just how much impact this simple tool can have last week at Ballard High School.

Rachel Kessler, being the word aficionado that she is, has a brown paper word bag full of high-quality words that she uses when she needs something to jumpstart her writing. For our BHS students, Rachel printed out several extra sheets of words that we then cut into single serving slips of paper.

We gave each student a pile of slips, encouraging them to trade or ask for additional words if need be. We suggested that students arrange and rearrange their words, playing with placement and the impact of word order and/or juxtaposition. We walked around the room, sprinkling supplemental word choices as we went.

Some students were very picky, sorting their word piles into accepted and rejected categories and asking for more words because they had only chosen 7 out of the original pile. Other students utilized their words with what seemed like reckless abandon until a closer look revealed some kind of pattern or plan of action emerging from the chaos. Each student attacked the project in an original way, some creating mini-narratives while others offered meditations or moments of pure lyric. Many of the created works were playful and humorous and a few were even holiday-inspired.

This activity embodied writing at its most fun. It brought out the voracious writer in even the most stoic students. The words themselves anchored and inspired the writing, but that was where the infrastructure of the lesson gave way to the students’ own creativity. And let me tell you, they used it.

Many students pasted their words to white paper or their folders in intriguing patterns, and some even included illustrations to accompany or augment their work. One student surprised even himself upon realizing that all the words he’d selected described the same thing, fire, which he referred to as “dappled sorrow .. leaking and weeping particles.”

A pile of words allowed writing to become tangible, something the students could touch and feel and even taste (the one use of the words that I did not encourage). I know a word bag will be making its way into my life and writing soon, and I genuinely can’t wait to see what I come up with.

When something cataclysmic happens, people will often say that there was one moment where everything changed, or at least where it became impossible to go backwards.

Often in the retelling, the story breaks into halves: what led up to the moment and what followed it. In this way, that single moment becomes the stitch that holds the whole piece together. Rather than a point that the whole story rotates around, the moment becomes a point of transition that the story must move through.

The free write happily does not require this moment and asks only for the writer to play with time, moving backwards through all the activities that preceded the current one (that being the free write itself). In this way, the writer is forced to view her actions in a new way, knowing where she winds up and moving instead towards that which allowed that winding up to take place.

After the free write, but before the actual writing, we read a short piece of writing that teeters between prose and poetry. This piece explains how to start a house fire, but what it actually does is use step by step instructions to tell a story.

In the first half, the statements all begin with the word “before,” taking us back, back, back, through not only the steps necessary to starting said fire, but also through the reasons the speaker must do so. We learn that the speaker’s family has lived in this house and worked the attached farm for several generations. We learn that there are oak floors and the house has been foreclosed. We learn that the speaker is very thorough in his application of the accelerant. We learn that the speaker is calm in his pain. However, we learn these things because they are part of the way the speaker gives the instructions. Although the emotion is palpable, it is not directly revealed.

In the second half of this piece, all the statements begin with “after,” letting us know that the moment has passed but the work is not done. Now we cannot go back. Now we must deal with the new situation we have made. The moment where everything changed is like a peak, with the first half leading up to it and the second half reeling back down to reality.

Although the moment where everything changes seems to be the focus in this type of writing, it is the use of prepositions that allows the writer to control the writing. The prepositions show the relationship between the activities and they also reveal which moment is the moment where everything changed because they sort all other moments into the categories of leading up to or resulting from the one moment.

Your turn: try writing your own before & after piece, whether it be poetry or fiction, and see how the controlling factors work for (or against) you. What other prepositions can you utilize to bend your words to your will?

I feel as though I have just returned from sea. For the past two weeks, I have been living out at Fort Warden in Port Townsend, staying in a weathered cabin that looks out over the Salish Sea. After watching the apricot hour* dawn over the mountains, I’d hop on my bike and pedal the few block to Blue Heron School to meet with three classes of fantastically enthusiastic fifth graders. Our hope was to write a polished short story in two short weeks. Our process was multi-layered and circuitous.

I began by having each student outline the features on their face with a single-line, drawing by feel. Each student developed her or his face into a map, using the visual language of maps. We wrote self-portrait poems, constructed from objects. We searched maps of real and imagined places for place names. From these, the students brainstormed place names and began filling in and naming the water and landforms on their face-maps. I encouraged each writer to travel across her or his face-map place through a guided quest. From this they wrote into existence an alternate world, discovered creatures, and set off on a journey.

I had no car but why do I need one when I have flying potion? I guess I had no choice but to go to the city in the secret world to get more magic potion. So I went out. The wind whipped at my face and light brown hair. Soon I came to a light red rock. This rock would take me to the city.
    - From “Flying Potion” by Sarah L.

Working with dedicated teachers Christina Laughbon, Chris Neuman, and Virgil Rondeaux, as well as resident artist and illustrator Jesse Watson, the 5th graders developed and deepened their face-maps with layers of words and images drawn from their poems and brainstorms.

One brilliant student, but reluctant writer, informed me that “Imagination” was his most hated word, right up there with “Art.” He preferred science to fantasy, but when we played around with mixing up different animals to create new beasts, he invented a “Camel-Rhino,” which he imbued with his own sensibilities and character-qualities.

Students drew pocket-sized field guides to the secret creatures they came across. The measurements and sizing charts in the field guides included another, more familiar object that was the same size as the creature. This size comparison encouraged figurative language in their character sketches. The visual art aspect of this writing project contributed to strong descriptive and sensory writing. The young writers worked hard on staying in the image they were writing about by exploring it with drawing and tactile observations.

I was in my dark wood house, eating the fresh rabbit Fuego caught for me earlier today. I was watching the orange and red bird devour his meal: a ferret he had just caught while it was coming down the soot covered chimney. He always ate the tail first. As he devoured the small creature, he flapped his wings with delight.
- From “Fuego” by Karley C.

I wanted to students to explore and to create worlds from their own imagination and beliefs and experiences. We studied some Northwest Coast Native American stories that featured portals to super-natural worlds. We discussed the basic “Hero’s Journey” story structure. Young writers were thrilled to discover thresholds to other worlds in very ordinary places in our regular world, such as the refrigerator, the cupboard, a certain large tree, a stone, the water’s edge of a lake, a spot of graffiti, and, of course, the toilet.

Andy sped down the street. Writing graffiti was a rush for an eleven year old boy. Four weeks later he was sent to the office with all his things. After a lecture he was told he had to clean off the so-called “filth”. Two days later he was dropped off at the spot he had put big velvet dot – he did not know why he did it, he just did. He sprayed the cleanser on the dot. It started to look as if he could enter it. Baffled, he touched it, then he was sucked in. Andy flaoted in a trippy limbo. He saw a large bolted door. It opened itself and a black portal formed. He slipped though and fell on cold cement.
- From “Cell Walker” by Keagon N.

It was enchanting to see each student invested in their characters, their worlds, and their writing.  Fascinated by the different hidden worlds and paths inside of each young writer, I began to see how powerful and important it was for young boys and girls to write about what scares them and to confront this danger by writing from the point of view of a character who possesses heroic and magical qualities. There were many epic troll battle sequences. I could almost hear the clang of sword tang above some writers’ heads as they labored over the “Road of Trials” and “Magic Chase” parts of their plot outlines. Fantasy allows humans to do some serious dreamwork.

* in one writing exercise, the students renamed the hours of the day with more visceral images, such as “The Hour of the Howling Moon” and “The After-School Snack Hour”.

I am constantly amazed by the work that takes place when I am in the classroom with Rachel Kessler at Ballard High School. This week I want to highlight some dramatic monologues and a postcard poem that I found to be especially thrilling. I hope y’all enjoy them as much as I did. Maybe they’ll even inspire you to do some writing of your own…

Big Pieces
by Henry E.

Now why would you do that?
Who cares that you’re crying? Look at me!
I’m all over the floor! Getting into your
feet! Grinding into the carpet!
You really just got a lot more work now.
I can’t believe you. You’re pathetic.
Just because you’re mad at the world
doesn’t mean I should get involved.
Oh look, now my OJ is soaking into
your socks THAT YOU DIDN’T PICK
UP.
Seriously?!
Well, you can always man the heck up
and clean! At least pick up my big
pieces?
Don’t close your eyes!
Okay, now there’s orange juice, sweat, AND
tears on the floor.
Blood, too, if you don’t GET THE FREAKING
BROOM!
God! Can’t you think of anyone but yourself?
What about your sister with her dance
lesson? Can’t do that on an
open gash now can she? Or your cats:
shiny things are food to them! Don’t choke
them! I don’t want to kill a cat!
Please? Jut the big pieces? Or all of them?

Siren
by  Alena S.

There is a song inside me
bursting to be free
I sing from the top of great cliffs
the jagged rocks thrusting up from the sea
It is not my fault that when men hear
me they want to join me on the rocks
All I want is to share the music
I can’t control how others react
The sailors are weak
if they want me so badly
I am strong
I am powerful
Many have died on the rocks below me
but that is not my fault
After all, all I do is sing

Circe’s Drink
by Jovantae D.

As she makes me she knows. As she
makes me I know. That when she makes me
we both know she makes me for a purpose.
As she serves me she knows. As she
serves me I know. The people they
don’t know. After it happens they still don’t know
but they wonder. They wonder why. But
they know how. As they crawl and squeal,
because for now they know that they have
been turned. They are now trapped as
pigs. How it happens it comes from
two words, come drink. It comes from one recipe.
You do not know what is in it, only I
and her know.

Postcard
by Oliver L.

There is a diner.
There is a desert.
There is a battered
old woman in a
sundress glaring
back at the sun’s
luminous stare.
greetings from Arizona.

- Oliver

The moments I most treasure as a WITS teacher are those where students take their own power and voice to heart, and poetry lifts from them like birds.

Ha-Kahla Davis writes a meditation in the form of the poem above. Her theme is transformation and its power is undeniable. Poetry creates a space for this flight, a place where the deepest thoughts and dreams of the student can find home. There are no tests, there is no standardization, there is only encouragement to dream more freely. In this way I aim as a teacher to create an atmosphere of conceptual freedom. Of course I encourage the student to follow their inspirations and questions as far as possible, and to apply skillful means of revision intended to polish the work. The process offers many revelations along the way and is incredibly rewarding.

Writing from a prompt shared by Aaron Counts this poet, Weang Weang, uses his words to define himself and affirm his own beauty. This work was very profound for him, as we felt when we began preparing for its performance. I watched the transformation as he moved from a shy and unsure young poet somewhat in awe of his words, to a confident and powerful one who is letting the world know exactly who he is.

I work with students who face challenges of class, dislocation, cultural biases and others. Poetry is a power that I share with them, it is a safe and nurturing place where they can discover words to name themselves and express their dreams and emotions. As Audre Lorde told us: “…poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams  toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.”

Have you ever wanted to be a violin? A pig? A toothbrush?

What would you say if you were able to inhabit an animal or inanimate object, or rather, what would they say if only they were given the ability to speak?

Free write in four voices: write about an object or animal, first addressing your subject as it, then as you, next as thou, and finally write from the first person (the I voice, or even the we voice if you feel that works). Try to spend a minute or so on each voice all the while imagining not only what your five senses can tell you about your subject but also what the subject itself might know, notice, have to say, care about, etc.

This exercise is genius for writers of all ages because it allows them to escape their own headspace. Even though writing can clearly be fictional, many students, especially those in the poetry residencies, need prompting to remember that they can write from a voice other than their own. Here, as with the riddles, students are forced out of their own voices, forced to write from the perspective of something inanimate or at least nonhuman. They can say whatever fits their subject. They can make statements they don’t agree with or even ones they do agree with but aren’t ready to broadcast.

And so, hidden in this activity is another one: the chance to see the world from a different perspective, even if it is one created from within. Even in imagining, students must ponder, must consider this character they are creating. What is significant to a violin? What calls a pig into giving a monologue? What does vocabulary choice or tone reveal about the specific toothbrush in question?

Here critical and creative thought processes work in tandem, allowing observation and hypothesis to fuel the imagination.

Now it’s your turn: what animal or inanimate object would you inhabit? Try the free write. You might surprise yourself.

I’ve been collecting postcards from art museums for years, but it was only a few years ago I thought to put them to use in the WITS classroom.  Since then I’ve collected with my young audience in mind and incorporated examples from more styles and periods—landscapes and seascapes, portraits, abstracts, even a photo or two of architecture.  I provide two or three times as many cards as class members so nobody feels stuck with the dregs, lay them all out on a table or ledge, then ask students to quickly choose one that speaks to them.  They write down the title of the art as the title of their soon-to-be poem.

I’ve developed a few postcard lessons.  It’s often helpful to add prompts and/or a wild card element to a writing assignment like this to avoid a predictable response.   In this lesson with fifth graders I wanted to incorporate their fifty-or-so vocabulary/spelling words.  I typed them in, copied them a dozen times, printed and cut them out.  The resulting pile of words went in a lunch sack.  I deposit little hills of them on each desk and ask students to draw a dozen, lay them out, replace duplicates and words they didn’t know.

Then I led the class through a series of prompts based on their art postcard.  Here is an example of my prompts, though you could easily adjust or adapt it:

1. in a phrase/incomplete sentence, describe the general scene and use one of your vocabulary words
2. in a phrase/incomplete sentence, describe a detail in the painting, and use a new vocabulary word
3. in a phrase/incomplete sentence, describe a detail in the painting using a new vocabulary words AND a simile
4. put yourself in the poem, either as a figure inside the painting or commenting on the painting—no need to use a vocabulary  word unless you want to
5. make a statement or ask a question, using a new vocabulary word
6. in a phrase/incomplete describe another detail on the painting, new vocabulary word optional

Six questions for a six line poem, though it didn’t always turn out that way.  Some of my students wrote many more than six lines. Some are still thinking in terms of paragraphs instead of lines.  I encourage incomplete sentences to encourage them to get to the meat of the idea.

Sometimes I suggested to the class that their details be sensory, could even be an imagined smell or sound.  I could have asked them to include a detail outside the frame, or just before or after the captured moment in the painting—you might like to try that. These prompts, simple as they are, ask the student to really study the picture to keep finding new things to notice.  Often the most interesting lines come at the end of these exercises, when students are forced to be creative, to look in less obvious places and use more difficult vocabulary.

Here follow links to a few images and the 5^th grade student poems and lines those images inspired.

Angel

The Sun and the Moon

Child in a Straw Hat

The Leap of the Rabbit

Arrival of the Normandy Train, Gare Saint Lazare