Recipe for a More Hope-Filled January

by Laura Gamache, TOPS K-8

This is fifth grade, but it could as easily be ninth when I ask for verbs. Under breath, behind hand murmur. “What’s a verb?”

“Something you do,” I say. “If you can add an –ing to the end, you’ve probably got a verb.”

“Quickly?” somebody suggests.

“Close,” I say. As a teaching writer, you’ve been here, and it isn’t fun.

It’s the first week back from winter break, as I pass each fifth grader a page torn from a garage sale recipe book.  There are murmurs, but the content is brought on by recipes for popcorn balls, gumbo, curried broccoli, snickerdoodles, or lamb stew. I give them a couple of minutes to enjoy, before laying out the plan for the hour. We’re going to write poems for a healthy planet using the recipe form, but first we’ll mine these pages for recipe action words.

Kids circle verbs, then copy several to the lists on their pages. I used to begin with a group brainstorm after the circling, but have decided to go with the more individual activity in this extremely chatty class. Heading to school, I heard an NPR commentator state that the brainstorming model we thought was so productive, may not be so. I felt better about my choice.  After a few minutes, I call for verbs to put on the example list I’ve put under the smart camera. “Grind, drizzle, preheat, combine, add, whisk, blend, cover, knead…” run down the left margin.

Lists complete, we segue to possible ingredients to bring together for a healthy planet. Not, as on the food recipes before them, baking soda or cube steak, but inner qualities of mind together with the physical make-up of the earth. I emphasize the abstract qualities, since I realize it’s difficult for most ten and eleven year-olds to juggle both sets of requirements. A sample ingredient list includes “compassion, trust, empathy, green trees, leadership, helium, pizzazz, teamwork, freedom and destiny.”

Do these lists quicken your heartbeat? They do mine, and the kids seemed awakened by these words we’d pulled together, too. Afterwards, reading the poems was even better soul food in this night-heavy month of January. Here is a sampling:

Recipe for a Healthy Planet

Combine love and affection and put them in the furnace of joy.

Slice up caring and sprinkle it on the platter of leadership.

Mix imagination with teamwork in the bowl of trust

And mix until there is no despair.

Reheat the mix of love and affection and

Squeeze out the hate so it does not poison your soul

When eating our concoction.

Take out and deliver to all the nations!

-R.

 

Recipe for a Healthy Planet

Preheat your oven with lots of love.

Blend lots of land and plant it firmly on a bowl.

Grow some healthy green trees

And spread them around the land.

Put the bowl in the oven and set it for

65 thousand joyful millenniums.

While the land is cooking, make some people for it.

To make people, combine compassion, self-esteem,

Empathy and leadership.

After the land is done cooking, let it cool

For two thousand years.

After it has cooled, pour water into it to make rivers and lakes.

Carefully place the people on the land.

Serve when the people have built civilization.

-P.

 

Recipe for an Extra-Terrestrial Planet

Place a core in space.

Add a four mile layer of mantle on top.

Spread crust too.

Make dents and stretch the crust.

Spread grass on the flat parts.

Spread trees on top of the grass.

Place rivers too.

Combine gases and ozone layer to make the atmosphere.

Combine one billion boxes of eras of peace.

To make interstellar species, combine

Self-esteem and brains of knowledge.

Bake at 80 degrees F for one year.

(During the baking, combine rays and helium to make

A blue star. Bake at 450 degrees F for six months.

Let it cool for another six months.)

Take the warm planet and place it

1,000,000 miles from the cooling star.

Serve in 65 eras.

Serves one trillion humans.

-A.

 

Recipe for a Healthy Planet

Preheat an oven of tranquility

Combine joy, love and sweetened imagination

In a bowl of pure freedom.

Sprinkle some ground trust and empathy.

Crack open an egg of peace

And beat for two minutes.

Bake until a crust of compassion forms.

Coat in happiness, but don’t let it crack

And turn to anger.

Place a jellied square of generosity on top.

Lastly, drain away the juices of evil, jealousy,

Hate, distrust, and greed.

Serve it to the people of the world.

-J.

 

Recipe for a Healthy Planet

Juggle your happiness into the pot of hatred.

Let it bubble up and turn that hatred into self-esteem.

Whip a teaspoon of love into the boiling cauldron of compassion.

Cut up a little bit of empathy and roast till nice and crispy.

Spread teamwork until everyone can see,

Then serve it to the hungry people of the world.

-L.B.

 

The Healthy Planet Recipe

Peel away the hate

Mix the support and the community

Then drizzle it on the air

And brush on the confidence.

Wash away the sadness

And fill it full of kindness.

Rip the joy and sprinkle it all around

Then bake it into peace.

Prick it with a toothpick to fertilize the ground.

Then place it in the dishes of hope

And serve it to the world.

-E.

 

The Taste of Earth

Blend the red and black seas together.

Sprinkle self-esteem on top, then serve hot or cold.

Zest the trees’ bark on the sides for

Extra salty taste.

Toss and mince the happiness.

Spoon water and air into bowl, then stir constantly.

Dice then juice the respect and

Never store it airtight

Or the dish will smell of trash.

Bake till surface starts to simmer,

Then take out to cool.

Serve with community, kindness, and hope.

Whisk the light with a cup of peace.

Drizzle on the stars and moon.
Best served to your finest guests.

-C.

The Big Game

by Emily Bedard, Roosevelt High School

When you teach, you inevitably pass on the lessons of your teachers, sometimes so frequently that an idea starts to seem like your own. Then something triggers your memory of the person who gave you the gem when you were a student. When this happens, the insight itself becomes suddenly fresh and essential all over again, with a new naked importance.

The poet Jack Gilbert, who died at age 87 in California earlier this month, was my teacher for a single semester during my MFA at the University of Montana. Gilbert was impatient, crotchety, piercingly insightful, and fiercely dedicated to the craft of poetry. During one memorable workshop, he made the cranky pronouncement that if we, the students, weren’t going to go for the Big Game, well, then what was the point of us writing in the first place? He urged us either to write about death and love and passion and fury and loneliness, all the thorniest emotions, or to just admit we were artistic lightweights and go play badminton or something.

Years later, I do not give daily thought to Gilbert or to the hours I spent as his student, but I think about the Big Game all the time. In fact, I use that exact phrase every semester with my sophomore WITS classes at Roosevelt High. But I had, I must admit, sort of forgotten the source. When I saw Gilbert’s obituary last week, I knew I owed him a belated thank you.

In addition to saying thank you, it would also have been nice to tell Gilbert that the exciting thing about urging 15-year-olds to go after the big emotions and the complex ideas, is that they actually DO it.

They might do it by asking brutal questions, as Christian F. does here:

Ever walk down a hall

completely blind?

Ever swim 100 yards

without limbs?

Even though it doesn’t seem

so, I’m dead, but breathing.

They might do it by capturing the power of an everyday thing, as in this ode to red paint by Grace N.:

It has broken free from

Its cage

Time and time again

A crimson bull burning through Paris

A scarlet fox darting out of its hole

It consumes others

Like fire

Devouring the yellow to birth

A boiling orange

Or they might do it, as Mackenzie B. does here, while describing a strange night scene of horses caught in a struggle between dancing and dying:

Fragrant scents

Lead them

To battle

Like music.

 

In the vineyard

They dance

And die while

The moon is falling.

 

Wounded silhouettes

Fall silently and

Without noise

They ascend.

I think Gilbert would be glad that someone—a lot of someones at Roosevelt High, anyway—can be trusted to take poetry so seriously.

He might not, however, be as pleased with something else my students do in their poems, and that is to be relentlessly, inventively funny. In another heated workshop on a snowy Missoula evening, Gilbert bitingly dismissed the purpose of humor in poetry. As I remember it, his stance was that poetry that aimed to be funny was a kind of simpering copout, a cowardly tap dance away from difficulty.

But here I part ways with my teacher and side with my students. That is one of the many gifts of the WITS program—seeing young people in the act of writing is a vital learning opportunity for the teacher, too. High school students can be startlingly funny, smartly funny, heartbreakingly funny on the page. And, I would argue, they need to be.

If you are a young person alive today, trying to sort out the weird, possibly bleak, inheritance your elders have shaped for you, you need to be able to lift the curtain on the ludicrous and flip sobriety upside down onto its careful comb-over.

As a writer, as a human, a sense of humor is going to give you a lot of mileage. It may, even, be one of the creatures clustered under the heading of the Big Game. And so we finish with this poem by Isaac M., written on love poem day and titled, perfectly, “Shazam.”

Oh Pumpkin, I wish I could say

that I love you with all my heart

but it’s so overused, such a cliché…I must

find a new organ to dedicate to you.

My mind you may find too small

to fit in. I lost my appendix when the tree

fell last summer. My spleen does something

important, I’m not sure what. Rooming with

mashed potatoes would suck, so my stomach

is out. My liver is ticklish, I donated

my extra kidney, stay OUT of my colon,

and be careful if you choose my lungs…

Why not just stay in my heart?

It’s worked so well for so long.

Getting Weird

by Rachel Kessler, Shorewood High School

Sometimes the trick is just to get the pen moving across the page.  I have many techniques, gleaned from other teaching artists such as Lynda Barry, that I use in my own writing practice.  The 10th graders I work with at Shorewood High School exhibited their nimble and original minds over the past two weeks as we made lists of objects, made lists of words describing those objects, then wrote self-portrait poems from all that list-making. By guiding them through a series of short list-making prompts with questions like “If you were a candy bar, what would you be?” (The best prompt to get reluctant writers minds moving, thanks to teaching artist Darwin Nordin), I command them to keep their pens moving, encouraging “First thought, best thought,” writing, keeping the prompts simple and short, listing 10 things, listing three describing words, list, list, list.

In my own notebooks, I make lists when I am stuck, or to avoid “real writing,” and have found that these lists sometimes turn themselves into poems. After wringing lists out of my students, I ask them use the describing words from their lists and build a list poem that begins with “I am.”

“Oh no!” many groan, “This is going to get weird!”  Exactly.

“I am cold and hard to fix, / sometimes the bitter one,” Linh writes.

I, like the boat and the ship,
float on a windy day
with the sound of ocean whispering,
telling me to stay.

I was worried that this leap into unusual figurative language would be a stretch for some of my students who are relatively new to the English language, but these students have the fearless, lyrical minds of poets. Then there is the student who must do things his own way, who does not write list poems, whose mind moves through his list of objects and finds a surreal narrative, such as Spencer:

The taste of licorice can lead to gagging, causing trepidation amongst consumers. Driving through a slick alley road in a wilting BMW, through endeavor after endeavor. Close the door with the key that does everything. No key leads to no car, the life of engines without a key is equivocal. Go in the store and ear through it. The pancakes and syrup are cathartic after an arduous day of work. Back home, basements fill with fog.

Drawing exercises keep our pens and minds moving.  We draw a continuous line tracing the contours of our faces without looking. Then we begin to color in spaces, layer and texture what was a Picasso-esque, stretched out face outline until it becomes a map. Writing about a place he sees in his face-map, Nebiyou paints a picture of where he’d like to be:

In my country, I am free.
I am surrounded by building
after building,
after building,
after building.
Very little wildlife surround me.
I am consumed by this Concrete Jungle.
The city sprawls for miles,
and miles,
and miles,
and miles.
Cold weather pierces my skin.
Loud pigeons defecate on your car.
And yet, New York City retains its charm.

The process of purposely “bad” drawing, describing oneself via objects ranging from weather systems to household tools, imagining hidden worlds in the new world of our faces, allows even the most reluctant writers to connect with the page. Michael, who spent my first visit to his class with his head on the desk, angrily refusing to engage in any way, could not resist the silliness of dreaming up his ideal place, McDarnia:

To get there you have to go to a McDonald’s, get access behind the counter, make your way to the freezer. Once you’re there, go past the pigs, break down the boxes of supplies… pull down a plastic bag, attach it to the ground and walls around you. Once you have done that, it should sparkle, just a little. That’s when you RIP through it into McDARNIA!

He proudly read his writing aloud, surprising his teacher and classmates.

We investigate the topography of our bodies, our lives, our experiences.  I ask students to sketch a scar they have. Then we write about what we see. Banna writes:

I have an invisible scar that cannot be seen,
it stays here inside my mind.
I got it from my dreams, insane.
It is there when I dream in the night…
it seems like it will never heal.
Like a bruise, my scar is inside.
How can I make it real?

A WITS Summer

by Paige Lester, WITS Intern

On any given weekday October through June, one can pretty much guess correctly the happenings of the WITS program. Writers travel to schools, they teach creative writing, and students make imaginative pieces.

But in the summer—when school is out and the sun sometimes is, too—the WITS staff shifts its focus to a more behind-the-scenes project: the compilation and publication of the year-end anthology. This anthology, which compiles the top pieces of work from each school in the program, is one of the most essential parts of the WITS experience.  Year after year, students are drawn into the world of creative writing. As some discover their inner genius for the first time and others hone their already-established skills, thousands of poems, plays, memoirs, stories and comics are crafted. Giving the students the possibility of getting published only makes the WITS experience more real for them.

Considering that there are over 5,000 WITS students, it’s clear that we can’t publish each and every one of them. So, how do we narrow it down? The process can seem very straightforward, but it is also filled with tough decisions, editing quandaries, and a lot of searching for the perfect title. As the summer intern, I’ve learned exactly how fun it can be.

First and foremost, after the students have written their work, the writers in residence choose five to ten of the strongest pieces from their classrooms. These pieces are then sent to our office and read through, one by one, by the editors. Reading over the ones that are submitted is inevitably entertaining. Many students are not afraid of revealing their inner voices and truest selves. Overwhelmingly, the pieces that come in possess a very honest and heartfelt tone. Some express especially vulnerable emotions as they describe who they are via letters to their self or write poems about those closest to them. Some pieces (like a comic about falling into a vat of yogurt or a play about a magical tie) made me laugh out loud at my desk. Others use such unique word combinations and descriptions that I found myself repeating the phrases in my head and going over them again outside the office quite often.

While there is fun in reading over what the students have worked on during the past year, the process isn’t always so terribly easy. Sometimes permission forms necessary to publish someone under the age of 18 aren’t turned in by students who write really great work and we have to pass them over.

At the same time, choosing the best of the work with permissions can be overwhelming (in a good way) because of how strong all of the submissions are. After each of us read a school’s stack of pieces, we make a list of our personal favorites and then compare. These meetings are always fun as we can come together and talk about why we love certain pieces. Getting to have this discussion is definitely one of the best parts of the process because there are great reasons for wanting to publish all of our favorites. However, we know that it is not feasible to publish ten writers from a single school and so we must make difficult cuts. When a few hundred pieces become just over a hundred, though, we know our selection process is complete.

Once this is over, we realize the rewards of deliberation. Students receive acceptance letters in the mail and “proud mom” emails fill the inboxes of the WITS staff. We work with our designer, Golden Lasso, to design a beautiful book worthy of the writing within, and we choose a cover image—this year, it was a bright pink and chartreuse painting by local artist Ryan Molenkamp. And with the year-end reading only a month away we know that more celebration and empowerment is to come.

This year’s collection is entitled In the Sliver of a Second and it celebrates both the transience and permanence of the act of writing. Ideas come to us in moments, but once they are written down they can have impact for years to come. My experience at WITS reflects this. Though my two lovely months here have sadly slipped by, the students’ work is not likely to leave my mind anytime soon.

Sounds Like Bees

by Erin Malone, Whittier Elementary School

All of us have our favorite writing exercises, but after a while even those start to feel worn. Our students are always new, but it’s not enough to surprise only them with our assignments—to keep our spark, we need to invent and try fresh lessons that may work, or may not. (I love a good experiment, and just keep my fingers crossed that if it “fails”, it’s not on the day the principal is observing.)

In the flop category, I tried “Two Truths and a Lie” with my 5^th graders at Whittier Elementary School this spring. I said, “My mother was a rodeo queen”; “I was born with an extra finger”; “I have a friend who trains whales at Sea World.” They got to guess which was the lie, and then my assignment was to write around the lie so that it would seem true. Oh, I was telling some whoppers. They were laughing and yelling out and having a great time. Then I told them it was their turn. And unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on how you look at it, it seems most 5^th graders are very bad liars. “I have two cats”; “My dad works at Boeing”; “I like playing soccer.” The lie? Kid has just one cat.

Later on in the quarter, though, I had better luck with the “quiet game.” First I had the students go into the hallway and write down all the noises they heard. From this Sydney wrote:

School Sounds

 

The tap, tap, tap

Of a pencil goes rhythmically

 

Paper crumpling

One idea after another

Is thrown out

 

People cough

As doors slam

 

Mouths full of food

Chew constantly

 

Pencils scratch

As people laugh

 

In a way

It’s almost music

*

When we returned to the classroom, I told them to listen very carefully to a musical composition I had brought in: John Cage’s 4’33”. “I can’t hear anything,” they said. “Can you turn it up?” I assured them the volume was up. I went around the room with a hand-held speaker, putting it up to their ears. Slowly they began to get it: they were listening to “silence.” When someone in Cage’s recorded audience coughed, the student whose ear caught it smiled a big smile. When 4 minutes and 33 seconds had elapsed, I asked them what they’d heard. “Static,” and “vibration” were built up to become “waves,” “wind,” and “fuzzy under the ocean sounds.”

What is music? Can silence be music? Alec Y. raised his hand to say, “Are we having a philosophical discussion now?” (No pulling the wool over his eyes.

Composition depends upon the importance of listening. What is that in the space between words, between sounds? What happens if we become still enough to let the world move around us, instead of pushing into it? My students remind me to listen, and when I do, I’m rewarded. They are rich in surprises. Here are some of their poems from that day.

Silence

 

Silence is like

The grass and

Leaves having a

Conversation under

The night moon.

 

-Toby W.

 

Still

 

Silence sounds like

dust on the ground.

Silence sounds like

chipped paint on an old house.

Silence sounds like

a damp roof.

Rain clouds about to burst.

Silence sounds like

a call being declined.

Silence sounds like

a pigeon on a lamp post.

Silence sounds like bees.

Silence sounds like

an ocean coming ashore.

Silence sounds like

a fisherman catching a trout.

 

Silence sounds like a poem

being written.

Silence sounds like. . .

 

-Fiona N.

 

Stone River

 

Silence is like a stone river.

Fish sit,

Stuck in time.

A bear looks surprised

As his meal

Turns to stone.

And everything

Is silent.

 

-Ben W.

 

The Ocean Sky

 

Silence is like a bone pale night sky,

With a ribbon of a silver moon,

Shining over the sea,

With fish underneath, in the reef,

Twirling under the glossy light,

Close to the copper beach,

But dancing away at the last

Moment.

 

-Nicky L.

 

Silence Is Like

 

Silence is like a fish, when he blows

bubbles they float up and pop above the surface.

Silence is like secrets being held,

waiting to be told.

Silence is a flame, catching the sky on fire.

Silence is peace, when the war has stopped.

 

-Emily K.

 

What Difficult Things Sound Like

by Daemond Arrindell, Washington Middle School and Garfield High School

I’m a big fan of the work of Patricia Smith. An incredibly accomplished poet both on the page and on the stage, Patricia is especially well-known for her persona poems, where she takes on the voice of someone else and brings them to life through her own imagination. Two of her most famous are “Undertaker” and “Skinhead.” Both of these poems voice characters who are dealing with/facing violence in some capacity, whether it be the aftermath of violence or being violent oneself. Both poems give a powerful snapshot through the lens of a person whose voice is rarely heard. Teenagers are rarely heard from on serious matters such as violence, and many of them face it every day. When how they are affected by the violence they see or hear about is not voiced, an opportunity for healthy self-expression is lost.

In a book on poetry slam, I read about how Patricia stumbled into doing persona work with students of hers. She had a lesson planned out and no matter what she attempted she couldn’t drag her students’ attention away from a shooting that had happened in their neighborhood the night before. Patricia rolled with it beautifully. You have to meet the students where they are at if you want them to start reaching for higher levels. So Patricia asked them for their opinions on the subject at hand:

“How do you think the bullet felt?”
“What does the guy who has to clean up the blood from the crime scene have to say about the shooting?”
“What did the gun say when it was aimed at the boy?”

Suddenly, the students were faced with a way of expressing some of the more complex and intense emotions on the matter, and they had lots to say.

I have an exercise I love to do with my students called “Reverse Group Poem” that takes part of a statement such as “Poetry sounds like…” and requires the kids to finish the statement with whatever they see fit. I randomly call on them and everything they say is put on the board, and I do mean EVERYTHING. Silly, nonsensical as well as dramatic and serious. Including the “ummmm”s, the “can you come back to me”s and the giggles. All on the board. At the end the responses are read aloud in random or reverse order and somehow, without fail, a poem is created from their musings. Often we will come back to this exercise throughout a residency as a way to address a subject or topic (ex: Respect looks like… Abandonment feels like…Joy tastes like…) always focused more on description than definition. For whatever reason, violence and death had been coming up within the students writing in different capacities. I took a nod from Patricia and decided to meet the kids where they were at.

The prompt was really simple – “Death sounds like…” I had the students write for 15 minutes. And as morbid as the topic may seem at first glance, it was enlightening to read the results….

Death sounds like mumbles and prayers
an emergency room flooded with peopleeyes filled with worry and sorrow
suddenly you hear footsteps
Death sounds like
“May I have the family of “******” please?
Sounds like deep breaths and sweaty palms
it feels like the weight of the world balancing on your one heart
Death sounds like questions
-J.

Death sounds like the misty hallows night that calls malevolent creatures
Hearing it lowly whistling
as it strides across the dark plane leaving ice behind
Death sounds like a melody that comes as it pleases
like a flute being played to snatch your soul
-K.

Death sounds like a moment of silence, a bad dream, jail food
a long scary hall with no lights that never end
death sounds like the world coming to an end
like no emotions whatsoever
illnesses with no cure
death sounds like the screeching of chalkboards
buildings crumbling
black cats and bad luck
-M.

Death sounds like bullets flying and ripping through my torso
like young african american youth struggling to survive
on this place called earth where we have to be strong to survive
death sounds like a rapid heartbeat and doctors yelling “Leave the room”
death sounds like a shell once you put it to your ear
you feel free and tha’ts the only thing you can hear
-D.

Death sounds like a black box being closed
hard feet walking on autumn leaves
a door closing
never to be opened
tears falling
landing on soft green grass

Death sounds like
when the phone clicks
instead of a dial tone there is silence
something like wedding bells gone wrong

Death sounds like
long processions of cop cars
like the last page of a book being turned
-L.

And while they had lots to say in response to the idea of Death, there were also some pretty passionate responses speaking to the value of life:

Irreplaceable
If death were to ttry to take my spot
I would tell him that I’m irreplaceable
Wonderful
One of a kind
That taking my life would be
Unreasonable
Pointless
A stupid decision
So Mr.Guythatsgoingtokillme,
Tell me a good reason why.
-M

My Life here is mine
mine to live
I have a dream to pursue
a heart to give, a smile to shine and brighten the world
time to spear, a generation to creat
an idea to give
a soul to cleanse
a god to thank
no it’s not my time
my bucket list to complete
what I have to say now?
Not now buddy.
Ill see you in 8 decades

–D.

Le Blob: Beyond Stick Figures

by Greg Stump, McClure Middle School & Room 9 Community School

For any writer or artist, deadlines can be a blessing and a curse: the same pressure that temporarily quiets internal second-guessing also encourages cutting corners when possible. One of the deadline-influenced characters I created for a weekly newspaper comic strip was a mostly-featureless, gumdrop-shaped mound of goo named The Blob. The primitive design of the character was hardly original; it looked roughly like the classic comic strip character The Schmoo (from Al Capp’s Li’l Abner), except that it had flippers instead of legs. But having such a quickly- and easily-drawn character in my ensemble cast meant that I could always come up with a Blob strip if I was pressed for time.

This year, as a WITS writer-in-residence at McClure middle school and Room 9 community school, I’m using what I learned as a cartoonist on deadline to help introduce students to the comics medium. Having my students create their own blob characters and stories has proved to be an effective method for getting them to practice a crucial aspect of comics creation: the ability to draw a character consistently, from a variety of angles and distances. The simpler a character is, the less an artist will struggle with representing it moving through space, and the more apt he or she will be to position the character in a way that’s appropriate to the scene and story.

Blobs, it turns out, are also a good tool for weaning students off of stick figures, which — despite their charms — are a bit limited as a tool for teaching comics. Meant to represent people, stick figures don’t much look like them, or different from each other. (Attempts at differentiating them by adding hair or glasses just look weird and distracting, to my eye). Blobs, on the other hand, are human-ish, rather than human, and it’s up to the creator to decide what kind of world the characters live in.

My counsel to students that lack confidence or experience with their drawing is that it’s no more difficult to draw an egg-shaped blob than a stick figure. Like a Mr. Potato Head toy, the character is mostly a blank slate, and the fun is in deciding what to add. It also satisfies the impulse to copy while simultaneously allowing for the opportunity to make a basic but personalized character. Of course, it may just be that my students seem to like the activity because they like the word “blob,” bookended as it is by satisfying “buh” sounds. So far this year, the blob characters I’ve encountered include “Blobbo,” “Da Blob,” and “Bob the Blob,” among many other others. If I had to pick a favorite, though, it just might be “Le Blob,” a beret-wearing, mustachioed blob of (apparently) Gallic lineage that was created by Room 9′s Jasper H., and is shown below.

Extra bonus: If you look closely at the following comic, you’ll notice that the character appears not only from the front but from the side and from the back, when it’s appropriate to the action, and at the end of the story — when it’s important for the reader to see the character fully ensconced on a island surrounded by the ocean — we see the character at its smallest (far-away) size. This is actually quite a challenge to do consistently with a complex character; with a blob, though, ce nest pas un problème.