Incarcerated Girls Write, Too
The Writing Workshop at Journey House is an eye-opener, week after week. The writers, all incarcerated girls aged 13-17, join the optional workshop only if they genuinely want to come. That is key. We decide for ourselves how we want to run the workshop, who speaks, who reads aloud, and what we write about. There are no grades, no assignments, no evaluations, and no deadlines.
The writing is formidable.
These writers have lived, and they have stories to tell. … Continue reading
Switching Editors Mid-Book
Almost five years ago, when editor Nancy Mercado took on Birthmarked, she delivered the written offer to my agent in a box with an orange. Since an orange in the novel symbolized hope in dark places, her gesture resonated with me. I knew she would be the perfect editor to help me make the most of Gaia’s story, and it has been a delight to work with her through three and a half novels.
I’m going to miss her. Nan called a month… Continue reading
Learning from That Writer I Knew
I went back to my very first draft of Birthmarked this morning to see how it opened, and I was surprised by how decisive and certain it sounded, especially since I know I was making it up at the time. The draft was in single-space, which also surprised me because I write in double-space now, and this drew my eye to the size of the paragraphs, which were short, and the white space that flowed around them. The prose already had a distinctive cadence… Continue reading
The Teachers vs. the Bean Counters
It’s a horror story. I keep talking to teacher friends who are being crushed by the new system of legislature-mandated teacher evaluations here in CT. They don’t talk about it publicly because they’re too exhausted and time-starved to peep, and besides, if you speak up from within the system, you sound like a whiner or an incompetent. Teachers are already scared and demoralized, if not actually crying (and some are). They’ve already been told point blank that by the end of the evaluations, no teacher will… Continue reading
Write and Write and Write
At the top of my to-do list, an ever-evolving string of reminders and chores, is the directive “Write and write and write.” It’s always the first item, at the top of the morning, a small, nudging cheerleader telling me three years into doing this full-time that yes, writing is really what I’m supposed to be doing every day. Not in a half-baked, lazy way, either. Lots of it. No matter what.
I’ll tell you what’s daunting: sitting back from… Continue reading
They Match!
For those of us who like things to match in a tidy way, the three paperbacks of the Birthmarked trilogy all have related covers.
And now back to work on Project Next.