Brewing Writing Communities

Sometimes I wonder why I make plans

If you have ever written with me or met me after I recently engaged in writing in community then you know that there is nothing I love more than writing with other humans. It was my greatest joy as a writing teacher and as a National Writing Project site leader. In fact, one of my proudest accomplishments include helping lead Write Across America for five years and forming the Rebel Cartographers.

I love writing. I love writing with others. I love crafting invitations for others to write. Last week the Rebel Cartographers wrote about Dangerous Gifts inspired by some of my recent reading and the writing and conversation was fire. That is my happy place. Some of my favorite days have been focused around writing with my students and pausing to listen to a room so quiet you can hear the scratching of pens and turn of the page. It is even more wonderful when some of the writing that comes out of that silence inspires us to write even more. That is the magic of writing in community. This is how writers are made. How lucky am I to know how to spark such magic?

How does someone quit that feeling cold turkey? That was the question driving me as I contemplated my practice retirement. I was afraid that without some additional writing marathons as an outlet I might drive the Rebel Cartographers away (I’ve witnessed something of the kind before so I was fully aware of the danger). Fortunately I have friends willing and able to share their students with me and even to recruit other students to give a writing marathon a try. This meant I could share Lucille Clifton’s poetry with a group of future English teachers because I always find inspiration in her words and I could spend a day with dozens of teen writers finding inspiration in other Kentucky writers to create powerful individual writing as well as collaborative poems like these:

But sadly our second Teen Writers Day Out did not attract enough interest and there was even less interest in our Spring Break Writing Camps (with the most excellent theme of Manifestos, Monsters, and Other Strange Things) garnered even less. So I do not know what writing in community with young people will look like for me in the future. However, my practice retirement has helped me gain some perspective and for now I am willing to wait and see. One good came out of the cancellation of the Spring Break Writing Camps. I was able to accept an invitation to the Sawstone Writer’s Guild

I prepared two envelopes of poetry excerpts and was delighted to reconnect with a former student as well as friends and colleagues (some of whose poetry was included in my collection) so that is definitely a writing community open to me in the future.

In the meantime I still have my Poetry Gauntlet cohort and Lexington Poetry Month to look forward to as well as (of course) the Rebel Cartographers so I am content to await further invitations to write in community. Maybe you would like to invite me to your community to write with your humans? You are always invited to write with me (in secret?) using any of these invitations to write.

Check out my reading in community and watching in community updates as I enter the final weeks of my practice retirement! Please let me know if you share any of my fandoms. I love geeking out with others.