Phew. I've been packing my car and the rooms to ready Dolan School of Business with summer supplies for teachers and young writers for several days now and yesterday launched the 15th year (having the first year with Faye Gage as my mentor to the work in this region). To say I'm exhausted is an understatement, but we put in the work to get the results we want to have. It's been 23 years since I did the Louisville Writing Project and I began the teacher institute today by sharing pages from my writer's notebook and showcasing all the seeds that were planted then and what they became over time, including a published piece in
English Journal, highlighting how these sees bloomed to larger than life events (through a series of events - the debut column of NWP work in the journal). One thing that has been with throughout all the years is my big bucket of magnetic letters that I use to highlight focuses of the day - yesterday being an introduction.
Missing, however, is Abu and Jalen, who often ran with he magnets to create art, funk, and pizazz before the teachers and students arrived. I will miss both of them this summer.
In day one, we had CWP teacher and now author, Rebecca Dimyan, on campus to discuss how a prompt experienced in a college essay workshop with students led to her first personal essay being published on Vox. She's now working on her third book and teaching full time on campus in the English Creative Writing department. Pretty neat connection and trajectory here.
Today, day two, we're moving to creative possibilities and nature writing, keeping a hard focus on what can be adapted to our own classrooms, especially those of us focused on working with English language learners.
I'm waking up today ready to go to bed, but we're on it. We got this. After all, we only have one week before 200 kids arrive, too.
