All Things Made New: My New Book About Writing

This year on Moving Writers, I’ve spotlighted re-reads of some older books about writing, and not all of them by teachers. Together, we examined the writer’s inner life with the poet Ted Hughes, practiced memory writing with the book Metro: Journeys in Writing Creatively, and honed our questions for conferring with the wonderful Barry Lane. […]

All Things Made New: A Classic of Classroom Revision

This year on Moving Writers, I am dusting off some old-but-wise books on my shelf about writing, creating a tiny review, then considering how one passage from the book can inform writing instruction today, even decades after the book was first published.  This month, I’ll consider After The End by Barry Lane, the original edition. […]

Syntax Study for Earth Day

Placing Maggie Smith’s “Good Bones” and Craig Santos Perez’s “Good Fossil Fuels” side by side can elicit a wide-ranging classroom conversation about the ways the climate crisis is downplayed.  Through describing points of convergence and divergence, students can ponder how the “recycled” aspects of Smith’s syntax and prosody appearing in Perez’s poem challenge their thinking […]

An End-of-the-Year Essay Unit Plan that Brings Students + Literature Together

When Allison and I wrote Beyond Literary Analysis, we read thousands of pieces of writing in the quest to figure out what kind of analysis professional, published writer truly write outside academia. In other words, beyond what English teachers have culturally and historically deemed to be our analytical territory, what kind of analytical writing will […]

A Mentor Text for Place-Based Storytelling

Photo by Zac Ong on Unsplash During the last couple of years of teaching, making mini-zines has been a highlight.  An 8-page zine has been a go-to method for helping students shrink a narrative down to accessible compactness.  As my students plot environmental stories culminating in a call to action, the details associated with specific […]