Making All Things New: Putting Thoughts into Words

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 an excerpt from the book Poetry Is by Ted […]

Environmental Justice, Comic Book Storytelling, and Seed Work

In Charlie La Greca and Rebecca Bratspies’ environmental justice comic, Mayah’s Lot, the image of the aspen seed is prominent.  The titular character intends to plant an aspen seed in a garden she secretly tends on a vacant lot, just before finding out a corporation’s plan to transform the lot into an industrial toxic storage waste facility.  […]

Front-loading the Writing Process: Reducing the Cognitive Load

Picasso’s quote may seem somewhat contradictory as giving answers is not necessarily a useless trait; however, dig a little deeper and it makes a lot of sense. Computers (or rather Google) give us the answers we are looking for — we receive an output for a question asked. This isn’t necessarily a negative thing — […]

Writer’s Telephone – an Information-Gathering, Idea-Nuturing Strategy

I feel like I’ve been engaged in a pedagogical ancestry project recently — mapping my teaching forebears through generations. In floods of professional books, blogs, Tweets, and chats, these ideals into which I have become so deeply entrenched sometimes lose their original source. Like a game of educational Telephone, the message gets translated and retranslated, […]