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The day I started school, walking into a kindergarten classroom in Honolulu, Hawaii, lo, these many years ago, September became the real start of my year. When I graduated high school in the Philippines, it was only a short time before I started getting children off to school in September. Now, over thirty years has past and that part of my life is done as well.
But September is not done. Here it comes again, rolling over me with its tinge of fall in the Atlanta air, its slighty sweet sadness as the leaves begin to color and curl on the dogwoods in my front yard, and its abundance of late-summer crops from my local farmer.

I have more to say about September, but it will wait. Just as September is changing the air and the earth, I am changing inside as well. I'm not sure what it's about yet, so I don't want to say too much. I'm requiring a lot of alone time right now, lots of staring time, and very little movement, so I can listen well.
The photos today are of Camp Springs Elementary School in Camp Springs, Maryland, just outside of Washington, D.C., and right next door to Andrews Air Force Base. My dad was stationed at Andrews in the sixties and was chief of safety for the 89th, the squadron that flies the president.

I took these photos a year ago when I went back to Camp Springs to research. Today the school is a senior citizen center. Folks were happy to allow me to roam around, and I was happy to be back. Nothing is the same, of course, but inside my heart, it all came flooding back.

I came from Hawaii to Maryland the summer I finished second grade, and went to Camp Springs for the rest of my elementary school years. It's the setting for Fallout. It's the school Franny goes to. As her class is dismissed for recess -- it is fall 1962 -- Franny writes:

"The darkness of the hallway blinds me -- I am still surprised by the hallways with no windows and the closed-in way people go to school in Maryland. At Pearl Harbor Elementary School, the hallways had no walls. The classrooms had windows on both sides. Sunshine drenched everything. Camp Springs Elementary School feels like a cave."I remember that feeling in September 1962, walking through the front doors of Camp Springs Elementary School. I remember the gleaming floors and the way we had to walk on the right, single file, and the wall where we played a wall-version of four-square at recess and the sidewalks with that tough, sticky grass, the flagpole, the grates we hovered over in winter to keep warm during outdoor recess, the Glee Club, safety patrols, art, music, French! and more --

-- perhaps because I lived there so long -- seven years is a long time for an air force kid to live in one place -- or perhaps because I was ages 8 through 15... at any rate, these memories of place are so strong -- what it looked like, smelled like, felt like, sounded like, tasted like -- I remember it as if it were yesterday.
So... I wrote about that. All my books are in some way autobiographical, but this one is the most so. I held back nothing. I poured my ten-year-old self into this book -- a book of fiction, to be sure, but my story as well.. that inside story of what it felt like to be alive in the early sixties, living in that place, within that family and that community, a child of a military family during the Cuban Missile Crisis, a child who, like other children, wanted to belong.
It has been like my little secret, this town, this school, this family, this time period... this book. I've been nurturing it along since 1996. On some level it's surreal to see it beginning to take shape with a lush, full story, copy edited and almost ready for page proofs, with cover comps and inside art and other people's eyes upon it -- other people saying good things. If I think about it too long, it's overwhelming. Maybe that's part of why I need to be so still right now. Come May and publication, there will be no sitting still! And that will be fine -- I will be excited to support this book that is so much a part of me, that has been so lovingly co-created by so many folks in so many departments at Scholastic.

Several of you have written me asking about my editor meeting: it was good, thanks for asking. Very good. We have been inventing a new language for these three books about the sixties -- books that include newspaper clippings, song lyrics, recipes, photographs, and more.
So far, we've been using the terms "scrapbook," "interstitial" and "distillation" to refer to various elements of the book. On Sunday we came up with another new term: "documentary novel."

It seems I've written a documentary novel. Who knew? My editor has been using the term for some time now to describe the novels in the sixties trilogy, and I'm going to try it on for size as well.

I'm not sure what I think about it yet. I'll let you know. But I do have a question: what does that conjure up for you? Documentary novel. Just wonderin'.

I'm going back to my staring now. The work ahead is on my mind. I've got a draft of the 1966 novel, but it needs so much work. And Scholastic would love to have it in February. Maybe that's another reason I need to sit and stare. February! It's just around the corner, really.

I'm re-entering the time of September, when traditionally I sit down at my desk and begin the work ahead with fresh pencils, a rested mind, and the optimism of a new year. That's worth contemplating.

Home, friends. I am home. There's no place like it, and I'm glad to be here. Thanks for coming to the low country with me. I had no words last week, but I loved reading yours. Thanks for all the lovely mail. I savored every word.
And now... a return to our regularly scheduled program. I have breakfast with my editor this morning (Sunday). He's here for the Decatur Book Festival, so we will take some time to be together this morning, to meet face-to-face for the first time, and start getting to know one another in person.

If you've been reading One Pomegranate, you'll know that I lost my long time, beloved editor, Liz Van Doren, in early 2007 -- a devastating blow. We had worked together for 12 years. Over time, we had learned to complete each other's sentences as we talked about stories. We challenged each other. We made good books together.

Kate Harrison became my editor at that time. Within the year, she left Harcourt for Dial/Penguin, and I landed at Scholastic with Kara La Reau and David Levithan. The plan was that I would work on the first of the sixties trilogy with Kara, but eight months later, Kara was laid off, just as I was nearing the home stretch of a complete draft of book one.

David and I began working together less than a year ago. In that time I finished the draft, finished another, and another, and have gotten to know David through phone calls and email. He's a good editor. I don't know him well yet; we are learning to work with each other, and I understand that good working relationships take time and trust. It's not necessary for us to become friends, although that would be nice, but we are already colleagues in book making, and I am delighted by that.

At any rate, it will be good to have met face-to-face as we come into the home stretch of putting this novel to bed. There are a million things to talk about, to ask about, to learn. And to share. Many of them have nothing to do with books. I'm looking forward to breakfast. It's good to be home.

As for Charleston: we'll be back. It was good. Very good. And... I have a prompt for you (and your students):

Take a digital camera with you and take photos on a given day of objects that tug at your heart. Don't think too hard about why they tug, just trust your gut. Take as many photos as you want.

Then, take a look at your photos and select the four or five that can tell a story of that day in one word. That one word will be a theme, if you will. Let that one word title and those photos help you tell a story wordlessly. Let them evoke a memory, an emotion, a mood, a narrative. See what you come up with. You can use my posts from last week as a model or guide. This should be creative and fun -- and full of good ways to think about story.

I'd love to see what you come up with. It could be a notebook exercise. The photos, printed on computer or photo-quality paper, could be pasted into your notebook with your one word as a heading. (Conversely, if you are keeping a blog as scrapbook (One Pom is part scrapbook), you can easily construct this as a blog entry.)

So. Personal narrative in photos. I'd love to hear the discussion this engenders, too, and the ways that you adapt it for your own purposes.

And now: What to wear to brunch? It always comes down to the practical considerations, doesn't it?

It's not so much about blackberries as it is about memories. Personal narrative. And how I believe we live through our personal narratives, often molding and shaping them as we grow older, seeing them through a softer lens or a sharper one, depending on who we are and how our eyes adjust, how our hearts grow... or don't.
I'm feeling sad today. It's a free-floating kind of wistfulness, and it's fine -- some days are like that. I'm remembering my former mother-in-law's tomato relish because a batch of it is bubbling on the stove right now. I haven't made it in at least ten years, but today the house is full of that familiar vinegar, sugar, black pepper, tomato smell, and I am sifting back in time.
I'm remembering the things we define ourselves by. For instance, this mother-in-law -- her name was Juanita -- was ten years older than my own mother, Marie, and twenty years older than my first mother-in-law, Carolyn. I married as a teenager, and Carolyn had been a teenage mother as well. I was only nineteen years older than my first-born child. Whew. So I had a mother-in-law who was 35 years old when I married at 18. We were both so young.

I knew these numbers so well... they were a part of me. As we all got older, I continued to add it up. And then, Juanita died at age 83 (which meant my mother would have been 73), and my mother died at age 78, and it's harder to keep track of numbers now, especially now that I have a new mother-in-law who has just turned 83. My mother today would be 84. This week.
Before I started the tomato concoction to boil and reduce to a thick ketchup, I took the blackberries I bought at the farm earlier this week, and sprinkled them with sugar. I opened the Joy of Cooking I had given myself as a present in 1978, when I was 24 years old, newly married a second time and learning how to cook, and I decided to make a cobbler. I took my mother's rolling pin out of the drawer and felt its heft in my hand, remembered the times I had sat at the counter while she rolled out the jingle bell cookies or the pie dough at Christmas, and remembered her saying, "Some day you'll do this with your children." And I did.
I made the rolled biscuits on page 632 of Joy, and followed the directions for cobblers on page 660, but I didn't heat my fruit or add flour or egg to thicken it -- I knew the biscuits would do their part to soak up the juice. My mother had taught me this.
I thought about those blackberries. There was a huge field of wild blackberries next to Camp Springs Elementary School in Prince George's County, Maryland when I was growing up. I wanted in the worst way to pick those berries. An old ramshackle house was in front of the field. At recess, we'd sometimes stare at that old house and wonder if anyone lived in it. Certain kids -- you know who they are -- would boast that they had seen an old lady with wild white hair and a pitchfork on the porch. Others said that ghosts haunted the house.

One day after school, I braved the blackberry patch, all alone. My heart beat wildly in my chest as I kept an eye on the back of the house while I bent down to see those berries. The smell was overpoweringly heady -- a blackberry feast of the senses that I remember to this day. This smell filled my kitchen as my cobbler baked and I washed the dishes.
There were too many thorns for me to pick long, but I didn't need many. I had emptied my pencil case into my satchel, and I filled it with blackberries -- for my mother. She would be so surprised! I raced home, skipped in the door, ran up the stairs to the kitchen, and announced my treasure.

"Were you trespassing?" was the first thing my mother asked me. Well... yes... I was.

"Only at the very back of the lot," I said, which was true.

And you know... I don't remember the rest of the story. I could make it up -- I could write some creative non-fiction, or I could write pure fiction about that day. I could say we sat down to blackberries a la mode and a meaty conversation.

I'm sure we didn't. I would remember that, wouldn't I? Memory is so complex, so unreliable, so slippery. And I didn't know anything about picking blackberries. What I had picked was mostly under-ripe -- not the luscious black of the berries I pulled out of my oven and piled into my bowl.
From that day on, I never really cared for blackberries. Not that I had had a hankering for them before. Likely I just wanted to do that forbidden thing, to see that forbidden fruit, and to offer some to my mother. It was all about wanting to be loved, as it always is with us human beings... wanting to give love and be folded up into love.

So I made a blackberry cobbler this week, surrounded it with homemade peach ice cream, broke my biscuits into the sweet hot blackberry juice, and took a bite of my memories. I held my spoon heavenward, in a toast. "This is for you, Mom."

Pictured below is yesterday's haul at Book Nook in Decatur, Georgia. I almost never find anything affordable anymore at used book stores. Long gone are the days I rummaged through boxes of books on the side porch of a little thrift store in Vienna, Virginia and bought books there for a nickel a piece when I could afford the extra nickels.

I also bought my then-three-year-old daughter a nightgown for 45 cents, which stays in my mind for some reason -- even the very look of it I remember... it was soft, well-worn cotton, buttercream yellow with tiny lace trim on the sides and bottom. Oh, how A. wanted that nightgown.

It was 90 cents, and outside my very paltry budget that day, but the owner took one look at us, and especially at A., who had her hands clasped under her chin, longing for that nightgown, and said, "Today, it's half off." My daughter wore out that nightgown before she grew out of it.

I digress.
I am partial to thrifting. Years ago, it saved my life. Even though that sounds like a drastic statement, it's true, and one day I will write about that life. These days, thrifting sports a different hue, but is no less important to me. Most of my home is furnished with thrifted items, and most of the clothes I wear are thrifted.

(Another aside: I once worked in an IRA symposium with the wonderful Naomi Shahib Nye, who boasted at the microphone (because she'd been introduced this way) that she had not bought anything to wear in over 8 years. "Share with your friends!" she said. Say it, Sister!)

Ahem. To the books. I love old cookbooks and gardening books, and old, odd books about keeping house and parenting. Yesterday at Book Nook, I found so many good ones on the half-price bookcases. The entire haul cost me $11.77, with tax, which is harking back to those good old days before thrift stores really knew how much old books could bring.

Maybe these books are important only to me. That's fine. This winter I will savor The Encyclopedia of Cooking (1951), Farm Journal's Cooking for Company, The Winter Garden, and sooner than winter I will try some recipes from Our Daily Bread along with the Chocolate-Orange Meringue Pie ("Light and colorful with grated chocolate as a garnish and a surprise layer of chocolate under the orange custard filling" p. 228) from Farm Journal's Best-Ever Pies.

Wanna come for dessert? A recipe isn't complete until it's shared.

I'm thinking about cooking lately since I have time to cook these days (have made time), and because I see what a community cooking and eating together creates.

Michael Pollan was interviewed on Fresh Air yesterday. It's a 20-min. interview worth listening to. He'll have an article in the Sunday New York Times worth reading about the same topic -- we watch cooking shows, but we cook less than ever. Why is that? He posits that it may well be that it wasn't fire or even language that grew us up into human beings. It may be the act of cooking.

And thrifting. :> Finding new uses for old discards. Or repurposing what we already have. Kids do this instinctively -- the couch cushions turn into a rocket ship or a cave.

What about you? What do you thrift or repurpose, and how do you do it, and why? What's the greatest, neatest, coolest, funkiest, funniest or most amazing thing you ever scored/thrifted/yard saled/repurposed?

Write about that. Short. One seed of the pomegranate. Just one story. Beginning, middle, end. Take a snapshot, draw a picture, give it some heart, make it a song. I'd love to see it, hear it, savor it. It will enrich my life every bit as much as that Chocolate-Orange Meringue Pie. Less calories, too.

It's why we're here, to share our stories with one another.

The ingrate. Just look at him, belly on the cool wood floor, little right foot sticking out so coyly. We rescued him from the bushes two years ago, when he was just a few weeks old, nurtured him to health, spent a bazillion dollars in vet bills -- he was always getting torn up outside by some thing or some other cat. We cooed to him and coaxed him and played with him and educated him and lovingly encouraged him to love us right back even as he chewed on our fingers and nipped at our ears -- hahahahaha. Our mistake.
Here is Cleebo, named for the same character in The Aurora County All-Stars. Cleebo the Clueless, I called that character. But this Cleebo is not clueless -- he's wily and crazy like a fox.

He stays away for months at a time. Yes, months. He returned at Christmas after an absence of a month, and we rejoiced. He sauntered in, chowed down, and waltzed right back out the door. He was gone for over two months this spring -- we were sure the coyotes that live across the way had gotten him. But here he came on the Fourth of July, still wearing his collar and name tag (with our phone number on it), loping down the driveway like he'd never been gone a day, right past me as I stood in the garden and watched him, my hands full of weeds.

We were overjoyed to see him the first time he came back. We had been so worried about him and had missed him so much. Now, when he shows up again, we hardly move. Someone says, still lovingly (we are suckers for Cleebo, we can't help it), "you ingrate..." as he sashays past us heading for the food bowl. Then I make sure he has his flea meds and is up to date on his shots before he can get back out the door.

He has been in and out since July 4, and I don't know if he intends to stay for a while or not. I've thought about writing about this cat, making up a story for a picture book, but I don't have a strong attachment to that idea, and I need that strong pull to the heart before I can make any story successful, so I'll pass on using Cleebo as a story idea.

So I won't write about Cleebo, and I don't write about my children or grandchildren or even the present day. I tend to plumb my young life for stories instead. I always go where my heart leads me, in trying to tell a story. The craft can and must come later. But if my heart's not in it, if there's not something strongly and steadily pulling me toward writing a story whether or not it ever becomes a book, then I leave it alone -- it's someone else's story to tell.

I've got four or five stories clamoring for my attention right now. I've got to turn my full attention to book two in the sixties trilogy soon, but I think I can work up one of these shorter pieces now. Which one is yakking the loudest? Time to sit down with my notebook and see.

Oh, Seattle! How I adore you.

I adore you so much, I'm still hoarse. I talked and ate, ate and talked, and laughed and learned so much from you last week... and I have spent most of my weekend in BED, recovering. Believe me... you were worth it.

Now to make sure that I can talk the rest of the week, as I visit south Georgia schools on Tues. and Wed., and speak at TASL -- Tennessee Association of School Librarians -- on Saturday. I must have a voice!

Who has the wonder cure for hoarse throats? (I can't even say the dreaded L word -- laryngitis.)

I am drinking hot Yogi Tea with honey, I am gargling with hot salt water, I am sucking on Ricola drops, I am speaking only in a whisper... and my voice is a bit better today, but not yet in singing form (which I need for K). I've got about fifteen hours left before I need to use this throat again.

But back to Seattle, the new love of my life:


Thank you, you beautiful students, resourceful teachers, and intrepid team at Glenridge, led by Tina and Mimi, and same-o to the good folks at Grass Lake, who so graciously sat through a two-hour teacher workshop after school, and who offered up their stories.







Thank you, Mary Jo Lambert, for putting together such a meaningful day at Grass Lake, and thank you to friends Nancy Johnson and Kathryn Noe for coming from their respective schools in Bellingham and Seattle, to take a tired author to dinner before her red-eye flight home.





So much happened in a week. I started in Atlanta, flew to Boston for Nancy Werlin's wedding (so lovely), flew to Seattle to visit family, then to work in schools, to visit with friends, and then flew home through Minneapolis, to Boston, then back to Atlanta, where I crash landed in bed. And all the while... we ate.














Food, glorious food.



Students, glorious students.














Notebooks, glorious notebooks.








And more food.... I am working up to a post about how all the wonderful food on the road conspires to elephantize authors, but I'm not ready for that one yet... still. STILL! It's so hard to resist, and so much fun to partake, and the community is luscious, it is.
















Here are K's (some first graders, too) dancing to ONE WIDE SKY...










Did I mention food? Thank you, Allison, for your baking wizardry, AND for the recipes.

















Glenridge teachers. Baker Allison (or is it Alison?) is in the back, left. Artist Debbie (who did the Ruby/Welcome artwork at the top of this post) is in back, right.










It was fall in Seattle, and yes, we had rain. We also had sunshine. And pumpkins.

















A big thank you to Mary Jo (right) and Mimi (left) for working so beautifully with their teams and making these visits so special.

I am ready to come back! Anytime.

Just let me find my voice....

Back to work in a real way this morning. Last night I had several breakthroughs while on my walk (exercise is part of process!), which catapulted me out of bed this morning, eager to get to work.

Breakfast on the porch this morning while I contemplate my progress so far this month. It never fails to amaze me how the slog slog slog of days turns into a white-heat for me. I know it's different strokes for different folks. Some writers must write every day. Some go for weeks without writing a word, while soaking up whatever it is for the next story, or coaxing it to the surface.

I am more in the latter camp. Unless I am on deadline, I go for days without writing the actual story at my laptop, but I don't let a day go by without scribbling in my notebook. Of course, right now, during this white-heat, deadline time, I am writing/revising the story, at my laptop, every day.

I use my notebook daily -- even if it's for a to-do list or a grocery list and that's it -- even when I'm traveling (esp. when I'm traveling -- I write on airplanes this way, in the interminable waits on takeoffs and landings, and then I transcribe to my laptop). The physical act of writing in my notebook keeps my writing pump primed.

Here is some of what I have scribbled in my notebook about the novel in the past three days. I haven't corrected spelling or grammar, as this is stream of consciousness, and also quick-recording. Here it is, just as I wrote it.

You can see, there is lots of personal narrative in here -- I am taking my life -- my ten-year-old life -- and turning it into story, a totally made-up story.
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We interrupt this program to catch up on the mail.

Yes, I do teach personal narrative writing, and yes I am so, so behind on answering requests for information about that, which always seem to come hot-and-heavy in August and September, as schools are looking at their coming school year's calendar (likewise in May and June).

I'd like to offer some thoughts here, in an effort to gather the teaching information into one document, and then I'll go back to catching up on the mail one letter at a time. I had a computer crash earlier this spring and lost some mail -- I'm still trying to reconstruct from that as well, and I don't mind a reminder from you if it's been too long since you've written and you're expecting a response. I've got an unpublished page on my website that details my teaching work, and if you want more information after reading this, shoot me an email.

I've been teaching writing for over 20 years. I've seen so many rubrics, guides, assessments, techniques and tools come and go, and I've tried my hand at teaching all genres, but I was a freelancer first and the essay is my first love -- here is an essay I wrote for Hallmark Magazine in February '08 -- it's an example of what I'm about to talk about -- writing personal narrative, writing short, writing from the three places that story comes from: the head (what you know and remember), the heart (what you feel) and the gut (what you can imagine). (Hmmm... the link at Hallmark appears to be broken -- here's my blog entry about that one clear moment.)

I teach only personal narrative writing, as it's what I know best, it's where I started, it's what schools are mandated to teach, it's the kind of writing that -- when understood -- brings much personal satisfaction and a vital sense of accomplishment. Personal narrative gives us a storyline. It helps us see how we belong, how we are -- or aren't -- safe in the world, and how we love, how we fear, how we want to change, too... personal narrative reveals our hearts and gives us all we need to know to understand ourselves and one another. I always say, it's hard to make someone your enemy when you have shared your stories honestly with one another.

I often use poetic forms when teaching personal narrative, but we always end up with a narrative, a story, beginning-middle-end, short, one clear moment in time, that comes out of life experience. Kindergarteners can do this. So can you.

I teach teachers, in day-long or after-school workshops, I teach at conferences, and I teach always on-site, never through the mail or email (although I love to see finished narratives arrive in my mailbox). In schools I target grades 3 and up, and particularly grades 3-6. I have taught high school writing and college-level writing, but my sweet spot is upper elementary school.

Your students become my students for a day or for up to one week. I assign homework. I teach each grade, and each class, differently. I work closely with the classroom teachers -- we are partners -- and the school administrators to achieve your goals... we work out beforehand what those goals are, and we go from there, tweaking as we go. We work hard, and we have fun. There's lots of laughter, and sometimes there are tears, especially when someone taps into a meaningful vein, and others are there to listen to that story, to support that writer, to support the writing community we are creating.

Here are some photos (and a narrative!) from a day spent at Mantua Elementary School in Fairfax, Virginia last year, working with the entire fourth grade, teachers and students, in a two-day personal narrative residency. I'll be back at Mantua in January, to work with the third grade students and teachers -- I'm so looking forward to it.

Last month, I worked with the lower-school teachers at Heritage School in Newnan, Georgia, and last August at Wayne Avenue School in Dunn, North Carolina, with the fourth- and fifth-grade teachers (Hey, Karen!). A look at my calendar page on my website will give you an idea of the different residencies and workshops I've done over the years. These days, even an author visit to a school is conducted as a writing day; it's instructional time, even in an assembly program. Sometimes there are unexpected results. :>

I am well-versed in the tenets of six-traits, four blocks, umpteen other assessments, theories, rubrics I've worked with. When I teach I pull from them, as well as from some of my teaching heroes, such as Lucy Calkins, Donald Graves, Katie Wood Ray, Georgia Heard, Ralph Fletcher, Shelley Harwayne, Nancie Atwell, Nancy Johnson and Cyndi Giorgis, and many, many more whose books adorn my office bookshelves and have been lovingly and enthusiastically absorbed.

But my most important teachers have been the writers who write personal narratives so well: E.B. White, Patricia Leimbach, Anna Quindlen, Erma Bombeck (yes), Jean Shepherd, John Gould, Noel Perrin, Donald McCaig, Annie Dillard, Gladys Taber, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Joan Didion, Phyllis Theroux -- I know I'm leaving out some of my favorites. There is a reason I had Jim Williams build me so many bookcases in this house. I need them! I have collected my heroes for so long, and have spent so many years, in the trenches, pulling apart their work.

For me, this learning to read like a writer has been just as valuable -- more so, dare I say -- than any how-to book on writing (although BIRD BY BIRD comes close). I think we need both, and that's how I teach; some modeling, some instruction, and always the questions: What makes writing good? -- Let's put together our own list. And look at this author -- listen to that voice! How does she do that? How can you do that, too?

This is an organic way of learning -- absorbing what is going on in a text, what it says to you as a reader, AND as a writer. "How does he DO that?" is the quest I was on as I learned to write... I am still learning, always learning, and "how does she do that" is my holy grail. And, this search for the answers and integrating them enthusiastically into my writing, then leaving the models behind and charting my own unique path... this is the way I teach.

Oh, I do keep in mind those traits and blocks and more -- I know them by heart. And they are all taught intuitively when you love the work you are doing and have torn apart text after text, have been trained to listen for voice, to notice word choice, to appreciate sentence rhythm and fluency, to analyze structure, and to pass on these skills daily, throughout the day, to your students... it becomes second nature.

It amazes me that we place so much emphasis on testing and writing in schools, and yet, in undergraduate teacher education, we so rarely teach the art of "how to teach writing" to prospective teachers. And yet, we hold these teachers accountable for so much. They step into the classroom inheriting so much that is beyond their purview. And they must step up the plate, and teach each child how to write.

Writing is hard. Good writing is especially hard. Consistently good writing requires consistent practice, consistent attention, consistent love (sort of like learning how to love a new puppy) which brings with it a passion for stories, and we all have stories. We ARE stories, waiting to be found, and we are our own best documentarians. Ideas are everywhere. They are the air we breathe.

All the how-to books in the world cannot compensate for daily reading and writing, and daily examination of how a writer accomplishes her task of producing that finished piece from the rough first draft of her imagination. And that process is best taught using models of "what makes writing good."

In the classroom I read and read and read, and ask question after question -- and model for my students what I want them to do. I have them write short -- you can teach every convention of good writing by writing short. Revision is easier to comprehend if you write short, one clear moment in time.

Try, I say. It's hard, but it's so rewarding. Risk. Let's see how such-and-so does it. YOU have a story to tell as well, many stories... what are they? Get out your notebooks. Let's get to work.