Orchards School Visit and PD

Recently I did an author visit at an international school in Tokyo where all Grade 8 students are assigned to read my verse novel Orchards over the summer in a unit titled Welcome Fires--a reference to the summer Obon motifs in the novel. At the start of the new school year in September, students began to craft short stories on the complexities and ambiguity of summer, and this year I joined the Grade 8s, gathering in a science lab, as they were beginning to revise their stories.

We did some collaborative writing, and I unraveled the process of creating one of my Obon scenes, and shared tactics and exercises I employ to revise scenes, stories and poems.

Questions from these Grade 8 students were excellent--how do you achieve ambiguity? how do you not over tell? how do you come up with motifs? how do you know what to revise? how do you choose images? why write in verse? how do you give a story layers? how do you make an experience into fiction?



The student stories will be collected in a Welcome Fires anthology--I'm eager to receive my copy!

At the end of the day I led a PD session for teachers--Practices and Strategies for Cultivating Young Writers. We wrote to prompts, discovered writing prompts in poems, talked poetry and writing at schools, the importance of reading, storytelling, creative writing, and of a poem each and every day.

Interested in an author visit, workshop or PD session? See the Author Visits page on my website for details about all sorts of presentations!