Toward the Walrus: Remembering Why You Like Writing

By Lindsey DeLoach Jones

Last year I taught creative writing at a residential arts high school for gifted students. My students had applied and been selected from across the state, and they were wildly talented. But a couple of weeks into the semester, it dawned on me: they didn’t like writing.

Presumably, they had liked it at one point—back when it lived in their diaries and book margins and notes apps, back when a pen and paper inexplicably produced, inside their lonely middle school ...