Why bother

There are many reasons to bring kids together to talk about stories and the imagination. There is, to begin with, the tremendous satisfaction that stems from building a community of seekers, thinkers, and sharers. Kids tend to want to talk about the books they read and the ideas they have, but it's not often that they're provided with such a forum. Conversation is an art, an essential life skill; neighborhood workshops provide kids with the opportunity to think out loud and grow increasingly articulate about their ideas, impulses, and politics.

Neighborhood workshops are also, it can (and should) be argued, essential in a society that places so much emphasis on resume building and competition. There needs to be a place for kids to go where no one is awarded “Best in Class” status, and where everybody's ideas are held to be equally valid and important. There needs to be more open doors for kids who yearn to think outside the box of their standardized tests and their fill-in-the-blanks homework. Finally, kids who write and read together are kids who come to understand one another—who come to judge less quickly, who come to weigh issues with more compassion, who come to take many things into consideration before deciding just what sort of person they will be.

Getting Started

There's only one credential needed to run a neighborhood workshop, and that's a love of kids and an interest in stories. But before you do anything else, you'll want to decide a few basic things about your workshop. What age group will you be working with? How many kids will you include? Where will you conduct the program?

Here are some things to consider:

Youth reading and writing workshops seem to work best for kids between the ages of eight and fifteen. Children younger than eight are probably best served by traditional story hours. Kids older than fifteen can be encouraged to organize writing workshops on their own. The important thing to remember is this: You must feel comfortable with the kids with whom you are working. It's often easiest to work with children of your own children's ages. You have a better idea of what they are thinking about and what they like to read.

The ideal number of workshop participants is between five and fourteen kids.

Workshops can be conducted on school premises during after-school hours, in the homes of participating students, in your own home, in the local library, in a garden, anywhere. All you need is a floor (or grassy hill or concrete steps) to sit on and some good lighting.

After-school programs for younger students (third through fifth grade, say) work best as once-weekly sessions of one hour in duration. Summertime programs tend to work best as once-weekly two-hour sessions conducted over a six-to-eight-week stretch.

Finding Participants

Young book lovers and aspiring writers abound. To locate those in your area, consider:

• Talking to your children's friends.
• Contacting neighborhood schools and asking the guidance counselors and principals for the names of the kids who love to read and write.
• Sending letters to parents whose kids you think might enjoy such a program.
• Printing fliers and posting them on the bulletin boards of local churches, YMCAs, and the like.
• Talking to the kids who sign up early, asking them for names of their literature-minded friends.

Remember: Only include those kids in your workshop who genuinely want to participate. Those who feel “forced” to be there by parental or peer pressure could cause behavioral distractions that interfere with the success of the workshop.

Establishing Expectations

Once you've identified your list of participants, send out letters or emails that summarize the details listed below. Try to get your letter out six weeks in advance of the workshop.

• Time and dates of workshops
• Location of workshops
• Supplies kids will be expected to bring (eg., clipboards, paper, writing instruments)
• General description of the things that will be discussed and written over the course of the workshop

Selecting the readings

To find out what kids are reading at what ages, take a trip to your local library and talk with the children's librarian. He or she will know which stories kids are loving at which ages, which classic stories are too often overlooked, etc. Inevitably, you'll go home with a list of titles or an armful of books. Sales clerks at local bookstores can be equally helpful. And don't forget to talk to your own kids and their friends as you search for ideas.

The web can be enormously helpful. Check out the sites sponsored by Reading is Fundamental ( www.RIF.org ), International Reading Association ( www.reading.org ), Teachers and Writers Collaborative ( www.twc.org ), and Sylvan Learning Foundation ( www.bookadventure.org ), for book lists, activity plans, and additional links.

No child is ever too old to be read aloud to. To avoid the requirement that participants go out and buy or borrow books, consider building your program around stories, poems, and screenplays that you can read aloud to them.

Combining readings and writings

Always try to combine reading and writing in every workshop. The first lays the foundation for the second. Giving children the opportunity to make something of their own helps instill in them a sense of belonging to the world of literature. Asking children to put the story they've just read to work in their own minds strengthens their understanding of and relationship to the readings.

The agenda

Do not read aloud for more than 20 minutes at a stretch; if you do, you'll face a fidgeting crowd. When you have finished reading your selection, open the workshop to a general 10-minute conversation about that reading, asking questions such as:

• What was most interesting about that story or poem?
• What characters were most sympathetic? Pathetic? Dull? Heroic?
• Does the story in any way parallel your own lives?
• What interesting things was the author doing with language or plot?
• Does the story change the way you think about some things?
• Does the story contradict your sense of truth or justice?
• Would you read more stories by this author?

After you have finished discussing your reading, give the kids their writing assignment for that session. Give them 15–20 minutes to work on it. If you find that they need more time and are not growing restless, give them that time.

Make sure that you are assigning writing exercises that are somehow inspired by the evening's readings. Some examples:

• “The Elephant's Child” by Rudyard Kipling is a story so rich with rhythm and refrain that it is almost like reading a song. Its songlike qualities create the perfect atmosphere for a writing project in which the kids are asked to choose their favorite character in the story and write a rap song about him or her.
• “Casey at the Bat” is a poem about heroic disappointments. It can inspire kids to write their own stories — fiction or nonfiction — about people who have tried and tried to achieve something.
• O'Henry's story, “The Ransom of Red Chief” is a story that comes to a critical, breathtaking juncture. It provides a perfect opportunity to talk about what if? scenario and to encourage the kids to write stories in which several different things could happen at any one point . . . and to follow some of the options through.

After the kids are finished writing, ask them to read their work aloud to the others. Some ground rules to consider here:

• Encourage the other kids to help the writer by providing meaningful but not overtly negative feedback. Ask the listeners: Where is the story headed? What are the motivations of the protagonist? Which of the descriptions were particularly appealing or helpful or provocative? Which questions should be answered in subsequent versions of the story?
• Make sure each child who wants to read gets a chance to read. Those who feel uncomfortable should not be unduly pressured, however. Over time, most kids will decide to join in. What's important is that each child be asked after every assignment and given the chance to choose whether he or she wants to read that particular piece that night.
• When all the kids have provided their feedback, be sure to provide your own. Encourage the child to spend some time at home reworking or adding to the piece, and to bring the second draft to the next workshop. I tend to collect the second drafts and read them after the children have gone home. I provide the children with written comments on the second draft.

End each evening with a recap of what has been read, said, debated, considered, written, and discussed. Ask the kids to tell you what they enjoyed most about the evening. Was the reading interesting? Was the writing exercise too challenging or not challenging enough? Did they feel they had enough time to work on the exercise? Give them some ideas about what the next workshop will entail. Give them time to be with one another while they wait for their ride home. I always end the evening by dimming the lights, putting on some music, and letting the kids be kids with one another.

Some additional thoughts

Where possible, provide a mix of experiences. When working on poetry, for example, seek out audio recordings of poets reading their own work; these can be found in most libraries or in bookstores in resources such as “Poetry Speaks: Hear Great Poets Read Their Work from Tennyson to Plath.” If working on essays about heroes or heroic lives, turn to resources such as “Words That Shook the World: 100 Years of Unforgettable Speeches and Events.” If developing film scripts or scenarios, play a variety of mood-setting songs.

Consider combining fact and fiction whenever possible — that is, providing access to nonfiction resources (anything from Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth to yesterday's newspaper) to kids who might be working on a fictionalized life of an archeologist or of a politician. The imagination is as much about how one uses what one already knows as it is about making things up whole cloth. Besides, learning about the world even as we write fiction makes for very good conversation.

Consider the value of readings drawn from books that might have been written with an adult audience in mind. There are plenty of scenes in books like Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake or Tillie Olsen's Tell Me a Riddle or Laura Moriarty's The Center of Everything or even Isabel Allende's My Invented Country that, when read aloud to kids of any age, will inspire and nurture young imaginations.

Consider creating writing exercises that facilitate both individual and group work. After reading segments from The House on Mango Street , for example, you might ask the kids to sit before a huge, shared piece of paper and to each draw a single house in an imaginary neighborhood. Then ask each child to create a character (on paper) who lives in the house just drawn. These are individual activities. Now ask each student to turn to their nearest neighbor and to write a story about the interaction between the two characters and houses each has developed. How would those characters speak to each other? What sort of conflict might arise? How would the conflict be resolved?

Remember to look for all the resources that are out there—in libraries and bookstores—that are specifically designed to support the imagination. Check out books like The Writer's Block or Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird when stumped for ideas. Look for possibilities on the web.

Remember: The primary purpose of these workshops is to nurture creativity and community. Place your emphasis on developing activities that inspire and provoke ideas and possibilities, as opposed to providing instruction on grammar or rules. Spend more time talking about character and compassion and conflict and resolution than about where the commas should go. You don't have to be an expert on language to inspire creativity. You just have to think that the imagination matters.

Making it Meaningful

One of the ways I try to let the students know how much I value their work (and how much I believe they should value their own) is by creating a literary magazine at the end of each program that showcases the kids' work. I allow them to choose what they feel is their best or most favorite work (after they've discussed that with the other members of the workshop), give them red pens with which to make their final edits, ask them to illustrate a story or poem by someone else in the workshop, and ask them to come up with a name for their literary magazine. I then type up the selected work, bind it in some fashion, and mail it to each child's home. Last year I created an electronic magazine so that the kids could email that to friends and family members.

In-depth lesson plans and reading resources (as well as a sample literary magazine) can be found in Seeing Past Z: Nurturing the Imagination in a Fast-Forward World by Beth Kephart (W.W. Norton, June 2004). For more information, please visit the author's web site, www.pov3.com.

An Interview with Beth Kephart

What is the focus of this book?

Seeing Past Z makes a plea for wisdom over winning and conversation over competition in a world that seems to value quantifiable achievement above all else. It does this by telling a very personal story, as opposed to presenting statistics.

How did this book come about?

You know, none of my books ever begin as books. They begin as notes I make to myself, or pieces I write for my son, or essays I publish in various newspapers and magazines. Over time the pieces coalesce into something like an argument or a theme. I actually had no plans to publish a book like Z, but it seemed to me that we were reaching a crisis in some quarters of our society and that a book like this could do more than simply point out a problem; it could offer some ideas for a fix.

What crisis do you think we've reached?

One might define the crisis in a million ways. But I think it all comes down to not giving our kids room to dream their own dreams, or chart their own courses. Kids are either bombarded with television images and peer pressure and the noise of general culture, or they are being encouraged to polish that old college resume at sometimes far too great a cost, and always from far too early an age. What is wrong with a lazy afternoon? Where in this culture is there room for conversation about values and character? Why have we stopped using literature to poke at the big questions? Why are so many kids floundering once they reach these exalted college campuses?

What, in other words, are we training this generation of high achievers to contribute to the world? We are seeing a lot of winning, perhaps. But we are also seeing a lot of cheating, a lot of anxiety, and a lot of psychic vulnerability.

You suggest in the book that writing and reading are playing a lesser role in many classrooms.

The best place to learn more about this is the National Commission on Writing in America's Schools and Colleges, which is a panel assembled by the College Board. Some of the statistics they discovered were deeply troubling. For instance, many high schools no longer assign an extended research paper because it takes too much time to grade, and most fourth graders spend less than three hours a week writing. You can't learn, as the report points out, if you don't write. You can't assimilate all the facts into something transcendent, like knowledge.

How hard is it to start a workshop?

You need time to prepare and you need to like hanging out with kids. I am in no way an expert on children's literature and don't pretend to be. What I am is someone who is interested in what kids are thinking, and what kids will bring to the stories they hear. I'm someone who likes to ask the question, What if? What if we finished this story for O.Henry? What if we had set out to tell the story of “Casey at the Bat”? What if we were inventors? What if we took today's headlines, didn't read the story beneath them, and wrote the stories that the headlines suggest? What if we pretended we were someone else? What if we took this third-person story and wrote it as a first-person story? Simple what if's. Fun what if's. And what if's that lead to marvelous conversation, not to mention meaningful explorations of self.

What have been some of your favorite stories to read with the kids?

Well, I think one of the greatest read-aloud tales of all time is Rudyard Kipling's “The Elephant's Child.” I mean, who doesn't want to say The Land of the Limpopo River several times over? You can't not dance to the beat of that story, and kids just go with it. I dedicate an entire chapter of the book to reading that single story because it is such a fabulous tale.

But I also love Roald Dahl—he's so clever, always just winking right back at his reader, never giving you sap, but always giving you unexpected heroes—and I think Louis Sachar is terrific with his Wayside series. Kate DiCamillo has written some important books, and of course Lois Lowy and Sharon Creech and Richard Peck (particularly Fair Weather ) have as well. For slightly older kids, I like to recommend Dancing in Cadillac Light by Kimberly Willis Holt (who also wrote when Zachary Beaver Came to Town ), Carl Hiaasen's Hoot, Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Virginia Euwer Wolff's True Believer (which is, I believe, a genuinely profound book), and Tillie Olsen's collection Tell Me a Riddle.

What sort of exercises have the workshop participants done throughout the years?

It varies from the very simple to the more complex. In the realm of the simple, I've asked kids to write about their neighborhoods and houses, after reading them portions of The House on Mango Street. I've asked them to look at unusual photographs and write a paragraph on the mood of those images. I've asked them to listen to me read and to keep track of all the adjectives and adverbs they hear in what I'm reading, then to write a poem using the words they've collected. I've played audiotapes of athletes remembering their greatest moments, and then asked the kids to write about their own.

In the realm of the more complex, I've asked the kids to interview one another about critical junctures in their respective lives, and then to write a first-person piece from the perspective of the interviewee. I've asked the kids to fashion a character (based on a series of questions I've given them), to then sit around a huge shared piece of paper and draw the homes in which those characters live, and to finally launch a series of interactions with neighboring characters and homes. I've asked them to listen to musical scores and write the movie scene that seems best suited to that score. I've given them names, told them the names' meanings, and asked them to write stories about how each imagined character has dealt with growing up with such a name.

What is your son's reaction to Seeing Past Z?

We're pretty low-key in our family. Jeremy's reaction to all of this is, “Hey. Cool. Cool book. What's for dinner?” He appreciates, and I think deeply, the ideas that are in the book. After all, he has chosen to be the kid he is and not the kid society wants him to be, and we've talked about the consequences and opportunities of this quite a bit across the dinner table. He's happy to be, with me, a spokesperson on behalf of dreaming out loud. But whether or not the book sells, and whether or not critics like it is of no concern to him, and it shouldn't be.

What is your son reading these days?

He's happily reading the Alexander McCall Smith series (The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, etc.) and biographies of famous spies. This summer Jeremy and I are going to read 42 classic short stories together—one a day is the plan.

What are you working on?

My husband and I run a marketing communications company that keeps us quite busy. When I'm not working on that, I'm finishing up a book that is due out next year about coming to terms with middle age—a book that is set against the backdrop of one of the world's great pleasure gardens.