A Blog of Seattle Arts & Lectures
Attention all young poets, rappers, leaders, and activists in the greater Seattle area, ages 14-19: are you interested in representing Seattle as the 2020/21 Youth Poet Laureate? We’re now accepting applications for this year’s Youth Poet Laureate program, and we want to see your work! What is the YPL program? Since 2015, the Seattle Youth […]
Every year, Seattle Arts & Lectures’ Writers in the Schools (WITS) program holds the Elaine Wetterauer Writing Contest to celebrate the wisdom, creativity, and heart captured in student and teacher writing. The inspiration from this year’s contest was drawn from Pachinko by Min Jin Lee, an epic historical novel that follows a Korean family over the […]
Do you have a middle or high-schooler at home looking for learning opportunities? Or, maybe you’d like some inspiration for yourself? Today’s #SALMoment comes from WITS Writer-in-Residence Laura Da’, who shares a writing prompt for when times feel overwhelming. This lesson teaches us to center and focus, to become quiet and still, even though the […]
April is coming soon, and while there may be a lot going on in our communities right now, it’s important to remember that April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month. That means it’s the perfect time for us all to brush up on our local support centers, and how we can get involved with their work—including […]
By Lisa Wells, WITS Writer-in-Residence I think of writing as a practice of awareness, a habit of heightened attention to detail—to light, gesture, sensation, intonation—and I try to approach the teaching of writing with the same quality of attention, awake to the shifting dynamics of the classroom. Good writing demands that we be awake in […]
By Karen Finneyfrock, WITS Writer-in-Residence There is a funny idea about inspiration that lurks in our culture. The idea holds that poets are just people who walk around, waiting to be struck by a fit of unexpected inspiration. We collectively imagine poets like hikers in the woods, and poetic inspiration a mountain lion watching silently, […]
By Ruth Dickey, SAL Executive Director On October 7, 2017, Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey published the first of several explosive New York Times stories on Harvey Weinstein. From that moment forward, their reporting fundamentally changed the conversation about sexual harassment and shifted a balance of power that had previously seemed intractable. In She Said, […]
By Rachel Kessler, WITS Writer-in-Residence Where do you want to go that is impossible? Fifth graders at Salish Coast Elementary School in Port Townsend, WA, took this writing prompt and hurtled headlong into potatoes, climbed inside engines, bound themselves to basketballs, and rode guinea pigs into battle. How did they get there? We began our […]
I look up I see the clouds so free and confident with the endless sky behind them I look down and see our lamppost the tree trunk and the things around me that fade away in the darkness I see the outline of the darkness hitting the light There is no pattern for this line […]
Inspired by Sarah Kay’s “B” (or “If I Should Have A Daughter”) To my little chick, hidden away, not yet emergent, When you are born, your eyes will be planets reflecting the depths of the universe: moon-starer, they’ll call you, my young astronomer, a child of the stars. Chickadee, small and sweet, your feathers speckled […]