February 20, 2020
Writers, what is your deepest fear about your craft? On February 6, we hosted a reading with Seattle-born poet and current Utah Poet Laureate, Paisley Rekdal. During the Q&A with SAL’s Associate Director, Rebecca Hoogs, Paisley answered questions about her writing process and her new work, Nightingale, but it was this question about fear that followed her home: “What […]
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February 18, 2020
By Daemond Arrindell, WITS Writer-in-Residence I have been teaching a lesson focused on anaphora, aka list poems, for over ten years. I’ve used it so consistently because of the positive results it yields, especially at the beginning of a residency, when the students are still wrestling with the ideas of what poetry is “supposed to […]
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February 14, 2020
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 […]
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February 6, 2020
Maybe the only genre missing from Carmen Maria Machado’s genre-bending memoir, In the Dream House, is the graphic novel. Luckily for us, Tessa Hulls, “SAL Official Doodler” and author of the forthcoming graphic novel Feeding Ghosts (MCD Books, 2022), was in the audience for Machado’s Women You Need to Know (WYNK) talk. From the crowd, she […]
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February 3, 2020
By Christina Lee Barnes, WITS Writer-in-Residence I’m often asked if my time in the WITS classroom helps inspire my own writing. While I haven’t yet written very much that is directly about my work with the students, I do draw inspiration from the willingness that students show to try out prompts, to dive in and […]
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December 13, 2019
By Bianca Glinskas As an emerging poet, I’ve been a bit clueless when it comes to considering how profoundly my writing process affects my work. I type in front of screens in noisy cafes. I am guilty of planning my poems out before I write them. For me, this has served as a sort of […]
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December 12, 2019
On what otherwise might be a gloomy December day, we are delighted to share this winter reading challenge, with text by WITS Writer-in-Residence Shelby Handler and art by Beck Gross. Inspired by SAL and The Seattle Public Library’s Summer Book Bingo program, Shelby and Beck created their own Winter Book Bingo board to get them […]
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November 7, 2019
Need to brighten up your Thursday afternoon? Nancy Guppy’s Art Zone brings us this video, beautifully shot by Vincent Pierce, of our 2019 Youth Poet Laureate Ambassador Maia Pody reading her poem “Foam.” Thank you to Nancy Guppy and Seattle Channel for making this possible, and to Maia for sharing her work!
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February 27, 2019
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 poetry. This year, participating students and teachers were encouraged to reflect on art and culture that makes them “feel free,” inspired by the essay collection Feel […]
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December 18, 2018
By Greg Stump, WITS Writer-in-Residence A few years ago, I was browsing in a used bookstore when I came across a slim little offering from 1955 called Oodles of Droodles, by a cartoonist named Roger Price. The book is a compilation of minimalist doodles, each one paired up with a jokey title caption that […]
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