A Blog of Seattle Arts & Lectures
Seattle Arts & Lectures has the chance to provide critical support to kids and their teachers right now, and we need your help. On Monday, April 6, Gov. Inslee announced that Washington state schools will not reopen this year. Teachers are scrambling to pull together online lessons so that kids can keep learning. Will you […]
Dreamed up by our WITS team as a way to keep students engaged with creative writing outside of schools, we’re excited to present our WITS Writing Bingo Board for today’s #SALMoment! We hope that WITS Writing Bingo is a fun way for you and your loved ones to stay writing and to keep making art […]
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 […]
By Peter Mountford, WITS Writer-in-Residence This year’s two-week fiction-writing residency—my ninth, I believe, with the eighth grade class at Blue Heron Middle School—was my favorite to date. There’s an inexplicable magic to these groups, something of a class culture, and some years, the students are more guarded, wary, and their writing reflects that. This year […]
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 […]
With our daily lives disrupted, we are all working to finding new forms of togetherness. From balconies, Italians break into song and Spain applauds its healthcare workers. Bookshops hand-deliver to Seattle porches. Local relief funds have opened up for artists and hospitality workers. And we at Seattle Arts & Lectures want to do what we […]
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 […]
At our recent Local Voices reading on February 10 at Hugo House, WITS Writer-in-Residence David Lasky gave some much-needed advice for creatives everywhere—especially for those of us who consider ourselves “late bloomers” in the arts. We just had to share it with you, below! David Lasky teaches comics writing through WITS at Renaissance School of […]
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, […]