A Blog of Seattle Arts & Lectures
By Sierra Nelson, WITS Writer-in-Residence Does the word Wolf move differently than El Lupo? Do we experience anything different in our bodies when we say the Russian word волк (pronounced “volk”) compared to the Japanese word 狼 [おおかみ Ôkami]? I was excited to explore these questions of language and translation in my WITS residency, working […]
By Daemond Arrindell, WITS Writer-in-Residence the skin stays silent it is our blind eyes that give them voices or take them away On Wednesday, October 19th, Seattle Public Schools put their foot out there in a pretty public way. Faculty, administrators and parents at numerous schools throughout the greater Seattle area showed their support of […]
By Laura Gamache, WITS Writer-in-Residence On my ninth day with fourth graders at Broadview-Thomson, I asked the kids to take out their hearts, and hand them in to me. I had drawn each heart on red copier paper before our second meeting, after the teachers had expressed doubt the kids could reliably draw them themselves. […]
Unsolicited Advice to People Who are Going through the Same Thing, After Jeanann Verlee When your best friend forces you to do things, Say, “No.” When you best friend starts bullying you, Do not take it as a joke. Smile. Say, “We’re over” and Walk away. When you finally learn how to Nae-Nae and it’s 2015, […]
Lantern You’re sitting in class. The teacher drones on and on. On her desk sits a lantern. Decorative yet functional. You think of the different scenarios of why you would use that lantern. In your mind you travel forward in time with that lantern. You’re sitting in a bunker, waiting for nothing to happen. The […]
A Few Blades Of Grass I was born to a seaglass house Softened by the rough edges of the sea, Chipped and clouded though it was I was born. Upon my birth I shattered it Gripping a dagger and a forget-me-not. I was born in a well Filled to the brim with gold paint […]
Books Go inside a book. That would be my way. Let someone be a perfect person that never gets in trouble. The letters pour off my pages trickling into my head. Inside is a mystery slowly unfolding. Inside is what my imagination feeds on.
Somehow, well before September 22nd, Seattle always lets you know that summer has come to an abrupt end (that is, if it ever started to begin with). This has left many SAL staffers with a familiar, lingering guilt: our summer reading lists metamorphose into suspiciously similar-looking fall reading lists, we recount couch-time that should have been sun-time, and some of us even sadly begin our knitting projects. None […]
Need a soundtrack for your Labor Day weekend? Four weeks ago, eight teens gathered at the Garfield Teen Life Center‘s recording studio to give us these emphatically–and sometimes collaboratively–performed poems. Written during their time at Camp WITS under the mentorship of WITS Writers Nikkita Oliver and Daemond Arrindell, they grapple with the vastness of identity, responsibility, and adulthood; […]
As summer nears to a close, we asked our Writers in the Schools teaching artists to tell us what they did on their summer vacation: what they read, wrote, researched, ate, worked on, and, of course, what fun they had. Read on for a glimpse into 8 local writers’ summers. Late summer blackberry pie count = […]