A Blog of Seattle Arts & Lectures
By Danny Sherrard, WITS Writer-in-Residence The subject of the exercise is identity, and I’ve heard scary stories. The idea: to bring up themes like race and gender using you (the teaching artist) as the lab rat on the first day of class. What happens is you ask, Who am I? or, What do you know about […]
By Kelly Froh, WITS Writer-in-Residence I had an idea to engage my middle-schoolers with a series of curated exercises that would magically entwine, crossover, and accelerate their understanding of the comics form, and that these students would turn out incredible comic pages for a final printed project. It did not occur to me that some […]
By Cody Pherigo, WITS Writer-in-Residence I’ve become semi-obsessed with checking the weather channel website several times a week for the last 3 months. It’s like Facebook without friends. I want it to tell me spring is here to stay, the sun exists, and temperatures will rise steadily to a glowing, saturated peak. But do I? […]
By Anastacia-Renee Tolbert, WITS Writer-in-Residence Lately, I’ve been reading a host of fiction and nonfiction from writers who have come before me, thinking about my mortality and the current state of the world as a woman of color writing, teaching and mothering. So recently, I asked high school students to write editorial essays. To begin with, some […]
ON THE ROAD AGAIN by Ann Teplick, WITS Writer-in-Residence Oh, the hours I’ve spent behind the wheel of a Volkswagen bus, a Subaru, a Datsun, a Honda, from Seattle to Banff to San Francisco to Glacier National Park to D.C. to Montreal to Yellowstone to Austin to Philly. Oh, the hours with the windows rolled […]
By Greg Stump, WITS Writer-in-Residence Most people who know William Steig’s work think of him as the creator of classic children’s books like Shrek and Sylvester and the Magic Pebble. But in the mid-20th century, Steig created numerous picture books for adults: Persistent Faces, The Lonely Ones, The Rejected Lovers, and many others. Most of […]
By Matt Gano, WITS Writer-in-Residence There’s real magic flying from the fingertips of the young poets at The Center School. We speak in terms of allusion in terms of empathy and connectivity. We cast spells in misspelled text and bend symbols of meaning to tease reality. We deal in magic as poets, as writers, as […]
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. […]