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 […]
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, […]
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 = […]
When we asked the different folks at SAL about the best writing on love, it was hard to know what to expect. The topic is so widely written about and so subject to cliché. And, yet, it is so satisfying to experience words on the page that somehow manage to capture the feeling and kind […]
By Rachel Kessler, WITS Writer-in-Residence “The function of art is to do more than tell it like it is – it’s to imagine what is possible.” –bell hooks How do we present ourselves to the world? This is an important question for sixth graders entering middle school. I like to open residencies by engaging students […]
Where I’m From I come from Ding Dong, Beep Beep Beep, Sponge Bob Squarepants. I come from the comfy gold sofa, sitting at a brown desk and putting on lipstick. Where I come from the clock goes backwards and the eyeliner won’t turn. Where I come from we eat Subway sandwiches and Ethiopian dishes, we […]
By Samar Abulhassan, WITS Writer-in-Residence “It is like writing my eyes instead of hands.” “You know how when you go into the wilderness you are expected to bring out your trash, leaving nothing behind? I spent the first half of my life leaving words in the world, and will spend the last half taking them […]
Knowing your resolutions for a new year is generally the easiest part of these annual aspirations. The real work invariably comes in executing them, though when we asked SAL staff and WITS Writers to share their literary resolutions for 2016, it became clear that publicly announcing them is also part of the battle. Now that […]