A Blog of Seattle Arts & Lectures
By Laura Burgher, Writers in the Schools & Broadsides Project Intern I placed the final broadside up on the bookstand and took a step back. Patrons at Seattle Public Library’s Northgate Branch were already starting to show interest, craning their necks to take in the twenty-two framed artworks I just set atop the bookshelves, their […]
Paris, Le Canal Saint-Martin Dark and silver clouds rule the sky over the dark winter city. The black bare trees reach for nothing and the murky water under the rusty iron bridge has no inhabitants. The streets have no wanderers and through the dark windows letting in the so-little sun into the dark rooms like […]
By Erin Langner, WITS Program Associate & Sonder Editor When Linda Pastan and I approached a classroom of The Center School, where she was about to speak, we were three minutes early. A teacher inside, in the gentlest, quietest whisper, asked if we wouldn’t mind waiting outside, for just two of those minutes. The students inside […]
By Emily Bedard, WITS Writer-in-Residence On a recent day when the trees flashed a hundred hues against a cloudy Seattle sky, I entered a fourth grade WITS class, planning to play with color. We began by reading Red Sings from Treetops by Joyce Sidman and Pamela Zagarenski, with its saturated, leaping language and its intricate, dreamlike […]
The Sea I kept deep-sea secrets in a little black bag. I carried boats through the toughest storms. I asked the fish where the shark lived. I was rough but calm. I was tired. I knew when the storm would come. I tried to keep the boats away with waterspouts. I tried to keep the […]
The Hymnal I am the hymnal and I have heard prayers. You call them prayers, I call them hopes Of a mother who drank away her youth. I call them music of a man with smoke in his lungs And magic in his hands I catch the tears of the desperate, I hear the skepticism […]
I Used to Be a Small, Thin Bone I used to be a sloppy flower afraid to take bloom, but now I seem to walk the clouds, ruling over all that crushed me. I seem to be a small, thin bone too shy to find myself, but really I am a fluffy dragon filled with […]
I Used To I used to worry about my life: what will make me finally draw that smile, what makes me chase the dreams. But as soon as I hit high school, things weren’t as they seem. I sit and I kick rocks, try to do what my bible tells me to do, but I […]
Daniella Edwards wrote this comic while a student at McClure Middle School in 2014-15, with WITS Writer-in-Residence Greg Stump. She read it to open for Alison Bechdel, the first presenter in SAL’s Women You Need to Know series.
Light My mind is like a light bulb getting switched on and off. When I get turned on my mind explodes with ideas, all filling my brain with different things to do, write, play. It is a magical thing, a feeling that can’t be compared with any other, my thoughts lighting up as if there […]