The Sage Hill Teen Writing Experience, that is. I just spent a week as the instructor of this terrific program, my first crack at something like that (although I was once the mid-week guest speaker when Alison Lohans was teaching it)….which is why blogging has been erratic for the past few days.
It was a wonderful experience. We spent the first couple of days doing exercises related to characterization and viewpoint, then Wednesday morning we did Writers at the Improv. This is something I’ve become very attached to at ConVersion each year in Calgary. Teams of two writers each take words suggested by audience members and come up with sentences that are then voted on. In this way, a story is built sentence by sentence until time runs out. I modified the process a bit for Sage Hill: at ConVersion (and Westercon, this year) the story is, by default, science fiction or fantasy. The first thing we got from the “audience” (half of the class) at Sage Hill was a genre. In this way we came up with “Major Problems: A Romantic Comedy” and “The Comedy of Horrors; or, Nunchucks and Wine.”
Wednesday afternoon, Judith Krause came in to talk about poetry, which the kids appreciated, since several of them were very interested in poetry and I’m more of a humorous doggerel writer, myself, at best.
Thursday I did one-on-one sessions, going over the pieces each student submitted with his or her application (I had two boys and nine girls in the program, aged 13 to 18), and aside from a brief dialogue exercise, gave them the rest of the day for free writing–the goal being that they would come up with something for a book, Sage Words, which I then laid out that night and took to the copy shop on Friday morning.
Friday morning, they critiqued each others’ application pieces; Friday afternoon I talked about my own writing and about some of the nuts and bolts of getting published and trying to make a career as a writer; and then about 2:30 we had a book launch for Sage Words, with cake and iced tea and chips (the former supplied by me, the latter by Sage Hill through the library), and the day finished off with some fun and games.
I was uncertain after the first day if I was a complete and total disaster as a teacher, or just a partial disaster, but judging by the evaluations that were handed in to me, I wasn’t too bad. I hope I get a chance to do it again–with any luck, better–next year.
