July 1st, 2009
I keep hoping to write a blog entry, but my nieces and nephew keep climbing on me, wanting to do Photo Booth on my Mac. 
Have to play in the sun, swim in the Pacific ocean off of Catalina’s coast and eat steak off the BBQ. Sorry! It’s a hard life.
See you as soon as I can rub two minutes together for writing.
In the meantime, check out the class listings. The Custom Writing Program class begins on Monday as does the Movie Discussion class. Sign up now before it’s too late!
June 26th, 2009
Hi everyone.
I wrote The Writer’s Jungle in 1999, published it in 2000. Since then, we’ve sold several thousand copies and I revised it once (adding a lengthy preface in 2005 which is what we call the “second edition”). This morning, I received two emails that enthused about the content. I wanted to share those with you.
The Writer’s Jungle is still your best writing resource and will last you the longest time. Save your money. Don’t buy dozens of writing programs. Learn how to be your child’s best writing ally and coach now so that you can support your kids all the way through homeschool and beyond. Enjoy.
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Hi!
I just wanted to drop a note to say, after waiting several years for my kids to be ‘old enough’ and reading your emails and blog for ages, for my birthday this past weekend I received my very own copy of The Writer’s Jungle and I am loving it! Even my husband is enjoying listening to me go on and on about all the cool (sorry, you banned that adjective … how about incredible?) information in it.
It’s such an affirming book. You’re so right, ‘real’ writers don’t do it the way so many textbooks teach, they do it the way you’re describing in your book. It’s a lesson I’ve been trying to learn myself these past four years (since your blog got me hooked on NaNoWriMo, thanks!), and I really enjoy reading a guide that will help me translate this into something I can teach my children. (Who, at 7 and 4, are also hooked on NaNo. LOL.)
My husband is also laughing because he’s never seen me read anything so slowly before (I devour most books), but I keep telling him I can’t read it when the kids are up because I might miss something, and I have to read it slowly because it’s got so many wise bits in it.
Anyway, I’m sure you get lots of raves about the book, but I just wanted to add my Thanks to everyone else’s. I am so excited to get this, this year, because it had been on my curriculum list but our budget ended up taking some hits and I had to take it off. So I am very excited about this birthday gift from my dear dh!
Thank you for being such a patient mentor to so many moms!
Kristen
(P.S. I did take one of your Writing for Fun adult classes one summer, and also enjoyed that one … still have fun memories of the activities!)
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I am reading The Writer’s Jungle now and I am very inspired by your method. Find myself laughing along the way as the experience and struggles you have seems so similar to mine. Excellent job and thanks for sharing so many wonderful experiences and “cure” with us homeschoolers.
God bless and shalom,
Elizabeth
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If you’re trying to think about how to make the most of your writing year, start now, start here. The Writer’s Jungle has been helping moms for nearly ten years now. Use this summer to revamp how you understand writing so that come fall, you’ll be excited and primed for making writing a meaningful and satisfying (even fun!) part of your kids’ lives.
–Julie
June 26th, 2009
Today, write all the sounds you can hear in five-seven minutes. Sit quietly, set the timer and then write. Notice the shush of traffic, birds, your brother bounding down the stairs, the sound of your own breath, the creaking of the chair when you adjust your seat. Really notice and write them out in language that helps the reader hear the sounds. If all you can do is list them, that’s fine too!
June 24th, 2009
I know it’s tough to carve out time for you when you’ve got children who need lunch, rides, help and sleep. I have a few tricks up my sleeve for how to recharge even with kidlets at your feet. Let’s break these down into time allotments. So, for instance, if all you’ve got is 30 seconds, you can still take time for you.
30 Second Time Out
5 Minute Time Out
15 Minute Break
30 Minute Break
3 Hour Break
If you can contrive a longer break, by all means take half a day or a full day. I used to take Monday nights (three hours) to go to the library. My husband would look after the kids (they were little!) and I’d reserve one of the library’s private conference rooms. I’d go in the room and either write (I was working on a book), write songs (I was learning guitar at the time and loved writing lyrics), pray (some weeks were like that) or cry (other weeks were like that). It was my time to use as I wished. I liked the library because no one could get to me, it was blissfully quiet and I would not be interrupted by anyone or anything.
Even tiny breaks are good. Put a flower in a vase, light a candle, eat one square of chocolate that you’ve hidden in your cupboard, straighten the photos on your refrigerator, brush your hair (feel the bristles on your scalp), make yourself smile, notice a reflection and see it… Be in the moment for a moment today. It helps.
June 21st, 2009
Hi everyone.
I made a list years ago of things to do in summer. We posted it to our refrigerator so that if any child came to me saying, “I’m bored; I have nothing to do,” I could simply point a silent finger at the door and they would know to scan the list before asking for any more ideas. Usually, they found something.
The key to using la liste is making sure that you have the supplies already stocked up in your house. Don’t put “oil pastels” as an option if you haven’t bought them. Make sure everything that they may want to do, can be done.
Before I post the list, here are a few ideas to consider as well:
1. Create an art table that houses markers, paintbrushes, watercolors, glue (of varying styles), paper, pipe cleaners, string, tape, staplers, scrapbooking pages and so on. (We use tin cans from beans etc. to hold the paintbrushes or markers.) Purchase colorful clay to bake into novel items.
2. Create a nature station which includes binoculars, birding guides, seeds, trowels, and a cheap digital camera for photo ops (when the squirrels fight or you see a cool caterpillar).
3. Tune up bicycles (air in tires, brakes that work), purchase a badminton set or croquet, collect water guns and pool toys.
All right, without further ado: here’s the list!
Please add to the list in the comments section! I’m sure you’ll have ideas I haven’t included.
(I’ll be out of town this week, but hope to get some blogging done.)
June 19th, 2009
How would you change the world to make it better?
June 15th, 2009
I used to read a magazine designed to help mothers of large families with the typical problems they faced in a day: how to get a toddler into shoes that needed to be tied while a baby crawled over spilled syrup in clean clothes and ants marched in a beeline (ha!) for the last crumb of pancake on the floor while the older two children hunted through the 600 square foot apartment for their math books… again. And, of course, this very common scenario always included an 8 month pregnant belly. The solutions to these ordinary life problems varied from “get shoes without laces” (I did that so well in southern California, my oldest daughter didn’t learn to tie her own shoes until, I kid you not, 10th grade) to never eating pancakes. Having fewer babies? Never floated as a viable option.
My life with five kids has been busy and crazy and messy and disorganized and noisy like that. I’ve noticed that people who have two kids? Their lives are busy and crazy and messy and disorganized too… at least at times. No matter how many kids you have, they fill up your world, taking it over, hijacking its order, demanding your total absorption. There’s no recipe for child-rearing that creates both control and energy. Seems that depletion is part of the gig, no matter whether you follow a schedule or live life without a clock.
I’m suddenly aware that my life has shifted gears. My youngest is turning 13 in the fall. When I get up at 9:00 in the morning (!), I’m the first one awake and the kitchen is shockingly tidy. I can hear the wind, birds and cars that drive by. (I’m pretty sure I forgot what those sounded like for about a decade.) The quiet is more distracting than the TV in the background, that’s how good I got at tuning it out so I could work and be in the same room with the kids.
And yes, teens and kids who come home from college generate plenty of sound and mess and energy. But not at 9:00 a.m. And I’m not in charge of it in the same ways any more. They really will hop up and empty the whole dishwasher and then load it just because they know it would help me. They really do know how to clean toilets and tie their own shoes (in time for college) and stir fry their own vegan dinners.
In that magazine I told you about, one young mother with five kids under 7 asked for advice about how to keep the house reasonably tidy. She just wanted to know: Can a mother of five little kids have that satisfying feeling of things being put away and the film of dust and grime wiped down and the laundry folded and in drawers and the children bathed and pajama’ed… all at once, ever, while they still live at home? The answer came from a mother of eight. Her response: “It gets better.” She spent an entire column describing how well her older children helped her run the family. No advice for the mom with all little kids under 7.
I was appalled. No help whatsoever. Only, I didn’t forget her words all these years later. Because each time I got overwhelmed with the chaos of my overly full life, my mind would wander back to the best advice a mother of eight could drum up, even with time and preparation to write an article. The truth: she HAD NO ADVICE. There is no answer. If you have kids under 7 or 8, you will not have a neat house, clean clothes, bathed babies, tied shoes, ant-free kitchens, enough food in the fridge, and easy-to-find homeschool materials all at once, most days. That’s how it is. That’s what normal and routine and, dare I say it, right living look like when you’re solely in charge of nurturing, caring for and cleaning the worlds of small children.
But over time, almost imperceptibly, things do change. Eventually, you won’t be pregnant any more. You really won’t. The older kids do remember their own dental appointments (eventually). Some of them will drive cars and help you with soccer practice runs for the younger kids. One of your children will clean your whole kitchen one night just to surprise you in the morning. Their bedrooms may never match the photos in Pottery Barn’s catalog, but they will be able to do a five minute sweep of the living room before company comes and make it look presentable again.
In the meantime, what I want to say this morning in my deathly quiet house is: enjoy (play with, admire, tickle, feed, cuddle, praise, forgive) your little ones as much as you can, while you can, in spite of the exhaustion. I did, honestly, know to do that. And I don’t regret it for a moment.
In fact, today? I miss it.
June 12th, 2009
Write about either: a) your best vacation you’ve ever taken, or b) your dream vacation.
June 10th, 2009
this July.
Good friend and art aficionado, Beth Burgess, is again teaching her well-received “Art Appreciation” course from last summer. So many of us want to give our children a rich education in the arts, but feel we lack the skills to equip us. Beth’s years as a painter, photographer and art history student (combined with her years of home educating her own four children) give you the chance to unlock some of art’s mysteries. Charlotte Mason has long venerated the idea of a solid art education. She talks about “furnishing the halls of our minds with great works of art.” She suggests picture study as a way to expand a child’s attention to detail and appreciation for beauty.
Brave Writer has long suggested devoting time to art appreciation as visual stimulation has a way of revving the writing impulse. Encounters with visual images crafted for specific impact stir our imaginations and vocabularies. Art appreciation is also a lens through which your kids may enjoy viewing history.
Read the class description here and give yourself a treat this summer. Immerse yourself in a course that will both prepare you to teach art to your kids, but will also offer you a respite from the daily cares of life at home. Escape into the visual world of paintings and photography. You deserve a chance to grow, expand and be nurtured, too, you know.
June 10th, 2009
Hi-
I remember reading an old blog entry in which you said that you had proofread your college student’s paper. At the time, I remember thinking that sounded nice and cozy, but that I doubted I’d ever need to do something like that for one of my sons once they had left home. Well, this last fall I corrected my oldest son Tommy’s first few Composition 1 papers! I was glad I had read your story because it kept me from hesitating when he informed me that he had a paper due tomorrow and he would be emailing it to me to look at. After the first few papers, he found that his high school had done a better job of teaching him to write than his classmates’ high schools and he stopped needing me, but I was glad I was there for him. As much as people complain about email as a sloppy form of communication, I think it is wonderful. This entire year my son has written to me every day! Email’s asynchronousness and ease makes him willing to communicate far more than he would if he had to telephone or write by hand. Anyway – I just wanted to say thank you for giving me a glimpse of what it is like to have a college student.
-Nancy Gorman
Isn’t this cool? I wanted to print her email to encourage those of you looking for how to handle that transition to college writing in the fall.
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I am interested in your LA Planning class, but I am trying to decide which way I want to go. (I am also considering IEW…very different approaches!) I have a 12yo dysgraphic child, as well as a 10yo and 8yo (and a 3yo who doesn’t count for this discussion). All my kids suffer from visual processing issues which makes copywork more difficult (the doctor tells us to avoid copywork, though I continue to try it periodically). We’ve been doing Friday Freewrites for a year or two…moved from 5 min. to 18 min., but the output doesn’t seem to have increased with the time, nor has there been much improvement in the thoughts conveyed. (I own The Writer’s Jungle, though I haven’t reviewed it recently.) I like your natural approach, but I guess I’m fearful of not seeing improvement, yet again…and fearful to take the leap as my child approaches middle school with 2nd grade level writing, at best. (I’m equally fearful with IEW being refused as too difficult.) Does this method work with kids who are highly resistant to writing? What if they can’t do the copywork? What is the toughest “case” you’ve helped…did it work out in the end?
Thanks for any thoughts you can provide that might help me decide where to head,
Deidre
BW is designed for kids like yours. We focus specifically on kids who are struggling with language arts, who have learning impairments. I would suggest you take the Copywork and Dictation class when we offer it in the fall. It is revolutionary for kids like yours. The instructor is a reading and language pathologist who specializes in translating her skills into the BW approach to writing. She’s had enormous success in helping kids get through the block to a good space for writing. In fact, my son with dysgraphia (14) has been her tutoring student for two years and he’s gone from not writing (really at all) to writing eloquent papers and his handwriting has finally become almost automatic. Such a stunning turn around for a kid who struggled mightily with writing.
Copywork is challenging for these guys. But it is possible to use special writing therapies to help your son overcome the difficulties. This is not information you will get from IEW. We’re the only program I know of that directly addresses these issues and provides mothers with the tools to do the kinds of processes that lead to growth and healing.
Julie