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[Podcast #345] DIY Writing Retreats for Kids

Brave Writer Podcast

What if a writing retreat didn’t require a plane ticket to Ireland?

This week on the Brave Writer podcast, we explore what makes writing feel spacious, playful, and alive. From Julie’s memoir retreat on the Irish Sea to Melissa’s fiction experiments with point of view, we talk about how atmosphere, community, sensory detail, and low-stakes exploration can help writers of every age drop beneath the noise of daily life.

We also share practical ways to create a mini writing retreat at home for your kids, complete with snacks, freedom, feedback, and delight.

Join us as we reimagine writing as nourishment for the intellect and the spirit.

Show Notes

Create a Writing Retreat at Home

A writing retreat sounds luxurious, doesn’t it?

A lodge on the Irish Sea. Waves rolling in all night. Tea, notebooks, quiet mornings, and a room full of writers listening deeply to one another’s words.

Most of us are not packing for Ireland this summer. We have laundry to fold, meals to make, camps to drive to, toddlers to supervise, teens to text, and a dog who needs to go out again.

Still, the heart of a writing retreat is available to us.

A retreat is not magic because of the location. The location helps, of course. Beauty and quiet give the nervous system a chance to settle. But the real gift of a retreat is that it creates permission. Permission to slow down. Permission to notice. Permission to write without producing anything useful right away.

That kind of permission can happen at your kitchen table.

Start with safety.

Tell your kids that this is not a grammar day. No red pens. No grades. No “fixing.” Writing retreat writing is exploratory writing. We are playing with language the way we play with Legos. Dump the pieces out. Build something strange. Take it apart. Try again.

Then make it feel different from school. Light a candle. Put out snacks. Make tea or lemonade. Invite a few friends. Write outside under a tree. Bring clipboards to the porch. Let someone write under the table if that helps. Change the atmosphere, and you change the body’s expectations.

Instead of assigning a finished piece, offer experiments.

  • Write a memory in past tense. Then, the next day, write the same memory in present tense. Notice what changes. Does the scene feel more immediate? More chaotic? More visual?
  • Write a story from the hero’s point of view. Then write it from the villain’s. What does the “bad guy” notice that the hero missed?
  • Choose one object, like a baseball glove, a mixing bowl, a shell, a button, a pinecone. Look at it longer than seems necessary. Smell it. Touch it. Turn it over. Let the object reveal its personality. The physical world is often where metaphor begins.
  • Try a proverb prompt. Gather a handful of familiar sayings: “The early bird catches the worm,” “A watched pot never boils,” “Many hands make light work.” Ask your child to choose one and freewrite a real-life memory that somehow brushes against its meaning.

Most importantly, make sharing optional.

Writing is vulnerable. Even experienced writers can shake when reading personal work aloud. Children may cry, freeze, get silly, or collapse into giggles. Those responses are not misbehavior. They are the body’s way of handling the strange power of seeing private experience turned into words.

When kids do share, ask listeners to notice what they loved. A funny phrase. A surprising image. A sound pattern. A moment that made them lean in. Let feedback begin with delight.

A writing retreat at home does not need to last a week. It can be one morning. One afternoon. One picnic blanket and a notebook.

What matters is the shift: writing is not always a performance. Sometimes writing is a place to enter. A place to discover what we think, what we remember, what we feel, and what we have to say.

That is nourishment. That is the writing life.

Resources

Connect with Julie

Connect with Melissa

Produced by NOVA

Brave Writer Podcast

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[Podcast #344] Courageous Divorce: An Interview with Alisha Roth

Brave Writer Podcast

What happens when faith, prayer, endurance, and every “right” effort still do not make a marriage safe?

In this brave and deeply honest conversation, we talk with Alisha Roth, author of Courageous Divorce, about young marriage, religious expectations, abuse, motherhood, homeschooling, community loss, and the difficult clarity that can come when a woman finally listens to her own body and life.

Alisha Roth
Alisha Roth

Together, we explore divorce not as failure, but as a serious boundary, sometimes the one that makes healing, safety, forgiveness, and a more honest future possible.

Listen in for a tender conversation about faith, courage, and choosing to truly live.

Show Notes

When Divorce Becomes a Boundary

What happens when you do all the “right” things and the relationship still isn’t safe?

You pray. You read the books. You go to counseling. You choose your words carefully. You try to be patient, forgiving, generous, faithful. You tell yourself that every marriage is hard. You remind yourself that your children need a family. You try again.

And then one day, your body tells the truth before your mind can bear to.

We’ve heard from so many women who know this story from the inside. They were raised to believe that marriage was a sacred container, that endurance was maturity, that self-sacrifice was love, and that divorce represented failure. For women formed by religious communities, the pressure can be even stronger. Stay. Submit. Forgive. Pray harder. Protect the marriage. Protect the family. Protect the story everyone else wants to believe.

But what protects the woman?

That question matters.

A marriage cannot be healed by one person’s devotion alone. No amount of careful language, spiritual discipline, emotional labor, or maternal effort can make an unsafe relationship safe if the other person refuses accountability. A woman can contort herself for years trying to become gentle enough, quiet enough, faithful enough, forgiving enough, only to discover that the problem was never her lack of effort.

Sometimes the most honest act is to stop pretending that endurance is the same as health.

Divorce is often described as an ending, and of course it is. It changes homes, finances, friendships, holidays, family rhythms, and the story you thought you were living. It can bring grief, confusion, fear, and loneliness. It can expose how fragile some communities are when a woman tells the truth about her life.

But divorce can also be a boundary.

A strong one. A serious one. A boundary that says: this level of intimacy is not safe. This arrangement is not healthy. This proximity is causing harm. Something has to change.

That framing can be clarifying. A boundary is not revenge. It is not bitterness. It is not a refusal to forgive. A boundary names reality. It creates distance where distance is needed. It may even make compassion more possible because the person who was being harmed is no longer trapped inside the harm.

For mothers, the decision can feel especially agonizing. We may worry about what divorce will do to our children. We may fear losing the life we built around homeschooling, shared meals, read-alouds, rhythms, and traditions. We may wonder whether choosing our own safety means taking something precious away from them.

But children are not only shaped by the presence of two parents in one house. They are shaped by the emotional weather of that house. They are shaped by what gets excused, what gets hidden, what gets normalized, and what gets named.

A mother who chooses truth, safety, and health is teaching something too.

Life after divorce may not look like the life you imagined. It may require creativity. Homeschooling may change shape. Parenting schedules may require flexibility. Holidays may need new traditions. Community may have to be rebuilt from the ground up.

And still, there can be life there.

There can be sleep. There can be laughter. There can be a quiet home. There can be children who adapt. There can be women friends who let you tell the whole truth. There can be work, travel, dating, solitude, courage, and a new relationship with your own body and inner knowing.

There can be a future you did not know you were allowed to want.

The work is not easy, and no one can make the decision for another woman. There are consequences to staying and consequences to leaving. Each person has to reckon with her own life, her own children, her own safety, her own faith, her own truth.

But we want to say this clearly: your well-being matters. Your body matters. Your fear matters. Your clarity matters. Your life is not merely the support structure for someone else’s story.

You are allowed to live.

Resources

Connect with Julie

Connect with Melissa

Produced by NOVA

Brave Writer Podcast

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[Podcast #343] Partnership Writing with Dawn Smith

Brave Writer Podcast

Why teach writing when AI can generate paragraphs in seconds? 

In this Brave Writer podcast episode, Melissa Wiley talks with Brave Writer president, Dawn Smith, about why writing still matters, maybe more than ever. Together, they explore writing as a tool for thinking, voice, discovery, and connection.

We look at:

  • how kids develop their own style,
  • why pre-writing conversations are part of the writing process,
  • and how partnership writing helps children bridge the gap between ideas and words on the page.

Plus, Dawn shares what’s new with Partnership Writing and how families can pair projects with Darts for a rich month of learning.

Tune in and reconnect with the deeply human work of writing.

Show Notes

Have you ever watched an AI tool spit out a tidy paragraph in seconds and felt a little wobble in your confidence?

There it is: grammatically correct, decently organized, maybe even sprinkled with a few impressive words. Your teen looks at it. You look at it. The question hangs in the air.

Why should anyone bother learning to write anymore?

We understand the panic.

If writing is only about producing a clean final product, AI seems like a shortcut. It can draft the essay, polish the sentence, summarize the book, suggest the thesis, and smooth out the grammar.

But writing is not only the product.

Writing is thinking.

And our kids still need to think.

AI Can Generate Text. Humans Generate Meaning.

Generative AI works from patterns. It predicts what word is likely to come next based on what it has absorbed from human writing.

That can be useful. It can also be flattening.

AI does not know your child’s inside jokes, favorite books, odd fascinations, family conversations, sharp opinions, or private questions. It does not remember the movie that made them cry, the argument they had in the car, the frog they found in the creek, or the sentence in a novel that made them sit up straighter.

All of that becomes part of a child’s writing voice.

A human mind is a mosaic. Every conversation, book, memory, game, movie, and relationship adds another tile. When children write, that mosaic begins to show itself on the page.

That is what we are protecting.

Writing Helps Kids Discover Their Thoughts

Sometimes we imagine writing this way: first you have an idea, then you write it down.

But often, the writing comes first.

A child starts with a half-formed thought. They talk it through. They try a sentence. They cross it out. They say, “That’s not what I mean.” They try again. Suddenly, something clicks.

Now they know what they think.

That moment matters.

It is easy to miss because it does not always look efficient. It may look like wandering. It may sound like rambling. It may involve long pauses, snacks, frustration, or a walk around the block.

But underneath the mess, the mind is organizing itself.

When we rush too quickly to the finished paragraph, we can rob children of the very process that helps them grow.

Voice Is Worth Developing

One of the quiet dangers of writing tools is that they can make every child sound the same.

The quirky phrase gets replaced. The joke disappears. The sentence that sounded exactly like your child is “improved” into something bland but acceptable.

We do want children to learn conventions. Commas matter. Spelling matters. Clarity matters.

But conventions are tools, not the whole house.

Punctuation can create suspense. Sentence fragments can add punch. A surprising word choice can reveal personality. Dialogue can carry character. Even academic writing benefits from a mind alive behind the argument.

We are not teaching children to obey grammar for its own sake.

We are helping them use language with power.

Partnership Is Part of the Process

Children do not need to face the blank page alone.

In Brave Writer, we value partnership because writing asks a lot of a developing brain. A child may be generating ideas, remembering letter formation, spelling words, organizing thoughts, managing emotions, and trying to sound smart all at once.

That is too much.

So we partner.

We jot down their words. We talk before writing. We ask questions. We help them remember the wonderful thing they said five minutes ago. We read examples from books. We fill their cup with language before asking them to pour anything out.

This does not make the writing less theirs.

It makes writing possible.

Professional writers do this too. They talk ideas through with friends. They send drafts to editors. They revise after feedback. They pace, delete, complain, and try again.

Writing has never been a magical solo performance.

It is a process.

Give Kids Something to Say

A child who has nothing to say will struggle to write.

That does not mean they are lazy. It may mean they need more before-writing life.

Read the novel. Watch the documentary. Build the model. Play the game. Visit the creek. Talk about the character. Argue about the ending. Make the comparison. Follow the rabbit trail.

Then write.

When children have lived with a topic, language becomes available. They have images, opinions, questions, and connections. The blank page is no longer empty. It has roots underneath it.

This is why deep dives matter. A month with one good book can lead to mechanics, literary devices, history, science, art, narration, discussion, and original writing.

The parts are there.

We simply slow down enough to notice them.

Friction Is Not Failure

Writing can be hard.

That does not mean something has gone wrong.

There is often a struggle phase before flow. The child bumps against the limits of what they can currently do. They feel the discomfort of effort. They may need a break, a snack, a walk, or a good cry.

When the tears come, the lesson’s done.

But the learning is not over forever. We return later with more support, more language, more patience, and a smaller next step.

This is how cognitive stamina grows.

Not through pressure. Not through panic. Through supported practice over time.

AI Does Not Change What Children Need

Our kids are growing up in a world of instant text, endless content, and shrinking attention spans. That makes the slow work of writing even more valuable.

They need:

  • chances to sit with an idea,
  • to hear their own voices,
  • to revise without shame,
  • to know that even published authors produce messy drafts,
  • and to experience the satisfaction of discovering a thought that did not exist before they began writing.

AI may have a place as a tool. But it cannot replace the human work of making meaning.

So yes, we still teach writing.

Not because the world needs more perfect five-paragraph essays.

Because our children need access to their own minds.

Resources

Connect with Julie

Connect with Melissa

Produced by NOVA

Brave Writer Podcast

Posted in Podcasts | Comments Off on [Podcast #343] Partnership Writing with Dawn Smith