Freewriting Works

Freewriting Works

So I was sitting under an umbrella on my blue yoga mat on the concrete and soaked stands watching Liam play lacrosse. This is what mothers do. We sit in the cold rain and wind to watch our kids get blindsided by a high check to the helmet and slammed to the AstroTurf so that they only play five minutes of the 60 minute game. It is reassuring to have the coach call today to check up on Liam who is certain he cracked a rib (I’m still not sure, but he didn’t play again).

Powerless to mother Liam, once he was off the field sitting on a wet bench in the whipping high winds recovering from strep throat and dizziness (I know – ugh!), I took up a chat with the mom to my right. She’s a reading specialist in our local elementary school. Quickly she discovered that I homeschool and run a business that teaches writing. I so appreciated her next question:

“So do you have a philosophy of writing?”

Brilliant! I don’t think anyone in casual conversation has ever asked me that. I dove in: Peter Elbow? Freewriting? Nurturing your writer? Supportive, validating feedback?

No on Elbow, no on freewriting, but yes on nurturing and supportive feedback. Thus a discussion ensued where we compared notes on how to encourage kids to talk, to express thoughts, to get their ideas out of their heads and onto paper. As I explained how freewriting works, a mom two wet bleachers below us, wheeled around to interrupt.

“Excuse me, I couldn’t help over hearing you. Please don’t mind me. It’s just that freewriting changed my son’s life.”

“Oh really,” I replied, excited to hear her “testify”!

“In third grade, my son had a teacher who completely changed my son’s life. Well, his writing life anyway. She taught her students how to write to a timer, how to put their thoughts to paper regardless of how they came out. Suddenly my son who had been a reluctant writer found his voice! He learned to write!”

She went on, as only moms can. She let us know that today, in junior high, when he has an assignment to complete at home and is stumped by it, she only has to say the name of that teacher and the word “freewriting” and suddenly he will check into himself and start writing. She was utterly blown away by how powerful that one practice has been in his life for the last four years.

Needless to say, the reading specialist next to me took note! She followed this testimonial with questions for me, comparing notes on how she might improve her students’ freedom in writing and thinking. I loved her comments that while she spends a lot of time helping kids to “read aloud,” it occurred to her last week that what these kids really needed was someone to talk to about what they were reading. We brainstormed some questions she could ask and how she could encourage better comprehension.

Despite the freezing cold rain, the whole space felt warmer simply from savoring the idea that children are valuable and can be led into greater and greater self-expression through supportive, friendly conversation and, of course, freewriting.

Freewriting Prompts

Posted in Brave Writer Philosophy, Friday Freewrite, Writing about Writing | 3 Comments »

Friday Freewrite: Signs of spring

Take a walk (if weather permits) and notice the signs of spring. Come home and write about them. You may want to collect an item or two from your walk to look at or draw to go with your freewrite.

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Doing it all… almost

I have to laugh as I get this post started. I’ve been interrupted so many times that I wonder if it is possible to even address the topic of “doing it all.” That’s when I realized, I do it all, almost. I definitely don’t do it all, all the time.

For example, it’s tax season and Jon and I each own a business. We felt good that we got our papers in order and to the accountant in mid-January. At that meeting, the nice man with the mustache, calculator and friendly smile gave me a “to do” list of items and numbers he’d need to finish our taxes. I’ve almost got it done…. since mid-January. It will probably take the pressure of March to make me put aside some other task to get that one task completed.

Some weeks homeschool gets the lion’s share of my attention. Other weeks, my business does. Some days, I give in and make spring crafts for hours (like yesterday) and let the whole kitchen go to heck. On those days, we eat pizza for dinner. Other days, I make a wonderful chicken stew and set the table with candles, but don’t wash any clothes. Some months, a writing deadline (like my MA thesis last April) means the family has to pick up my slack in the meal-making, food-shopping, clothes-washing department so that I can write unfettered.

I heard Carol Burnett say on Oprah a few weeks ago that at the height of her fame when she had the weekly “Carol Burnett Show,” she only worked 30 hours per week. Oprah asked her about her family life and she said, “We were very organized.” Oprah thought she was joking, but Carol was not. She went on about how the family had a system and that enabled her to work only those 30 hours.

I wish I could hand you a similar system. All bets are off when your business and your kids’ education are both at home and both fall on you! That’s a situation few people in your life will know or understand. There really is no time when you are all alone and free from the competing pressures of dogs with vet visits, phone call polls, television drone in the background and the eternally hungry tummies of children, teens and home-working husbands.

The truth is, I’ve put my family first in every way I can. That means that homeschooling and watching reality TV, going to sports games and plays, listening to my son’s saxophone, and rehearsing lines for a scene all take priority over the other stuff. It means I have deliberately curbed the growth of my business. I’ve turned down opportunities that would cause me more exposure, I’ve resisted speaking commitments that would take me out of town, I’ve avoided advertising. I give my business time, but I’ve chosen a slow growth model deliberately.

When the business has begun to crowd into family life, I’ve hired to my weaknesses (a shipper, a registration manager, an accountant, more teachers). Still, there are days when I get overwhelmed by the self-made demanding schedule that involves family, business and education. And it’s those times that require me to ask myself the questions again: How can I minimize the impact of work on family, what can I do to relieve me of the burdens that take me away?

I have never believed in making my kids work for me or expecting that they will care about orders being fulfilled or classes being taught. They didn’t start a business. I did.

Perhaps the best “advice” I can give to those who wonder how they can add work to their lives is to be as certain as possible that your whole family can handle the increased demands on you. When I began graduate school, I really was asking everyone to compensate for my being gone once a week at night, for the hours on Saturday mornings when I’d have to write essays. We got into a rhythm that worked for us. I would never have added graduate school to my life if we had toddlers or babies.

The bottom line is that more and more of us need to work to pay for life in America. College tuition alone drives many homeschooling mothers back into the workforce after fifteen years of fulltime mothering. If you are at this place in your life, your family can handle it. You just need to be sure that you continue to give your heart and energy to your kids when you are with them. That’s the only way to balance it all out.

And as Jon likes to say when I have my doubts, “It’s great for our kids to see you work. They get to know that there is a meaningful life ahead of them as adults that extends into the community, beyond the family, but that includes the family.”

Posted in Family Notes, General | 3 Comments »

Good morning everyone!

I’m back from Grand Rapids and the wonderful, enriching time I shared with the 33 women who attended. They came to the frigidly cold north from across the country: California, New Hampshire, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and all parts Michigan. I’ve been mulling over how to describe and summarize the deeply satisfying weekend we shared together. I think the word I’d use is “personal.” It always amazes me that teaching about writing leads to personal revelation and reevaluation. As we looked at how mothers draw out the writers in our children, we confronted what ways we block the free-flow of their imaginations, ideas and words. We had to face the fact that sometimes we haven’t wanted to hear about the things that interest our kids, that we haven’t valued their thought lives because we feared they weren’t interested in the “right” things or “educational” things or that they were perhaps even treading next to what for some have been labeled “dangerous” things (video games, role playing cards, or fairies, for instance).

Yet by appreciating the rich complexity that is each child, by taking notes when they speak their meandering recitations of a movie or game they’ve played, of the way they built the snow fort in the front yard… we demonstrate that in fact what they think about deserves preservation on paper and that it ought to be shared with a larger audience than Mom. These kinds of insights led to memories about our own parents and the ways we’ve been validated and understood or dismissed and ignored. It was interesting to hear, for instance, one mom share that she and her siblings would never tell their parents about their changed religious and political beliefs because these would be unwelcome by their parents. It struck me that that unwillingness to share our real selves with our parents develops over a lifetime of feeling our thoughts and ideas don’t matter. What an opportunity we have to be different kinds of parents and writing partners!

Another mother shared with me that since her wonderful father died, she had lost her love of writing. It was as if that part of her had died – the part that shared who she was with her dad and the world. Through the weekend, she found the will and desire to express herself again and wants to provide that outlet to her children. Truly, our parents form and shape us for good or ill. We get to choose.

We talked about all the usual things: copywork, dictation, narration, revision, editing, freewriting. Yet through it all, a golden thread of tenderness and love for children wove these disparate language arts practices into a stronger cloth. Because the best writing advice is “write what you know,” we discovered that the best “teaching writing advice” is “know your writers.” And because we rarely bother to know something well without loving it, it occurred to me that a Brave Writer translation of these two principles might be:

Love your writers, so they will be free to write what they love.

In the end, this is not only how we learn to write well, but how we learn to know and love each other. Once again, writing becomes the conduit to self-knowledge, but also to loving relationships. There really is power in the word.

Thanks to all you lovely ladies who shared the weekend with me. I feel equally recommitted to, re-vested in my children and family.

Posted in Brave Writer Philosophy, BW products, General | 8 Comments »

Class Registration is OPEN! Use the links in this post:

Hi everyone.

Disaster struck at 11:35 this morning. The program I use to change webpages crashed. My husband’s computer is on the blink (which operates as my back up). We had no way to make the pages go live. So I am posting the links for class registration here:
Registration:

http://www.bravewriter.com/Classes/Spring_2008_regis.html

Payment:

http://www.bravewriter.com/order_classes.htm

Username:

http://www.bravewriter.com/Classes/userid.htm

Please feel free to pass these on to your friends. If you still have any trouble, you can always email your registration to me and I’ll help you settle tuition payment at that time.

Between strep throat and an unexpected business crisis, I’m feeling pretty awful this morning. 🙁 Please forgive this debacle. We’ll get the pages up to speed as soon as we can.

Posted in BW products, General | 1 Comment »