W.o.o.t.s.

Whether it was the hand of destiny that brought me here, or mere luck, as soon as I heard about an opportunity to work for Literary Arts, I jumped on it.  Then, I winded myself by jumping more when I received the phone call letting me know I had been chosen as one of their [...]

Hello, my name is Mel, and I’m addicted to written words. You can laugh, but I’m serious. I have friends who hide their magazines when I come over because I get sucked into the articles and stop paying attention to the conversation. I’ve stumbled into classes or work with puffy, bloodshot eyes and zero attention [...]

When a roomful of creative, intrepid leaders begins talking about their successes in teaching youth about writing, it’s hard to resist their enthusiasm. At the recent WITS Summit, every seat was filled by representatives from organizations working around the state with one goal in mind: nurturing the next generation through writing education. Many shared feedback [...]

In high school, besides conversations with my very best friend (whom I talked to about everything I read, heard, did, and ate, so it doesn’t really count), I never really talked with my peers about books. We’d say whether we liked the novels we read for class or not, and then go over the SparkNotes [...]

I’ve spent the past couple of weeks reading through WITS students’ writing, preparing to pick the pieces for the 2009-2010 anthology. The truthfulness of the students’ work, and the pictures they create move me more than I ever expected, and when I heard Matthew Dickman read in a mosquito-y amphitheatre at Reed in July as [...]