W.o.o.t.s.

Look to the right of this post, above Facebook and Twitter, and you will see in clickable blue letters, “Getting Published.” Behold a brand-new section of the W.o.o.t.s. blog! The aim of Getting Published is to help student writers find online and print journals that fit their style, so they can perfect their work and [...]

Several talented writers read aloud from their work at the Wordstock festival this past weekend. However, I can safely say that few, if any, were as entertaining and authentic as the WITS student readers. On Sunday morning at the OEA stage, an audience of fifty people watched as the words on the pages of the [...]

Natasha Anisimova, a student at Woodburn Arts and Communication Academy, stood before Margaret Atwood and Ursula Le Guin last Thursday to ask the first audience question. Her voice clear and without a touch of nerves, Tasha asked Atwood what drives her to take on such large-scale social issues in her fiction. Unfortunately we don’t have [...]

Last night students from Wilson High School and Woodburn Arts and Communication Academy joined us at the Schnitz for the Atwood/Le Guin conversation. Mindy Brooks, a teacher at the Woodburn Academy, says that after attending the lectures, her students are more invested in the author and their work. Getting students to truly enjoy and connect [...]

After an awesome orientation, this year’s writers-in-residence are ready to go! Five of them are brand new to WITS (and are hard at work getting oriented in this photo). The attendees walked into p:ear on a crisp September day, looking much as their students will on the first day of school: armed with nervous-yet-excited smiles, [...]

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 [...]