Teen Writing Workshop
Saturday, October 16
You spend the school year writing for other people: papers and reports for your teachers, essays for your college applications, articles for your school newspaper. With so much on your plate, it’s hard to find time to write for yourself.
Take some time to focus on your own writing!
During this special one-day session of the Teen Writing Workshop you’ll have a chance to write without worrying about grades or deadlines. You’ll have time to create new work and polish existing pages, and you’ll get to work closely with professional writers who will help to guide your process and answer any questions you have about writing, publishing, living the writing life, and more. Best of all, you’ll get to meet other teenage writers like yourself who are serious and excited about their stories!
This class has two components:
• Writing: Writing prompts to spark your imagination, help you break through blocks, and learn to write past your “internal editor.”
• Workshopping: We’ll share our work and give each other feedback on what’s working well and what opportunities we can find in each piece (whether it’s fiction, non-fiction, or poetry). We’ll talk about where we can extend scenes and dialogue to push the narrative, how word choice can affect the piece as a whole, how to spice up language and how to find—and trust—your original voice.
Who Should Attend: The Youth Institute is open to students in grades 8-12.
Why Attend the StoryStudio Chicago Youth Institute?
There’s no mystery to it: students who excel at writing do better in school, in college prep tests, on college applications and, to our way of thinking, life in general. Communicating well opens doors to any profession or pursuit.
Creative writing promotes critical reading and literacy skills while encouraging imagination, discipline and the courage to share one’s creative work.
StoryStudio Chicago is the city’s premier center for writing and related arts and the collective experience of our instructors is vast. Our philosophy is simple: encourage writers to discover their own processes and to delve deeper into their own stories.
The Teen Writing Workshop is limited to just 15 students per class, giving ample attention and time to each writer.
We’re located in a lovely, safe neighborhood in a beautifully rehabbed loft building filled with small businesses and artist studios.
About the Instructor: M. Molly Backes has taught students of all ages and abilities. As an English teacher and Gifted and Talented Program Director in a struggling New Mexico school, she designed and taught curricula to a wide spectrum of students, with a close consideration of state and national standards and benchmarks. In honor of National Novel Writing Month, Molly got 150 middle schoolers to write their own novels. As a teacher, she developed classroom writing workshops, pushed for greater emphasis on interdisciplinary writing in core classes, ran trainings for educators in writing workshop implementation, led her school’s Educational Plan for Student Success Goal Team and served as English Department Chair in 2007.
Molly recently moved from New Mexico to Chicago, where she has served as a poet-in-residence, run writing workshops for Polyphony HS and After School Matters, and developed the Youth Writing Institute. In addition to teaching and tutoring writing, she works as the Assistant Director at StoryStudio Chicago where she’ll be happy to answer all your questions about life, the universe, and all our classes.
Date/Time: Saturday, October 16, 2010; 10:00am - 12:00pmPrice: Student:$35