And in that moment, Love, Ruby Lavender was born. “I wake up feeling like the bubbles in an RC Cola-all fizzed up and ready to pop!” I wrote for my first line. Then, in order to shake up our rigid thinking about what a story “should” be, she had us use the lists we’d made to write a “Twenty Projects Poem,” a structure devised by her colleague, Jim Simmerman, for his poetry students. We had ten minutes to complete this exercise, and then we were to circle one entry from each column and use the three entries to tell a story. When I was first learning to write as a vocation, as an art form, and as a true love of mine, I often came across the adage “write what you know.” I didn’t understand what it meant until a teacher in a community college course had us list in three columns everyone we knew, every place we had lived, and some of our childhood adventures. Now she is teaching other writers to do the same. Wiles gives us an in-depth look at how she learned to “write what you know” and relate her own experiences through her characters. How can you inspire your students to write about what they know? Deborah Wiles is the author of Freedom Summer, The Aurora County Trilogy, and The Sixties Trilogy which includes the recently published title, Anthem.
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