fearless healing flight
vivid anchored voices
craft original accounts
fearless healing flight
A haiku I wrote reflecting on my semester as a Teaching Artist with a local program, the Young Authors Project, a part of Deep Center in Savannah, GA.
We logged onto Zoom and began our checking-in ritual. Debriefing our weekends: check. Make weekly joke about how we saw each other less than twenty four hours ago: check. Lesson plan: check. Links all working?: check. (What music should we choose today…celebratory for sure… goofy… high energy?! Yup, 100%!) Music: check. My partner writing fellow and I were preparing for our writing workshop with our group. Over the course of the semester, we forged a friendship as we planned and mentored our extraordinarily creative group of young people.
Late last year I was researching local nonprofits and organizations with a focus on creativity, writing and social justice. Looking to spread my wings a bit as I rooted my heart here in Savannah, I came across Deep Center and the Young Authors Project, a semester long creative writing program for middle school students. The program recruits writers with varied experience and backgrounds to volunteer to mentor local young people in their writing, with the promise of publication for each young person in a book at the conclusion of the semester. The program also suggested peer community among the mentors, or as Deep calls us, writing fellows. It sounded exactly like what I had been searching for. We began in mid January, and by the second week of workshops I knew I had found something special. Around this time I received an invitation from the program director to assist with a second workshop. Plus, she said, with the addition of another workshop there was compensation. I immediately filled with deep gratitude, joy and hope. For months and months I’d been searching and listening for my next step forward, for community, for meaning in this new season of my life. Here was a beginning.
In both of my workshops my partner fellows and I witnessed our young people blossom. They began the semester with a somewhat timid nature about them. Together we learned about writing with details, developing characters, and incorporating figurative language. Through goofy writing games, thoughtful prompts and sharing together, confident voices emerged with spectacular imagination and vulnerability. One workshop continues to sit with me. It was our figurative language week, which falls about halfway through the semester. Running the workshops virtually allowed for some creativity in choosing the weekly readings we shared. My partner and I decided to find a resource that used visuals to emphasize the figurative language present in the writing. We landed on a song from the popular show Steven Universe, that spoke about anxiety, relationships and pausing to breathe and let go. The clip from the show uses butterflies to represent the anxious thoughts that are swirling in the character’s mind. When we showed the clip to our young people, they were so open and clever with what they gleaned from the song. I remember a couple of the young people even saying that this cartoon was not one that they normally enjoyed, but gained a new appreciation and sense of peace upon looking at it through our conversation and the lens of writing.
Though I was technically mentoring them, the young people I met this spring reminded me of the beauty that is found in creating. Not just through art, but in living boldly. Deep- the young people, the staff, and my partners brought me a new lens on life. With the semester and my role with the program concluded, my next steps forward feel a bit lighter as I add imaginative hope to the daily ritual of writing my story.
