As a writer, it’s always a fun day when I get to announce that I have a new book out.
Writing Adventure: How to Encourage Writing for Fun and Self-Reflection
is now available for sale as an ebook here on Amazon.
I’m excited because this short book takes on a topic that is near and dear to my heart. For those of you who may not be familiar with my story, I used to be a middle school language arts teacher. That experience was transformative and immersed me in the ways that young people engage with words. I am so thankful to those students for bearing with me as I was a young teacher learning right along with them.
Through the years, I have continued to spend a lot of time teaching, tutoring, editing, and working with people to create writing that they are proud of. In my experience, however, I have found that while there are a few people who really love writing, many approach the experience with hesitancy, at best, and often more likely dread.
As a writing teacher, I got to thinking about our cultural narratives around the process of writing, and I realized that writing is almost always contextualized as an assignment or a task or something that needs to be done.
But writing is so much more. Writing is an expressive experience, and one that I think is important to the development of young and old alike. I began to ask myself what it would look like if we changed our talk around the concept of writing, and we began to think of it as something that is fun and fulfilling.
This topic is an enormous conversation and one that could fill volumes because it is personal and expansive and rooted in educational theory and self-awareness and the entire lexicon of the place that words hold in the human experience. So this book, well it is truly just a starting point. It is a short collection of my thoughts around the idea of writing as more than a task and the ways that adults can encourage young people and peers to engaging in a more personal writing practice.
There are no concrete answers here, but there are ideas and questions and things to think about as we work to redefine the role that writing has in a world where, in my opinion, it is as important as it has always been.
If you have young children or teens, I hope that this book gives you a place to begin new conversations around writing. If you are an adult, I hope that the ideas and examples are rooted in enough truth to translate into the adult experience.
Life is certainly an adventure, and I believe that writing is a great way to experience that adventure.
Here’s to your own Writing Adventure!
You can buy Writing Adventure here.