This winter I’m mentoring a young student who is one of only 15 students selected for The Telling Room’s Young Writers and Leaders Program. These are international high school students from Somalia, Rwanda, Jordan, Iraq, Congo, Burundi, and Afghanistan and are now attending one of Portland, Maine’s high schools. They’ve all come to write a…
Posts Categorized: Literacy Projects
I Love the Novel Any Way I Can
When I was a child, I always wished my family would talk to each other the way people talked to each other in books. Or maybe I wanted my family to reveal their hearts or even know their hearts and use language as a way to speak truths to each other. Books fed this hunger…
CLiF Storytelling with the International Institute, Manchester
Tiger Lily from the ESL Institute, UNH
Students at the ESL Institute at the University of New Hampshire presented a conference on June 19 to recognize World Refugee Day. ESL Lecturer Meaghan Dunn and her students had read The Good Braider and invited me to come and speak. I did, and went early to see the students’ poster presentations. They each focused…
A Student Speaks for “all the Violas of the world”
Students and teachers have shared with me some of the essays written in response to reading The Good Braider. One student, Steven Kidder, wrote an essay about PTSD. It was both well researched and also deeply personal, and his personal response added power to the facts about PTSD. In Viola he saw a person experiencing…