Write Every Day

I'm teaching a workshop right now for the Kenyon Review --- a six-week online creative writing workshop titled "The Magic of Many Things" which is all about looking for creative writing prompts and structures in unusual and different places. The high-school students in this workshop, some of whom are in time zones at 2am when it is taking place, are so eager to write and to make human connections, which is something I absolutely love. Still, they are also shy, and like to keep their cameras off, and it's hard to get them to share because they're with strangers for 6 weeks writing their most intimate creative writing things  so I get it. 

Image from Instagram - Account of Shanaleehampton. 

But these 6 Saturdays I've been writing with them, even though I'm the workshop leader, it reminds me that I'm a WRITER too. For the last ten or twenty years (honestly) even though I've been a writer, I've let that identity slip down the list and maybe "teacher" or "parent" has taken that top spot. 

But I'm a writer. I think a lot about how so many people don't tell their stories because of life. What's that Alex Haley quote about when people die a whole library dies with them? That's how I feel about the importance of writing and writing every day. 

Really.

The other thing I've been doing is with my friend Sherilyn I've been doing the Stafford Challenge -- a poem every day. Writing every day has been AMAZING. Because, my poem every day doesn't have to be a poem. Also, I've been writing my poem a day on the notes app on my phone which is TOTALLY not my thing, but I like some of the poems I'm writing and just that daily 5-15 minute act of writing a little poem and sending it to my friend and to my sister and to my sweetheart is such an amazing thing for my writer's spirit.

So this is just to say, write every day.