Crick Hollow Writing Retreat for Kids

This week marks year three for Crick Hollow Writing Retreat for Kids that I run every summer.  I have several students, 4-7^th grade, returning for their third summer, and some new ones.  This is a place for kids to come and grow as writers!  We focus a lot on the power and strength we get from writing in a community–so we write, and read, and talk and play!  Our writing voices become stronger and more powerful!

Crick Hollow is the name of the street that Jes lives on in my middle grade novel, Sweet Blueberry Pie! which is currently off being considered by an agent!  Woohoo!  Crick Hollow is also a place found in JR Tolkien’s novels.  It also aptly describes this magical space on which my house sits–tucked in its own little hollow with the constant rhythm and power of its own little creek that runs deep within the earth below us.

Yesterday, we focused on character development using an activity my 12 year old daughter created.  She is CIT for camp this year, and quite honestly, I’d be lost without her!

Here’s the activity. 

1. Reach into a bag of objects and choose one.  Without pulling it out of the bag, try to guess what it is.  Take a few minutes to write about it.  Then, take the objects out of the bag and see if you can identify your object.
2. Choose one of the objects and answer the following questions:  Who owns this object and why?  What is it used for and how?  How does this character feel about this object?  Where will the character keep the object and why?  What will happen to the object:  Will the character keep the object, give it away, lose it?
3. Write!  Think about how often in novels we meet a character and then learn something new about the character or begin to see the character in a new way. 

We ended the day with a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye (not sure why the poem keeps insisting on double spacing itself).

The Song

 

From somewhere

a calm musical note arrives.

You balance it on your tongue,

a simple ripe grape,

till your whole body glistens.

In the space between breaths

you apply it to any would

and the wound heals.

 

Soon the nights will lengthen,

you will lean into the year

humming like a saw.

You will fill the lamps with kerosene,

knowing somewhere a line breaks,

a city goes black,

people dig for candles in the bottom drawer.

You will be ready.  You will use the song like a match.

It will fill your rooms

opening rooms of its own

so you sing, I did not know

my house was this large.

We picked out words we liked: balance, single, glistens, breaths, kerosene.  Then we marveled at the sounds they made—all those “s” sounds creating the sense of song themselves.  Then one young girl said, “I really like the phrase, “You will use the song like a match.”  And another said, “I like, ‘opening rooms of its own.’”

Then, I asked, “What do you make of those last two lines, ‘so you sing, I did not know

My house was this large.’”  In my own adult writing group, Bear Mountain Writers, we talked about those last lines.  Folks wondered about the comma between sing and I.  Is the poet saying she sings “I did not know my house was this large”?  Then why no quotation marks?  Or does she sing and think—I did not know my house was this large.  Then, why a comma? 

The girls at my writing retreat didn’t have a problem with this.  Instead, one of them simply said, “The song, like the match, opens rooms of its own.  Without the song the house does not seem so large.”  Wow!  I understood the poem in a way among these young writers that I couldn’t understand it among the adult writers.  What do we women have to learn from these young girls?  Writing with these young voices opens up new rooms in my own writing.

 

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