Well, I did it again: I got 18 elementary kids so jazzed about writing that they filled a literary magazine. This is the biggest issue yet, with about 70 pages of stories, poems, plays, comics, and illustrations. The table of contents alone is 3 pages long.
We throw a little literary reading party where they each get up and share their work out loud, and I think this year’s was also bigger than we’ve ever done as well. We definitely had more people than chairs.
In the past, when I’ve shared this project with others, the most common response I’ve gotten is, “I didn’t know children could do this,” which is weird to me, because this is exactly what I was doing when I was their age, except I was doing it by myself without any social, emotional, or financial support. So I’ve always known children could do this. A blank piece of paper is more expansive than the whole of the internet. This magazine is what happens when we give kids that space.
But I think the reason it seems surprising now is that we do not always give young people space to stretch these muscles, and it’s not a secret that I think the internet is huge part of the issue, because we now have 2 decades of evidence that the proliferation of screens is negatively impacting all of us on a cognitive level. Every time we resort to the screen in place of other forms of engagement, we’re denying kids the opportunity to flex their minds and achieve the kind of intellectual expansion that allows us to produce this magazine. Which is also ironic, because many of my students would be greatly served by learning to touch type, and a lot of them definitely deserve new laptops to help them write more, and faster.
So I create a super permissive environment where the kids have license write anything (literally anything; they know that if they need to write things that are considered “inappropriate” in other aspects of their lives, they’re allowed. I don’t criticize. I don’t put it in the magazine, and if it’s upsetting to the other kids I don’t let them read it out loud, but they are allowed to write swears and violence and so on, and only occasionally do I ask the psychologist or guidance counselor if I should be worried, because this job ALSO makes me a mandated reporter) and they do.
This issue has some pretty grim moments. It’s definitely darker than the previous issues, probably because kids are canaries in the coal mine and they are sucking up all the poisonous miasma of their environment. It’s hard to see. But maybe this work helps them process. Maybe it’s a kind of antidote.
Like both previous issues, this magazine has a queer love story, anthropomorphic food, surprisingly sensitive poetry, multiple unfinished novels, and bizarre horror stories. It also has our first choose-your-own-adventure story, which is also horror, and has 5 possible endings: 1 good one where you wake up in your bed and your mom is making breakfast, 3 bad ones where you die, and 1 very bad one, where you have to spend eternity doing i-Ready, which is a standardized testing app despised by children across the country.
it’s too bad there aren’t more resources for clubs like this.
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