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This blog post was originally published on TWC Instructor ‘s blog. We are publishing this extract from it with permission. View the full post here.
I was at my very first HippoCamp last year when I told Lisa Romeo my hopes and dreams, because she was the only person there that I knew, and so she was stuck with me. I told her I wanted to find the New Jersey equivalent of Girls Write Now, a mentoring program for teen girls who want to write, because I love the work they do and would get involved if only I didn’t have to cross into NYC in order to do so. I also lamented my lack of local writer-friends. I knew there were other writers in the area. But where were they? And why weren’t they friends with meeeee???
Which is how I found myself at the Montclair Literary Festival last weekend, working the children’s room at the Montclair Public Library as a representative of the Writers Circle.
The Writers Circle (TWC) is a local writing community that offers a number of workshops and other events throughout the year. Lisa was good enough to introduce me to the awesome ladies behind TWC and, earlier this year, I taught two, 11-week classes for them: one on memoir, and another on writing as a tool for advocacy. Later this month, I’ll be starting another class on short-form creative nonfiction and, this coming summer, I’ll be doing a one-hour workshop for their creative writing intensive for teens.
But for now, me and several other TWC teachers were in the children’s room at the library, raffling off free classes and leading younger kids in a variety of games. I was sitting at a table with five kids, ranging in age from 5(ish?) – 9, using TWC’s Story Magic deck to help them write their own stories….
