This past January I had one of those ideas that comes to you like a lightning strike out of a clear blue sky. I was at my writers retreat at Cloudland Canyon. It was late, around 11:30pm, and I was awakened from a restless sleep by an inexplicable hunger. Dinner with my writing companions had concluded just a few hours before, yet I found myself standing at the sink plowing through a box of Heritage Flakes cereal when the words, “Free, online writing classes for kids” came to me. It was an answer to the question I’d been noodling on for many weeks: “What could I do to snag a Literary Arts grant from ArtsBuild?” I never went back to sleep.
“Writing Classes for the Curious,” the offspring of a marriage of dry cereal and sleep deprivation, went online the first week of September, and I could not be prouder. It’s my second Literary Arts grant. The first was a 2008 MakeWork grant from CreateHere, which afforded me a laptop and the opportunity to go to a writing conference put on by Oxford American magazine. In that instance, the grant was awarded so that I could do something and buy something; for the ArtsBuild grant, I had to buckle down and create what had been funded.
I was elated to receive the grant. I celebrated with my husband and some good old fashioned social media bragging, and then I buckled down and created a timeline for completing the various aspects of the workshops.
But a curious thing happened when, a few weeks in, I received the first monetary installment. I can only liken the feeling to what used to happen when I’d meet a hot person in a bar and four days (ok, hours) later realize I was now, for all intents and purposes, in a Relationship. Did I mean for this to happen? Was this the outcome I sought when I did everything in my power to prove myself smart and credible and worthy of partnering with?
I’m not saying I had second thoughts about the grant once it became hauntingly real. I’m just saying that getting a grant and fulfilling said grant are two very different animals. I’m also not saying that getting the grant and fulfilling the grant is at all comparable to getting the hot person and then building a life with the hot person, in a house whose roof will collapse in an ironic mirroring of how you will come to feel about the gravity of your situation.
No. I am just saying that at the moment the grant stopped being “a cool thing I got about which I’m super pumped” and became instead a challenge of steep intellectual and technological and organizational proportions, I realized I had to put away my childish romantic notions, and buckle down and become that partner worthy of partnering with.
Under the banner of Writing Classes for the Curious (WCC), I created a two hour online workshop called, “How to Write a Personal Essay that Doesn’t Suck.” Its intended audience is kids age 12-18, but it is also appropriate for adults who haven’t taken creative writing classes before and want to try their hand. (Don’t just take it from me, take it from my friend Janet, who watched the workshop and then wrote an essay about an experience she had when she was a child that later shaped how she interacted with her own children and grandchildren.)
Also under the banner of WCC, I brought in two writers to create two additional workshops: “How to Write Science Fiction,” which was created by UTC professor and sci fi author Andrew Najberg, and “How to Write a Graphic Novel,” which was created by artist and writer Jonathon Wurth. All three workshops are hosted at http://www.YouTube.com/@danashavin. They are completely free, accessible day and night, and, if I may say, an incredible resource for the community, as all that’s required is access to a computer and an interest in learning a bit about writing.
For my workshop, in addition to having to make some decisions about what’s most important to know when writing a personal essay, I also had to learn how to record myself on TikTok, share the videos to my desktop, and upload them to Adobe Express, where I then had to learn to edit, add music, and stitch them together. All of this took thousands upon thousands of hours, as I would record a video, watch it, ditch it for minor infractions (a stutter here, a fakey smile there), then re-record it. Again and again and again.
At one point at around the seven hundredth hour, I realized a longish video I had recorded (and been happy with) featured me wearing a too-sheer t-shirt, through which my bra may have been visible. About this I weighed the prospects of going to jail for indecent exposure to minors against having to re-record yet another video, and almost chose jail.
All in all, I estimate that, over the course of my two-hour workshop, I changed my shirt a hundred times, my hairstyle four times (from long and straight to long and wavy to short and straight to short and curly), and my reading glasses almost every day. Which, returning to the earlier hot-person-I-met-in-a-bar comparison, is scarily consistent with my behavior when I am in a new relationship.
I hope you will check out “Writing Classes for the Curious,” especially if you have 12 -18 year-old kids who are or might be interested in writing. Each workshop is just a two-hour investment, but the dividends, for those who discover a passion for the written word, pay out for a lifetime.
That’s not something to be taken for granted.
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Dana Shavin is an award-winning humor columnist for the Chattanooga Times Free Press, and the author of a memoir, The Body Tourist, and of Finding the World: Thoughts on Life, Love, Home and Dogs, a collection of her most popular columns spanning twenty years. More at Danashavin.com. Email her at [email protected].