I love listening to teenagers. The more you listen, the more they tell you. And if you're only pretending you're listening, or listening with an agenda, they know it. In a recent session, a student showed me that if I really listened, we could travel into a different eco-system, where caring for each other was part of the ecology. Out of your element, or in it? A student was telling me about his love of scuba diving. Newly certified, on one of his first group dives, he was daunted by the oxygen tank, and the thought of bumping loose a cartridge. How to parcel out the air? His nervousness made him a conservative in what he would explore. (The analogies to COVID life loom). But he was also, I think, awed by the power of being in a completely different element, the underwater ocean, that wasn't really meant for us. Not in a sustained way beyond the doing the crawl or getting rolled by a hook-shaped wave. The Sharks and the goofballs came On his wreck dive with his family (also a pandemic analogy, there?), a family of sharks--and I swear he called them nar-sharks, to which fact my five year old exclaimed LIKE NARWAL NARWAL SHARKS??-- swam by. A small flock. Other goofballs on the dive went out of their way to take a selfie of themselves with the shark pod with a long selfie stick camera. Scrambling around for the money shot. Grinning, peace signs, oxygen burbles. They were posing with their stupid selfie stick IN FRONT OF A FAMILY OF SHARKS, he said, like zero common sense. I mean, sure, try to get your picture, but stop behaving like such an idiot. His dad taught him to hang back, to see if you could get a photo without disrupting the balance and bothering the sharks. Because: BOTHERING SHARKS. Be humble, he said. These are sharks. They just want to hang out with their families. As I listened to him, he relaxed and grew funnier. Once I had given him his writing prompts for the week and we hung up, all I could think about was goofballs who Continue Reading …
Writing Tips
Chill out writing strategies that work
I promise these are writing strategies that work... ...only if you do them. These strategies might feel uncomfortable and awkward at first, but so does being born. And that didn't stop us, did it? Both writing strategies involve a wall, which everyone has or can find. Any wall will do! Nothing special there. After you've learned the practice, you'll be able to IMAGINE a wall, but it helps at first to have a physical wall to use. Strategies that work: Being Seen Sit in front of the wall. Elevate your hips on a support or cushion if your knees are annoyed right away. Feel or imagine a tall spine and the dignity you were born with. Relax your shoulders (always). Imagine the wall is looking at you. It can see you. Its eyes are the warm accepting eyes of a grandparent, or any adult who cares for you immensely. If you don't have an adult like that in your life, invent one, or imagine your ancestor, or a really loving person in a movie. Your only job is to let yourself be seen. Keep relaxing. Don't try to hide anything from the wall-- it's just a wall! When you feel done, get up, but don't feel the need to snap out of it. What if the people in your world could really see you? What would they see? Strategies that work: Breathing Fully Start the same way: sit in front of your wall as comfortably as possible. Imagine the wall has a mural on it. Imagine the coolest, most vivid mural you can think of, or look one up, first, so you can have a bright image in mind. But just one problem: this mural has somehow become covered over in dust and funk! As you inhale, imagine and truly feel that you are slowly drawing a layer of dust off the mural, revealing a gorgeous, exciting piece of art. As you exhale, imagine that you are scattering the dust, revealing more of the art. Breathe in very slowly, so none of the dust goes up your nose: you are just clearing space. Breath out gently, so that the layer of dust is scattered lightly: you are Continue Reading …
Change with the Change: Writing Advice for trying times
A story about dying is always a familiar story, right? The ultimate change challenge? “They are dying!” I said, like this was a surprise or needed pointing out. The daffodils, poster girls for Spring, now looked like used latex gloves* on stubbornly green stems. My mother gave us the bunch early in self-isolation, soon after New York City had gone into lockdown. She cut them from the ruthless crop in her yard, as she did every spring when they briefly appeared. When my husband dropped off ice cream and Lysol spray (pandemic essentials), she sent them home for us--my husband, our 22 month old and our 4 year old-- to bring the outside in. The daffodils made me cry because they work. They are the symbol of arrival and transience, and they live and die boldly and quickly. They were also, very simply, from my mother. At that moment, my belly was ribboned with anxiety that she and my father, too, were facing imminent COVID transience. I imagined what so many are experiencing: final separation from us in an overwhelmed and handicapped hospital system. The fear for my parents, the longing to cling, flared up: is it ridiculous cling to summer’s bounty when autumn has already dusted the trees of their leaves? For how long can you save that last blueberry before it shrivels? But despite my contrafactual wish otherwise, die the daffodils did. I did not want to look at a dying thing on my table but I equally did not want to throw them out. Problem. Turn it into Art & Make Your Meaning So I dried them. I turned them upside down, bound their stems with a rubber band, and hung them from a random nail on the wall with a garbage twisty-tie. Their vibrant yellow faded, their vibrant green went dormant inside an unremarkable brown. But they did not rot, and they became something else beautiful. Something I could keep. I know, snooze, a story about daffodils drying. But stay with me here. Days later, my Continue Reading …
5 minutes in the bathroom to write your college essay
Sometimes, you bump into the subject of your writing when you're not trying-- like in the bathroom. The classier version of this is called the "shower effect"-- it's a real thing. You only need 5 minutes and faith. Often the trying itself keeps your topic at arm's length, stiffly.But not straining in trying? And simply being available? That woo-woo stuff? It often works far more effectively. GAH. How annoying and wonderful is that? JUST FIVE MINUTES? As my mentor Rick Benjamin says, "It's really five minutes + your whole life leading up to this moment." DETAILS. Give Your College Essay a "Quick Change" in the stall This afternoon, I went to the single-stall bathroom at a non-profit where I teach personal essay writing to (some of NYC's most awesome) 7th and 8th grade public school students. The door was locked, but within minutes, my student came out, fancied up: a maroon dress over a filled, collared shirt, black knee socks, and black patent leather pointy toe shoes. She was ready for her upcoming school interview. Moments before, she'd been hunched over her math worksheets, solving equations, chewing her lip and eating her sweatshirt string nervously. (Side Fact: I haven't solved an equation since puberty settled in, so I always salute students doing such worksheets, though in my case eating strings would be more productive than isolating the variable and so on. <---WHAT I RECALL FROM ALGEBRA BUT I DIGRESS.) What's I'm recommending here is, despite the number 5, not mathematical-- but you do need structure in the end. little time, big difference Thing is, I was surprised to see my student emerge from the bathroom so changed. It struck me I'd never seen her dressed up, and her whole persona and body language had shifted with the outfit. "You got this!" I told her (likely true), which is maybe the only thing worth saying right before someone has an interview. Especially when you can assume they've already done the most Continue Reading …
What if I don’t have something to write about?
This is a thing I hear a lot: I don't have something to write about. Franklyn said it. Erin said it. Fatou said it. You might have said it. It's not true. And your admissions essay writing process should prove that to you. Are your cells not dividing, just because you can't see it happening from your current vantage point? No: in so far as we know, we are always breaking something down in order to grow. So there is always a bitty thing leading to a bigger thing. That's writing: the power of the specific and small to expose something more. You do have something to write about: you can write about anything. Choose smaller Often, the students that show up for my help carting their Big Something to write about end up having to switch gears and pick a new topic. They were trying to impress, not investigate. They need to get really small. The orange rind they left in their backpack in third grade, that started their interest in problems mold can cause. The way their mom's tamales smelled on Sunday mornings, that led to family competition who could eat theirs the slowest. The time they missed the bus and found a dying baby bird. These things are small. They are not often things we call Something. The best writing begins with anything. Sometimes, it's better that you write beginning with something random, not loaded, so you feel more free to explore: "paperclip"; "backwash"; "pothole"; "queasy." Our minds are so good at making up stories-- and so you feed your mind a word, it often spits out a situation, a scene, a reflection. Follow that, open the boring-looking door, get nosy. Find or make a pattern with your thinking We are pattern detecting machines; but we are also pattern generating machines. When I ask students to make a connection or association in their personal essay writing, the a-ha's, I'm really asking them to find the pattern, and if they can't find one, make one. Is it true that Orion's belt is just hanging out in the Continue Reading …
Mix It Up
My son Ro, who is four, just started in a soccer league. Four year-olds don't know attention is a thing that can have a span-- their coaches have to mix it up to keep them engaged. When their sweet Coach N explained, "Now I am a shark, and you are fish crossing my ocean, and if your ball gets away from you, I'll eat you!," they took him very seriously. They didn't want to get eaten on the first day of practice. Who does? Also four year-olds excel at being literal. When It Comes to Sports, Love (and Writing), Mix It Up! The lead coach, who has been coordinating community soccer leagues since I was four, watched from the sidelines, and played rapturously with my 1 year-old. He was chatty, and did not stop talking if you were within reaching distance. At the end of the clinic, while he watched Ro eat peanut butter and honey, he waxed on about the league he started in New Jersey for Orthodox Jewish (OJ) kids on Sundays. They couldn't play on Saturday, regular Soccer Day, because of observing the Sabbath. Turned out local Seventh Day Adventists (SDA) kids also couldn't play on Saturdays because THEY also observe the Sabbath. So eventually some SDA kids migrated onto the OJ team. Then parents showed up to watch. Turned out a number of the parents were widowed or otherwise single (the divorce scene is opaque). Slowly, mutual romantic interests developed--"mixing" between the adults. The kids didn't get eaten by sharks, made goals and dirtied knees across religious lines, and god didn't smite anyone. Meanwhile, the parents flirted and paired off. A Good Story is Still Good the Millionth Time! I could tell the coach had told this story a million times before. But Ro didn't mind, because he was eating ALL the peanut butter and honey and admiring his shin guards. And Aria didn't mind, because she was busy trying to pick up the cones that marked the sidelines and cigarette butts on the astroturf (really?). And I generally like people telling stories Continue Reading …