Naia VanHeke is one of the students participating in Santa Cruz Writes’ Young Writers Program at Davenport’s Pacific Elementary School. (Photo by Chip Scheuer)
Once upon a time there was a knight and the knight fought any kind of monsters you can imagine with his buddy Puss in Boots. On their way back from fighting monsters in a faraway world they came home to find no gold in their village, Jellystone. It had been stolen. The villagers were upset and asked Puss in Boots and the knight to find their gold. They said “yes!”
—From “The Mystery of the Missing Gold” by fourth-grader Roen Rawlings
What you just read is an excerpt from a short story by Roen Rawlings called “The Mystery of the Missing Gold.” Rawlings is a student in Terra Barsanti’s class at Pacific Elementary School, one of two pilot classrooms participating in Santa Cruz Writes’ Young Writers Program.
The program gets a boost from 826 Valencia co-founder Dave Eggers, an acclaimed novelist, who will be helping out at a benefit Sunday, October 28 from 1-4pm at Bookshop Santa Cruz
Her students, including Rawlings, are right now working on an exercise called “Reader’s Theater.” With the help of Young Writers Program volunteers, they take turns reading aloud facts about water and occasionally getting their classmates to guess what word comes next.
One girl recites from a piece of paper, “If flowers don’t get enough water, they’ll…”
“Die!” shouts most of the class.
The girl coyly shakes her head, and Barsanti encourages her to act it out. The
girl bends over and lets her arms hang limply towards her feet.
“Wilt!”
“Wither!”
She perks her head up. “No.” Then she sags back down.
“Droop?”
She snaps back up. “Yes!”
Later, Barsanti and the volunteers encourage the students to think of one fact from the presentations that really resonated with them, and to channel that into some further questions they could ask in an essay on the topic. Volunteers sit at tables in child-sized yellow chairs, each with a group of four or five students.
As the exercise goes on, Barsanti leads all the groups in a class-wide discussion, and some relevant and surprising ideas begin to grow. At first, a boy with a mop of curly brown hair, who often writes under the pen name Fargles Gopher, brings up his current favorite topic: “People waste water by putting water in holes to get gophers out. But then they just move and create other holes in their garden.”
“That’s a topic you could research, ’cause I know you’ve been into gophers,” Barsanti offers.
He throws his hands above his head and begins to dance in his seat, with an exultant, “Yeah!”
“I knew he was going to do something about gophers,” she later confesses, over a cafeteria lunch of stuffed baked potatoes and steamed broccoli.
The knight is tall and thin and he always wore a helmet and he had a magic sword. Puss in Boots was orange with orange stripes and a short orange tail. He wore magic black boots and a black belt with a silver sword.
An arm of the nonprofit Santa Cruz Writes, the Young Writers Program brings trained volunteers into classrooms to help kids with their writing through one-on-one attention. Each classroom’s writing project is on a topic of the individual teacher’s choosing.
Julia Chiapella, director of the Young Writers Program, started Santa Cruz Writes last year along with co-founders Jory Post and Karen Ackland. She is modeling the Young Writers Program after San Francisco’s 826 Valencia writing center.
“What we want to do is value the students’ work. We want to put the students’ work in an arena that says, ‘Your writing is valuable, your writing has meaning, there’s a larger audience for it,’” says Chiapella.
The benefit with Eggers on Sunday is not your typical book event, says Bookshop Santa Cruz owner Casey Coonerty Protti. There will be no reading and no Q&A. Instead, Eggers will be signing copies of his books, as well as drawing one-of-a-kind portraits of pets and objects—no humans. (“Well, maybe hands and feet, in a pinch,” says Chiapella.) Entry and signing is free, while a hundred percent of the sliding scale donation of $50-$100 for the drawings goes to the Young Writers Program. Those who want to secure a place in line for drawings can register online at the Bookshop Santa Cruz website.
Securing an afternoon with an author like Eggers—his latest book, A Hologram for the King, was just named a finalist for the National Book Award—only speaks to the program’s growing momentum. By working closely with 826 Valencia and making connections with Santa Cruz institutions such as Bookshop Santa Cruz and the Department of Education, Chiapella hopes to grow the organization into a highly regarded and well-known institution of its own in the years to come, maybe with its own storefront someday. Mainly, though, the emphasis is on helping kids with their writing—and everything that goes along with it.
“Children need an outlet, in the same way that adults do, and teaching them how to write teaches them how to communicate with the world. They have amazing stories to share, and the Young Writers Program hands them the pencil, sits beside them and encourages them to keep going,” says Kaitlin Fasse, a Young Writers Program volunteer.
Three minutes later, Puss in Boots and the knight noticed a trail of gold leading into the clouds and they started walking into the clouds following this trail of gold. They walked and walked and finally they came to a fork, and they went different ways to make sure they didn’t lose the trail. But the trails both ended on the opposite sides of a tower. The entrances were blocked by two dragons!
Fasse, a UCSC Literature grad and volunteer in Jody Lust’s 5th grade classroom at Gault Elementary—the other Young Writers Program pilot class—was disappointed in her public high school education, and believes programs like Santa Cruz Writes can help turn things around.
“I have recognized that one of the problems plaguing the public school system is the focus on regurgitation of information for testing rather than critical analysis and a deeper comprehension of the material. This focus leaves our students ill-prepared for high school, college and life in general,” she says. “Kids have great stories to tell, and it is our job to encourage them to learn how to express themselves.”
Santa Cruz County Department of Education Superintendent Michael Watkins says the issue is even more pressing with the looming implementation of new California Common Core standards beginning in 2014.
“I think writing has been over the course of the past decade a bit shortchanged. As we moved toward the Common Core new assessments, an extensive portion of the testing will be based on the students’ ability to write critically and express their thoughts,” he says.
The Santa Cruz Department of Education has provided $25,000 in seed money for the first year of the Young Writers Program, which was launched in Februrary. Watkins says he hopes the DOE can provide more in coming years. Chiapella, for her part, hopes they won’t need it.
“This thing is going to take off. This thing is gonna go,” she says. “Once we get our first publication out, and then our second in June, it’s going to be magic. People are going to see what the kids are producing and drawing,” she says.
The knight threw his magic sword at one of the dragons. The dragon disappeared! Puss in Boots took off his boots and threw them at the dragon. That dragon disappeared also!
Santa Cruz Writes already publishes the local literary magazine phren-Z, and with guidance from 826 Valencia co-founder Ninive Calegari, and help from 826’s designer Justin Carder, Chiapella plans to produce a publication of student work for each classroom that participates in the Young Writers Program.
“The big lovely juicy thing about this program is that these projects in teachers’ classrooms all wind up as published pieces of work in high-end publications,” says Chiapella.
The magazines will be available on Santa Cruz Writes’ website, in the classrooms and potentially at local outlets such as Bookshop Santa Cruz.
“These projects are going to sizzle and spark, and the kids are going to get excited about them,” she says. “Children’s hearts and children’s minds are in a position to comment on the world in a much different way than adults are. There’s a freshness and a naiveté that’s beautiful. They can see things that we don’t.”
Oh, and in case you were wondering, the knight and Puss in Boots get the gold.
Dave Eggers
Bookshop Santa Cruz, Oct. 28, 1-4pm
