In case you haven't been checking out Guys Lit Wire recently, go read Kris Reisz's recent piece on teens attending a creative writing program in the psych hospital where he works. Here's a bit:
One of the first things a person discovers when they start working at a psych hospital is how many of their friends and friends of friends have stayed in a psych hospital. Like me, most of my patients didn’t expected to wind up here. Most of them won’t talk about it after they leave. It becomes a passing-through place, a point between there and there but never exactly “here.� For most people, it’s not a chapter in their lives but the blank space between one chapter ending and another beginning. It’s a long stretch of empty time to figure out how they got to this point and where they’re heading.
At least those are the things Robert tries to get the adolescents thinking about in his writing class. A drug addict turned drug councilor turned preacher who got his MFA last fall, Robert knows a little about writing and a lot about starting new chapters. Monday through Wednesday, he brings the adolescents into the classroom. They each pick one of the pictures taped to the whiteboard and write a story based it.
Every Thursday, Robert throws a book party, where the kids read what they’ve written in front of an audience. For confidentiality reasons, nobody can come except hospital staff. (The cleaning crew are the kids’ biggest fans.) Robert gets whatever drinks and snacks he can scrounge, and the kids pass out little handmade books with their stories in them. Then, one by one, they stand up and read about their dreams and pain, what they’ve seen and where they want to go from here.
Kris is a wonderful writer and further proof of how glad I am that GLW has come together the way that it has. He's reaching out to his community to try and help teen writers. If you want to help (and it is dirt cheap to lend a hand), then visit his lj and find out how.
