If you have some time to spare this weekend, you should participate in this fascinating public art project. An artist is inviting the public to write down “What Needs to be Said.” Responses will be pinned to the wall of the site of the project on University Ave., then burned when the project is complete.
It’s a quirky and powerful idea, and you can say you were a piece of art history!
Do you know about Stone Soup magazine?
Stone Stoup is a quality print magazine written entirely by kids up to 13 years old. They invite submissions, book reviews, and illustrations. And get this: if you’re printed, you get paid!
It takes confidence and bravery to submit your work to be published, but I can tell you from looking at your work all summer, Loft Young Writers, that you are good enough to be published. I hope you try!
For inspiration, take a look at this beautiful sample copy of Stone Soup.
Ladies and gentlemen, in this very special post–my last as summer education assistant!–it is my great pleasure to present…
Young Justice: A Superhero Story, by an intelligent and adorable crew of 5 young writers/superheroes who wrote it collaboratively in Kristin Fitzsimmons’s Superheroes: Dramatic Storytelling & Theater Games. (Click on any image to enlarge.)
By: Andrew K., Iris S-M., Adam M-C., Sophia W., and Jakin L., ages 6-8
One day, five friends discovered they were superheroes. Denard Span found out he was a superhero by hitting a five hundred foot homerun. Captain America broke a wall into a thousand pieces.
Patricia was out on a sunny day – she wished it could rain and it automatically thunderstormed.
Viper was walking in the woods and a snake went up on her head. Her hair turned into snakes. She turned into a snake.
Lance was a superhero at first. He was a superhero and then he found out he wasn’t. Just your typical normal, awesome guy.
Somebody puts a bomb in our base. Denard Span hits the bomb out and it lands on the bad guys’ base and their base blows up. Then the bad guys cry like babies. Then they remember they’re bad guys and they stop crying. The villains escape and they say they’re going to destroy all the tall buildings in the city.
The bad guys release t-rexes and they destroy some buildings. Nooooooooo, T-Rex! Patricia makes it thunderstorm and hail at the same time.
Captain America hangs onto Viper when she turns into a snake and uses sleep bubbles to put the dinosaurs to sleep. Denard Span throws baseballs at the dinosaurs. Viper poisons them. Lance goes crazy with the car machine. They beat the dinosaurs but they have to fight the regular bad guys and they win. They go around the world fighting crimes.
THE END
Posted in Links, Student submissions
Minnesota’s not just the Land of 10,000 Lakes; 10,000 Quirks; and 10,000 conversations about the weather–it’s also the Land of at Least 10,000 Reasons to Love our Fantastic Arts Scene.
Here at the Loft, we are all about supporting writers (young and young-at-heart) in their creative process, but we’re also all about supporting other forms of the arts: visual, musical, and, this week, performing. Lucky for us, the Twin Cities are home to one of the one the nation’s largest festivals of performing arts: the Minnesota Fringe Festival.
Fringe? What’s the Fringe? you ask, your mind conjuring images of an awesome leather jacket.
Even more awesome than that leather jacket, the Minnesota Fringe consists of 168 performances in over a dozen Twin Cities venues over the course of 10 days. The shows cover the range of just about every genre you can imagine, from the tragic to the terrifying, from the awesome to the absurd. Some include music, some include dance, some include puppets, some include fire. With that range, you’re bound to find something that interests you.
These performances are especially kid-friendly and these ones are geared toward teens, but if you browse the site, you’ll probably find dozens that will interest you. (I’m so overwhelmed with choice that I barely know where to start!)
The festival began yesterday and continues through Sunday, Aug. 14. Tickets cost $12, $10 with a student I.D., or $5 for kids 12 and younger. If that price still seems steep to you (I know it is for me!), consider volunteering. For every shift you volunteer, you’ll get one free ticket to a show. Not bad, huh?
Are you familiar with Intermedia Arts? They’re currently one of a dozen Twin Cities theaters hosting the Minnesota Fringe Festival (which you should check out anyway because it’s awesome), but they also offer a service we thought you should know about: a young writers group!
From the program’s site:
A monthly gathering of teen poets, novelists, fiction writers, essayists and more. We laugh, work, create, and grow together in a community workshop setting—come check it out! (No registration necessary; this is an ongoing drop-in group).
They meet every 2nd Tuesday of the month, which means their next meeting is next Tuesday, Aug. 9. Go check it out, and if you like it, how about sharing some of your work here on the blog?
Many writers, young and young-at-heart alike, have trouble relaxing and letting words fly because we’ve all been trained to correct ourselves. As many of us have experienced, correcting your spelling and grammar can really interrupt your flow when you’ve got a great idea you need to get onto the page.
If you want your work to seem professional, you will have to get around to checking your grammar at some point in the writing process, but no one’s perfect, and even with the help of Spell Check, everyone’s bound to make a mistake at some point.
That’s why I wanted to share this column by Jill Pertler at Writers Weekly. Despite triple checking a query letter she sent to some important people, a wee-but-significant error escaped her attention. Click on the link to find out how she made it work for her.
