when to use your emergency brake

Reading is escape. A way to get out of your environment and into your imagination. Did you just find out that the girl you liked doesn’t like you back? Or that your mother lost her job? Or that you’re moving to a new city, where you don’t know anyone? You can take a break from being you and, instead, become a whaler, a space cowgirl, or a father and son on a cross-country motorcycle trip. Reading is a way to leave the real moment for a better moment, if only for a little while.

I felt the same way about driving when I was a teenager. To get in a car was to head somewhere new, to leave, if only for a little while. A good book and a good car are similar in that way: they can get you where you need to go. Even if the destination is nothing more than “not here.” 

But before you can drive, and before you know how to use a book, you have to be taught—parents, siblings, a valiant corps of fearless teachers. Someone takes you to a parking lot and teaches you how to turn the wheel. To turn the page. How to push down on the clutch and find a favorite author. When to use your emergency break and when to counter-steer and what science fiction is and when to stop reading a book that’s too frightening. (Not that the latter has ever happened to me.) 

Isaac Fitzgerald's foreword to 826 Valencia's Quarterly 16 

Illustration by Wendy MacNaughton 

draw your stories

Melissa Chadburn: Do you have any advice for aspiring writers?

AMH: Think about what you want the reader to go away with. Draw your stories if you get stuck. Sometimes it’s useful if you take it out of the world of language to determine what you’re doing, where you’re going and why.

Sometimes I do this in sections. I’ll draw it in abstract shapes and hang various things off that shape. Or sometimes I will define the tone of the story by color. To get the pitch correct I’ll ask how it sounds.

from Tin House

who are you and whom do you love?

1. Who are you and whom do you love?
2. What do you remember about the earth?
3. How will you begin?
4. Describe a morning you woke up without fear.
5. Tell me what you know about dismemberment.
6. Where did you come from / how did you arrive?
7. Who was responsible for the suffering of your mother?
8. What is the shape of your body?
9. How will you live now?
10. What are the consequences of silence?
11. How will you / have you prepare(d) for your death?
12. And what would you say if you could.

I would love to use this in the classroom. From The Vertical Integration of Strangers by Bhanu Kapil via Something Changed. Also this from Stephanie Young.  

catch a fire

Hugo House has a youth writer in residence. NaNoWriMo has a Young Writer's Program. 826 Valencia has college scholarships, a summer camp and publishes gorgeous books of fiction, essays and plays. There's Youth Radio, Figment.com, Wordstock, Litquake has Teenquake, The Alliance for Young Writers and Artists has scholarships and all kinds of publications, and of course, there's Rookie. It's a great time to be a young writer.

Catch a Fire by The Wailers via Etymologie