MISSOULA - Writing is a subject that can be hit or miss for kids — some love it, some hate it.
The Missoula Writing Collaborative works to increase the former.
The group hosts a variety of summer camps for kids as young as third grade.
During the third week in July, high school students spent time workshopping their writing with instructors who are passionate about the subject.
The Rattlesnake Writing Workshop involved kids in grades nine through 12.
Instructors Dana Fitz Gale and Sam Dunnington ran the kids through various writing exercises for three hours a day.
“Whatever the kids are interested in, really, we try to offer,” Dunnington says.
The kids wandered through the Missoula Art Museum on Wednesday, July 19, 2023, to find poetic inspiration from the pieces. It is a technique that Dunnington says dates back to the Iliad.
“Ekphrastic writing is a really fun writing process with a really deep history. It’s basically looking at visual art and using that,” he says. “And so it’s a fun thing to sort of connect the kids to a deep writing tradition and also I think is a really useful generative exercise.”
The group gathers on the University of Montana campus, but the instructors try to get them out writing in new areas every day.
“We like to go to a variety of different settings just to kind of emphasize that writing isn’t just some academic thing that happens in the classroom, that it can be anywhere in the world,” Fitz Gale says.
For the teenagers at the Rattlesnake Writing Workshop, writing already comes naturally, but having a dedicated time to hone their skills is still important during the summer months.
“Just getting to sit and write all day, it’s great,” 17-year-old Brogan says. “Oftentimes I’m at home and a lot of that time I spend writing as well, but it’s different then because I’m just alone with my computer and sometimes I don’t get motivated. I just sit there writing the same word over and over again.”
“I really enjoy the quiet and the places we go to write,” 14-year-old Pepper says. “I’ve enjoyed the peacefulness of it, I find it very calming.”
More than time to write, the teenagers are able to participate in critique amongst their peers. After about an hour at the art museum, they all sat down to read their poems.
“You get used to it when you do it more and more, but it’s really nerve-racking,” 15-year-old Leah says.
To ease some of those nerves, the instructors share their own work as well.
“I think it’s important for us because they’re taking a big risk when they share their stuff, and that’s hard, especially for some of the more introverted kids, so we have to model that we’re willing to be vulnerable and take that risk too,” Fitz Gale says.
Fitz Gale is a published and awarded fiction writer while Dunnington has a Masters in Fine Arts and has published several articles in newspapers and magazines.
Still, the two say they gain inspiration from the young writers’ work.
“It’s been great hearing the stuff the students have come up with, writing alongside them, I’ve generated a lot of stuff that’s been useful for my own practice, it’s been a lot of fun,” Dunnington says.
They both have a passion for spreading the joy of writing and see the value in teaching kids creative expression.
In fact, Fitz Gale wrote her doctoral thesis on the benefits of creative writing for young students.
“It’s critical to children’s language development and for thinking skills,” she says. “It helps to build skills like empathy and compassion. It builds friendship skills, caring about other students, it builds a positive classroom environment. So I really feel that it’s about more than just, are you able to write a nice poem. It’s about helping students to also learn how to be a good friend and a good citizen of the world.”
Dunnington and Fitz Gale also volunteer during the school year with the Missoula Writing Collaborative.
They visit classrooms and host workshops with students that may be a bit more reluctant to write.
“So to me, that’s incredibly rewarding too, just to help kids discover how much power there is in creative writing and how much freedom they can have to tell us whatever they want to tell us,” Fitz Gale says.
The Missoula Writing Collaborative believes every child can benefit from learning how to write.
“Whether or not you want to go on to become a more professional writer or sort of deep in the practice, I think just that ability to express oneself is something that just pays dividends the whole way down,” Dunnington says.
More information on other programs with the collaborative can be found on their website.
