Shhh... Writing + Authors + Students + Authentic Learning = Top Secret YA Storybox Project by Kathy Halsey

I can't keep quiet about author/storyteller/educator Kevin Cordi's brainchild, the Top Secret YA Storybox Project. This past Sunday while folks were watching the NFL or enjoying a gorgeous fall day, 170+ people crammed into the Thurber Center for the project launch. 

Since its inception, the project has evolved to include an international audience and generated stories from thousands. It's also been featured on the NCTE's blog here. So, what is the secret and how do you get involved?

Storybox Revealed

Established authors and some pre-published authors volunteer their talent to begin a story which will be finished by high school and middle grade student authors who are assisted by teachers and designated story ambassadors. Kevin has launched a story box every other year because he believes in the power of story. 

Kevin Cordi, StoryBox Creator

In the summer, applications are sent in by schools to be considered for the project. Once selected, teachers share the story starters authors created specifically for the StoryBox. Students complete a story, learning much more than the typical "five paragraph essay" so prevalent in schools today. Creative boxes are designed by students that include their bios, stories, and photos for schools that receive the boxes in the second round. 

Launch parties are held for the published authors to meet student authors, for audiences to listen to completed stories, and to vote on their favorite box. This year Kevin hopes to have the completed works published.

Q & A with Kevin Cordi

Explain the logistics of how the boxes proceed through the process. 

Kevin: StoryBoxes have been ongoing since 1995. I have shepherded many, but there are others from our country and other countries that carry on the idea of the StoryBox. How a StoryBox travels depends on the person who launches it. In my case people apply to be a Story Ambassador and become a caretake for the StoryBox - its contents, and the events that bring people to it. They pay to get it and pass it forward.  

I read the applications and decide where will it make the biggest difference and then create a calendar of the places that can expect the StoryBox. At one school 950 students will have the opportunity to share stories and read the YA stories. At another school over 30 special needs students will have the opportunity to enjoy the reading, writing and community communications that originate from the TOP SECRET YA StoryBox.  

Why do the boxes all have secrets supplied by the authors and students? For fun, motivation?

Kevin: At first the idea of the secret was simply an idea, but as we promoted and talked about it, we centered on the belief that suspense leads to good reading and writing. We want to sneak our way into schools. We want our teachers and Story Ambassadors to be unpredictable and this is also what we want from our stories. This StoryBox has secret as at the lead.  

Tell us about the  next project.What theme and grade levels will you target?

Kevin: I've already been approached about a community StoryBox; we have a Vocation StoryBox being launched at my university in November, and a StoryBox for silenced voices.   However, 2019 has big plans. I've chatted with professional storytellers and illustrators, but what it will be is a secret. The launch will be stellar due to the team that is already developing around it. I also have numerous applications to keep the YA Top Secret StoryBox moving past this year.

What do authors gain from this experience?

Kevin: A number of authors have been approached via email, website, and more from students who want to know more about their stories and them. Yesterday an author personalized a note about how he was affected by student Abby’s story. Shelley Pearsall said that she enjoyed hearing and having a direction connection to the StoryBox; Sarah Hans is communicating regularly with a person who is finishing her story.  

I've read this is an international project. What other countries and states are involved?  

Kevin: The better question is where has it NOT been.  The project's been to Ireland, Israel, Scotland, Sweden, and a one room school house in Australia, at the United Nations Geneva Conventions on Children’s Rights, Brazil…

 A Win-Win for All Involved

Everyone I interviewed at the launch praised the YA StoryBox for a myriad of reasons. 

• Parent, writer, and SCBWI member Leanna Watkins and her daughter heartily endorsed the opportunity. They cited student choice, the opportunity to email/connect with authors, and reading/writing outside one's favorite genres as reasons the Storybox made a difference to young writers. 

• Teachers and Ambassadors were just as enthusiastic as student writers. Jane Burton, eighth grade Language Arts teacher from Pleasant View Middle School, and Literacy Coach Jen Zarlino, Story Ambassador from Southwestern City Schools said that authentic learning and real audience participation spur students toward their best work. 
• Authors were amazed to see their beginnings morph into stories they could not have predicted. They had new audiences for published work and the chance to interact with zealous fans. 

  

  YA Author Joy Casella and student author who just may be the next Stephen King.

• Kevin Cordi shared this memory on why such projects are needed. The YA TOP SECRET StoryBox reminds students that they can aspire to be a writer by reading, creating and writing.  I was told when I was young that I could not aspire to be a writer like those I was reading. This is not true. I have witnessed the boundless energy of youth from teaching high school for14+ years. I've learned from their stories and have witnessed how one story can change a person and their thinking.  

Final words from Kevin: The TOP SECRET YA Storybox Project or any StoryBox's purpose is to move conversation about the joy of sharing stories, energizing everyone involving the rich joy and wonder in reading and writing and talking about it. It should not be a secret that reading and writing change lives.  

For more  information on The Top Secret YA Storybox and Kevin Cordi, follow these links:

http://www.kevincordi.com

http://blogs.ncte.org/index.php/2017/10/top-secret-ya-storybox-project/

https://sites.google.com/onu.edu/yaunfinishedstorybox/home

https://sites.google.com/onu.edu/yaunfinishedstorybox/ya-contributors-to-the-storybox?authuser=1

  

 

Inspiration from the local "happenings" column

by Sue Heavenrich

For a number of years I wrote a weekly column for the local paper. “It’s a social column,” the editor said, “about who’s doing what in town.” It’s what some of us call “hyperlocal news” and what other people would refer to as town gossip – sans snark.

For those of us in town, the column was a way to share the good stuff that’s happening: the Wednesday evening dinners at the Methodist Church (free eats and good conversation), the snowmobile club meetings, the golf tournament that raises money for the Ambulance Squad. I reminded moms about Tuesday morning Library Story Hour, announced public hearings, and shared upcoming historical society programs. Every week I got to talk to the plain ordinary folks who make our town what it is.

For a writer, social columns in small town papers – and the “about town” items in the New Yorker – can provide a treasure trove of writing ideas. Within the narrow confines of two-point-three-inch wide columns one can discover:

• The church that provides free meals just got a new dishwasher and stainless steel sinks through a bequest. The guy (as reedy thin as his name would suggest) ran a sawmill in his back yard and sold wooden crates to apple-pickers.
• The “amigos” are a bunch of special education students who meet every Thursday after school to do something for the community. Their current project: baking dog biscuits for the local animal shelter.
• A boy scout who discovered an old cemetery hidden beneath weeds and shrubs. He adopted it for his Eagle project, cleaned it up, built an entry way.
• One of the streets in town is named after a Civil War Hero who died in the battle of Gettysburg clutching a family photo.
• The bed-and-breakfast was a stop on the underground railroad, and may be haunted by spirits.
• The guy at the farmer’s market who grew up in the south can tell you ten different ways to eat kudzu.

 Not that one should write biographies about these folks, but they can inform the characters in your stories. These are just ordinary people doing ordinary things.

Turns out, local newspapers are a wonderful source of inspiration. They are written by people who live in the community, people who walk the beat and talk to the citizens. What seems mildly eccentric to the folks in town could make for a character quirk in a story. Street names may lead to biographies or, at the very least, great character names. News stories present authentic life situations that can help when you’re stuck on plot points. Even the obituaries provide a wonderful source for interesting story prompts and names.

So next time you’re in the library, check out the small town papers – or even the city dailies – and go on a field trip through the newspaper archives.

Margarita Engle on Poetry that Crosses Borders

Margarita Engle is the national Young People’s Poet Laureate, and the first Latino to receive that honor. She is the Cuban-American author of many verse novels, including The Surrender Tree, The Lightning Dreamer, her verse memoir, Enchanted Air, and more recently Forest World. Her newest picture books are All the Way to Havana, and Miguel's Brave Knight: Young Cervantes and His Dream of Don Quixote, a fictionalized first-person biography in verse of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. Her upcoming book, The Flying Girl, How Aida de Acosta Learned to Soar will be published this coming spring. You can learn more about Margarita and her writing at her website and follow her on twitter here. And tomorrow, drop by Sally's Bookshelf to read a review on her recently released picture book, All the Way to Havana.

I am so pleased that Margarita could join us today to share her thoughts on poetry and diversity. Thank you, Margarita!

                                               ~     ~     ~    ~

"Poetry that Crosses Borders"
by Margarita Engle

Diverse books from the richly varied cultures of the United States are important, but they're not enough. Americans are notoriously ignorant about geography. When I speak to classrooms, I’m often shocked by how little the younger teachers know about Cuba. That’s because they didn’t learn about this close neighbor of the U.S. when they were in school.

A high school history teacher in California actually asked me if Cuba is a U.S. protectorate like Puerto Rico.  As a result of this widespread geographic confusion, children are more likely to ask, “What is Cuba?” than, “Where is Cuba?”

After Hurricane Irma, television reporters kept referring to the first U.S. landfall as Key West, when actually it was in Puerto Rico, followed by the U.S. Virgin Islands, and then Key West. Americans have a tendency to forget about any portion of U.S. territory that is not part of the primarily English-speaking mainland. I think it’s time for a new era of education in geography.  One of the most powerful ways to teach about our own country as well as other nations is through literature.

When it comes to international books, there is no substitute for “own voices,” or at least books written by someone who has grown to know a country from within, rather than as a casual tourist. Kwame Alexander’s Solo is a wonderful book partly because he has spent so much time working with volunteer projects in Ghana. Notable ‘own voice’ works of border-crossing poetry include verse novels such as Inside Out and Back Again, by Thanhha Lai, and A Time to Dance, by Padma Venkatraman, as well as picture books such as A Different Pond, by Bao Phi, and Somos Como las Nubes/We Are Like the Clouds, by Jorge Tetl Argueta. 

 My own fascination with books about many nations began in childhood. The first book I bought with my own money was Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe.  It was 1961, and I was ten years old. I didn’t relate to the whites-only “classics,” and there simply weren’t any multicultural children’s stories available in the U.S., so I quite naturally drifted toward international books written for adults, including travel diaries, atlases, and books in translation. I did not return to youth literature until I started reading to my own children in the early 1980s. Even then, there wasn’t much in the way of variety.

Today, statistics on diverse books are still pathetic and discouraging, but I love the We Need Diverse Books movement, and lists such as the International Literacy Association’s Notable Books for a Global Society,which honors works that cross borders. I would love to see more poetry on these lists, and I would love to see more books in translation become available in libraries, classrooms, and bookstores. As Americans of diverse ancestry, how can we continue to isolate ourselves when it comes to reading? People of all ages need to open our minds to the whole world, not just our own neighborhoods. In addition to serving as windows, mirrors, and doorways, books can also be bridges, connecting us across oceans and borders.