Julie Keisman Miller is an English teacher at Lake Braddock Secondary School. In her previous life she worked in book publishing, both on staff and as a consultant for educational publishers such as Oxford University Press, CQ Press, and Alexander Street Press. She also has written on and off for trade journals, including Publishers Weekly, and writes humor essays that have yet to be published. She lived in Manhattan for many years and loves the city beyond measure. However, her current home in Reston, Virginia is nice, too, because it was here that she started teaching – not to mention her never-dull life with husband, son, daughter, father, and two goofy cats!

ES: Welcome to The Corner, Julie. We are going to make this interview a bit longer than our norm here because you have so many experiences to offer from all perspectives – writer, publisher, AND teacher! 

So, diving right into our first question: you have this miraculous project you complete with middle schoolers - you get them to produce a first draft of a novel in 1 month! Many adults find this a challenge, and most of us find kids tearing their hair out when assigned a simple 5 paragraph essay. Your secret is something called....NanoWriMo! Can you start by telling us what this is?

JM: NaNoWriMo is a project that coincides with National Novel Writing Month in November of each year. Its headquarters is a website that challenges adults and kids to write a novel in one month. The kid site is the more developed one - it provides a whole curriculum for teaching fiction elements in October, in prep for writing in November. For adults, the word goal is 50,000; for students, they set their own goals, then check in each week with their teacher to see what percentage they've finished. NaNoWriMo provides professional-looking posters and stickers and buttons to teachers (you can get these for free if you strategize a bit). 

Once November starts, the website really kicks up the energy with interviews with other writers and published authors. The interviews provide tips for success such as helping kids stay on task - to "just write" and "put away their inner editor."  There are blogs and a place to set up an online classroom where students can chat with each other or with other classes around the world. These help build excitement among the students, but the biggest incentive is the goals that they set for themselves. They love seeing their progress, and it's incredibly instructive to them to have to revise their word count goals mid-way through the project if they discover they've been too ambitious.

At the end of the month, students who've finished get online kudos from the NaNo staff and can get two bound copies of their novels printed by Amazon. This is also cool for the students.

ES: That is so wonderful! There is surely something humans find beguiling about achieving the impossible…since it gets so many kids who otherwise dread writing to be excited about writing a novel! 

Perhaps the first question on everyone's mind is: In the Twittering Age of rampant ADHD, how do you get kids motivated - and committed - to sit and write for so long at a time and for so long every day?

JM: I think the fact that this is all student-driven really gets them going. They pick their own topics and their own word count goals. It's all on them and they love the ability to set their own goals. They challenge each other by watching each others' word counts grow on the goal-tracking posters I put outside in the hall. I think they also feel like they're "getting away with" something in that this isn't structured lesson time. But of course they are applying all the fiction skills they've learned--they're just doing it in a way that seems real and relevant to them--writing their own stories.

ES: Student-driven is definitely a huge factor in classroom success! I just switched to a very open, student-driven classroom model and the kids are loving it. 

What are the brainstorming and outlining tools that you encourage the kids to use before their drafting - or is it just grab that pencil and write?!

JM: NaNoWriMo provides a workbook that leads students through the brainstorming process. The lessons start out asking students to write down novels they love and ones that they hate and write book talks about them. Then they rough out their topic and characters, practice dialog and setting, even watch a TV show to get a sense of how supporting characters can contribute to the plot arc, etc. I think what helps most is the personification of all their insecurities and fears as the "inner editor." They each draw this creature, then put him away, physically--in folder or pencil case or some such--so that they are free to create and not worry about the mistakes that might happen. 

ES: Oh my goodness, I absolutely LOVE the idea of creating a physical inner editor and then tucking that lil munster away! 

What about your revision process with them? And do you find kids are more interested in revising a novel - something so few of them ever dreamed they were capable of producing?

JM: This is the hard part - the real work is in revising. This year is my first year doing the project with my 7th graders, and because of scheduling problems/fitting in all the curriculum I've had trouble getting back to the editing as regularly as I'd like. That said, whenever we revisit the novel, I hear "yay"s and "oh great - cool" from the students. 

I had the students pull out excerpts to work on - there is no time to edit their whole novels. I also broke up the editing process into chunks (I used to work in book publishing, so I know the process pretty well). I had the students work with partners and switch roles between author and editor, critiquing each other's novels using Google docs. (I did the whole project on Google, but it can also be done on paper.)  They started with content editing, using questions such as: “Does the plot move forward logically?”  “Have you told the reader your protagonists' name?” “Is the setting described enough for the reader to "see" where the action is happening?” And so on. 

Then we did research, picking a topic from their novels that they want to know more about so as to make their stories more authentic. 

Finally, we do copy editing - the nitty gritty of punctuation and grammar. All through this, I'm teaching the curriculum related to the part of the editing we're working on: expository essays for the research, grammar lessons during the grammar editing, etc.

ES: It’s fabulous how you tuck the regular English lessons into their beloved individual projects. And they are so lucky to have someone who worked in publishing to help them!!

What are some of your favorite reactions from the kids about this project? 

JM: Here is some feedback from different kids:

“[My favorite part…] was experiencing the rush of writing a novel in 30 days.” 

“I really enjoyed creating characters that were all different from each other. It was fun to make their personalities original and make their lives change in miraculous ways.”

“I just made my font bigger then smaller to trick myself into typing.” 

“Before I changed my goal, the project as a whole was quite daunting and it felt like no matter what I did, I would never finish, but I just HAD to.” 

“The most fun part about this project for me was seeing how much my story changed from my original idea as I went along.”

“If you set a goal, you can always change it, don’t be afraid to set a crazy goal, because it will motivate you, and if you can’t reach it, you can always lower it to a more reasonable one.  I set my goal but then didn’t use my time wisely so my goal became too hard for me so I lowered it.”

“I think I'm best at writing dialog, because I daydream a lot, so making up fake conversations that sound real come pretty naturally to me. For example, when I wasn't too sure what to write next, I decided to add some dialog, so I stood up and acted it out with myself to see what I would say naturally, and then changing it up a bit to fit the character that was talking.”

“My favorite part of this project was meeting my characters.”

ES: You’ve certainly inspired many kids! It must be a great satisfaction to you at the end of every day.

As it turns out, your mother, Robin Hathaway, was a writer with many children's fans! What was her method of drafting? Did this influence you in any way in terms of your teaching?

JM: My mom is with me in spirit in the classroom every day that I teach, and especially during the novel project. She was a writer, but also knew so much about English and American literature. Growing up with her influence, and my dad for history, was like living out a humanities course every day, but without the boring lectures. ;)  

My mom didn't get published until she was 60, so her motto when speaking to fledgling authors (and seasoned ones) was "never give up!"  I tell this to my kids and use it throughout their writing adventure, because there are definitely moments when they get discouraged or tired or scattered in their thought processes, and just want to stop. I also try to channel her knowledge of authors past and present to tell the kids stories about them and expand their literary knowledge while entertaining them too.

That doesn't really answer your question, though. Mom always said that she wasn’t an "outliner."  She just wrote her draft, then outlined from what she’d put down. She often said that the characters in the novel took on a life of their own and she was just there to see them through their adventure. I know a lot of writers say this, and I think it's because they really do experience this. Some of my students have said this too. I love when they do, because that tells me that they are really "in the moment" with their novel - creating and connecting with their characters.

ES: As a writer, it is also one of my favorite moments – seeing people and situations spring to life on their own between your fingers and the blank page!

You were in educational publishing until just 2 years ago - any advice for our nonfiction authors reading this?

JM: I spent most of my years on the marketing end, so I would say the harsh reality is that most authors have to know how to promote themselves, and this must start even before their book has been accepted for publication! Being online is important nowadays: a blog, a twitter account, having a "presence" among the audience the author is trying to reach. 

Also, research your industry, go to conferences in the field you're writing about, get to know "names" in the industry, maybe even get them to give you a positive quote to include with the query letter or to post on your website. These are all good ideas to separate yourself from the pack. Research the publishers, too, because different houses specialize in different types of books, of course. If your book is about spirituality, for instance, do a search on Amazon for similar books, find some quality titles, then see who published them. It's a good way to target your publication quest. 

Also, of course, never give up!!!

ES: Wow, Julie, thank you for giving us so much of your time and sharing such great advice from your wide-ranging experiences!

To contact Julie by email, click here.

Kitty Felde’s day job is covering Capitol Hill for a public radio station in southern California, KPCC. She’s won many awards, including Journalist of the Year - three times! She’s been published in numerous print publications, including “The Los Angeles Times” and “USA Today.” Kitty is also a playwright. Her courtroom drama about the Bosnian War, “A Patch of Earth,” won the Maxim Mazumdar New Play Competition, was produced around the world, and is included in a collection published by the University of Wisconsin Press. The Los Angeles theatre company Rogue Artists Ensemble commissioned her to adapt stories by Nikolai Gogol for the stage. The “Gogol Project” won the LA Drama Critics Circle Award. Kitty is currently at work on her second middle grade novel - a mystery set on Capitol Hill. 

ES: Welcome, Kitty! You have an impressive resume. And somehow, despite your successes as a journalist and playwright, you’ve found time to be an active volunteer. So before we jump into talking kidlit biz, tell us a little about your experiences with Heart of Los Angeles Youth (HOLA)…it sounds like a wonderful organization! 

KF: HOLA is a program for kids living in the poor neighborhoods just west of downtown Los Angeles. It's a dangerous, gang infested area. Many of the kids have older siblings who are gang members. One of the writers I worked with was in a wheelchair from a gang shooting. 

How I got hooked was through a roundabout connection. 52nd Street Project is a New York playwriting program started by Willie Reale. An actor pal of mine invited me to come help out with a similar program he was doing at HOLA. Zip forward a couple of years, and I was running it. 

We'd meet Saturday mornings for six weeks, learning the structure of plays and how to create character and conflict. Each kid would have his or her own adult mentor. Then, at the end of six weeks, we'd head off for a weekend retreat, usually at a youth hostel near the LA Harbor that used to be a military base. We'd trade off cooking and doing dishes, writing all day, playing basketball, hiking down to the lighthouse or the tide pools. At the end of the weekend, each kid would have written a 5-10 minute play. 

The acting troupe at HOLA - again, adults and kids - would perform the plays in front of standing-room only crowds.

The kids were amazing, writing about everything from talking fish to gangsters. One of my writers - all grown up - met her husband-to-be at my radio station.

I miss HOLA.

ES: What an inspiring story! And now you have set your sights on kidlit. What do you envision writing for children?

KF: I'd been a member of SCBWI years ago, but never felt "ready" to write a kids book. One of my plays, "The Luckiest Girl," is an original 'theatre for young audiences' piece. But I found that children’s theatres across the country are adapting kids’ books, not producing original work. So I turned "The Luckiest Girl" into a middle grade novel. I found an agent and I'm collecting rejections as we speak.

I had such a good time with "The Luckiest Girl," I started working on a second middle grade novel about Fina Mendoza, a little girl whose father is a Congressman from California who solves the mystery of "The Demon Cat of Capitol Hill." I'm on draft #5.
 
ES: I love that title! And mysteries are very popular now…where do you get your ideas??

KF: They seem to find me. "The Luckiest Girl" was inspired by my time in Holland, covering war crimes trials for public radio and discovering the Dutch version of Santa Claus - Sinterklaas - and his politically incorrect sidekick in blackface Zwarte Piet. I was shocked to discover that the Dutch saw nothing wrong with “Black Pete.” 

At the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the American judge Gabrielle Kirk McDonald became my hero – and my model for Gran in “The Luckiest Girl.” Zwarte Piet was always a conundrum, she told me. She and a number of other African-American ex-pats agonized every December about whether to condemn or ignore the caricature. Over the past few months, media outlets around the world have reported on the uproar over Piet. UNESCO proposed putting him on their “naughty” list of human rights abuses. Yet a Dutch Facebook site praising Piet got a MILLION likes in one day! 

My newest book "The Demon Cat of Capitol Hill" was inspired by my own experience as a California kid looking at life in Washington as something strange and unusual. I get to capture all those little quirks I see and put them in my heroine Fina's mouth.

ES: I think it’s fabulous how you can bring your diverse life experiences and interests into your writing. What plays do you find you return to again and again, either for inspiration or for the pure joy of it?
 
KF: "The Importance of Being Earnest" always makes me laugh and "Death of a Salesman" devastates me - not just the tragedy of Willie Loman, but the sheer talent of Arthur Miller. I will never be able to write like that! 

But my passion is seeing NEW plays - particularly those by women playwrights. 

ES: Thank you for stopping by The Corner, Kitty, and best of luck in all your endeavors!

To visit Kitty Felde, click here!

Taking a quick reading break to join us today is Lauren McBride!

Lauren is a school librarian at Seneca Ridge Middle School of the Loudoun County Public School District in Virginia. She is a licensed and certified library media specialist and has a Masters of Library and Information Science from Pratt Institute (New York City). She is also a freelance writer and has written for School Library Journal and Rosen Publishing. She enjoys running, spending time with her supportive husband, active little boys, and sweet rescue dog named Skylander (nicknamed Skylar). 

She is pictured above with the students from her Sudan reading and fundraising project, as well as the Lost Boy speaker who gave a community talk (Lauren is on the far right). 

ES: Thanks for joining us today, Lauren! What do you see as the role of a school library in the 21st century?

LM: School library media centers are the hub for information for the school community. As the world of information is becoming more global, libraries have a unique opportunity to introduce students to global issues and inspire and teach them to make a positive difference in the world. With a combination of books and 21st century technology, students can learn, think, and share to make a difference in the world. 

ES: I know you’ve been responsible for some fabulous projects at school, even contributing an article to School Library Journal about your experiences. Would you like to share an example with our readers today?

LM: This year in my middle school library, my Virginia Readers’ Choice book club learned about the crisis situation in South Sudan while reading the book A Long Walk to Water by Linda Sue Park. Inspired to help South Sudan and raise awareness in our community, we partnered with a local non-profit organization, Sudan Sunrise, to bring a former Lost Boy of Sudan to speak at our school in a community talk. We raised enough funds to purchase 15,000 meals for students at the Manute Bol Primary School in South Sudan. This project was highlighted in a web feature in School Library Journal.  A follow up article discusses ways that school librarians can use a combination of books and web sources to encourage global thinking among students and to help support girls’ education around the world. 

ES: Wow! Congratulations, and thank you for serving as an inspiration to us all! What is the American Library Association doing to help foster this transition in the role of school libraries?

LM: Collaboration and partnerships in teaching social justice through school libraries are being recognized and awarded with a new award by the American Library Association (ALA). The first annual Roald Dahl’s Miss Honey Social Justice Award was launched this year. According to the ALA website, the award acknowledges “teaching by school librarians and the use of school library resources to convey a child’s sense of justice as exemplified by many of the characters in the works of Roald Dahl.” We can make a difference, one book and one library at a time. 

ES: Thank you for taking some time to share your amazing work with us today! 

Follow Lauren on Twitter @bravelibrarian!

The interview that will kick off The Corner blog is with a star teacher in Loudoun County Public Schools!  

Cheryl Golden is a veteran teacher of over fifteen years with an additional ten years of training, coaching and managing in the corporate world.  She holds a Master's in Educational Leadership, is a teacher consultant for the Northern VA Writing Project, serves on the Virginia Association Teachers of English state board and is a National Board Certified Teacher.  Her goals are being a lifelong learner and assisting others in learning and developing a passion for reading and writing. She currently is teaching at Seneca Ridge Middle School.

Welcome, Cheryl!  And thank you for starting off our conversations here at The Corner.  

Despite being a superpower in the world, the US still struggles to lift the literacy levels of children reading below-grade. What are your thoughts on this issue?

After 16 years of teaching, what still amazes me is the number of children who enter middle school reading two or more grade levels below.  Yes, often they are students who speak English as their second language.  We need to address this gap and help to close it.  Unfortunately, the challenge is compounded by the fact that these struggling readers often come from families at or below the poverty line. Therefore, these families usually lack the resources to work on literacy at home. Here are strategies we can focus on in school to help our struggling readers:

• Put books in their hands that are on their independent reading level. Some titles I've recently used for this purpose are the I Survived series by Lauren Tarshis, the Underworld series by Tony Abbott, and all of Roald Dahl’s books. For those who are reading slightly below grade level, at a 5th/6th grade level, they love Roland Smith and Sharon G. Flake books.
• Identify "what do good readers do" - often at a subconscious level - and bring those skills to the conscious level for struggling readers. Then they can practice these skills until it becomes a natural part of what they do. Examples of these skills are: a) figuring out what’s confusing them, b) setting goals for getting through the reading, and c) use of many strategies to create understanding and d) having the confidence to persevere.
• Recognize what the brain needs to move things from short term memory to long term memory and apply them to the reading process. The “Four Card Match” is a good example of how to do this. The four cards include the vocab word, its definition, its graphic representation, and a sentence using the word – with all the vocab cards one color, the definition cards another color, and so on. The use of color, picture, physical movement, and the variety of ways to interact with the word all assist the student in transferring vocabulary from working to long term memory, and from there to the reading process.
• Partner struggling readers with strong readers for modeling and think-out-louds. For our readers who are not teachers, think-out-louds are when a teacher or strong reading partner reads and then "thinks out loud" about what they are processing while reading.  For example, what visual images they’re picturing, what connections they’re making, or what questions they’re asking themselves. 
  

Your students are lucky to have you helping them!  But sometimes, you must feel frustrated with limitations that are out of your control.  If you could sit at a magical roundtable filled with publishing representatives and tell them what you desperately need more of in the classroom, what would you say?

Oh, sitting at that roundtable would be like winning the lottery for me!  One of the biggest gaps we see in middle school English classes is a lack of high interest/low readability for our students reading below grade level.  Often in my 6th and 7th grade English classes, there will be a mix of reading levels varying from 2nd grade up through post high school.  It is never a problem to find challenging material for my strong readers.  However, finding "cool," acceptable-looking books that interest middle schoolers (especially boys), AND that are written at the 3rd-5th grade level, is extremely difficult.  I would welcome more publishers to take on this challenge.

Thank you for sharing your time and expertise with us, Cheryl! If you would like to serve at the 2014 National Council of Teachers of English Annual Conference in Washington, D.C., please email Cheryl at cgolden@lcps.org.