Leap Write In!: Adventures in Creative Writing to Stretch and Surprise Your One-of-a-Kind Mind

(Paperback)

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Description

"Writing is inspired by life, and life can be understood through writing." Writing is inspired by life, and life can be understood through writing. Get your writing to flow off the page by exploring the inner treasures of your life. This book presents an inward-bound adventurea way to shake things up from the inside and unleash what you most need and want to say. Leap Write In! is a passport to the wild country of your expanding heart and widening imagination. Stamped on these pages are the exercises, ideas, and prompts that will help you to explore all the wacky, confusing, brave, soul-stirring wonderings and wanderings of your life in a way that will unleash your writing. The ideas, experiments, exercises, and lessons include- ON-THE-SPOT DROPS that offer quick "free-fall" prompts on different themes, such as short-winded poems and seven-line stories SURPRISE-YOURSELF SURVEYS for those who think they know everything about themselves STORY STANZAS that explore feelings and states of being like Fear, Compassion, Kindness, Anxiety, Anger, Jealousy, Happiness, and so on UNTIE-YOUR-MIND WORD LISTS to jump-start stalled imaginations MINI MEMOIRS to unlock personal stories DEFINITION DECODERS to introduce new ideas and styles of writing Here you'll find all of the inspiration you need to create one-of-a-kind poems, stories, imaginative fragments, and real-life on-the-spot sketches to share, or not. Take a breath, relax, reset, and leap write in!

Reviews

Karen Benke gives young writers permission to explore the illogical, the heartspace, the wilderness of the imagination. Unlike other books, she offers guidance in centering and being kind to yourselfprerequisites to freeing your voice. The clear, compelling writing adventures she presents gently pull down any guard, any walls you might have in order to release the unexpected within.Betsy Franco, author of Falling Hard: 100 Love Poems by Teenagers

Writing is always work, but it is also playsomething most of us forget as we grow up. In this most engaging guide Karen Benke reconnects us with the mind at play: imagining and observing, listening and remembering. She nods to our hesitations and then encourages us to leap write in! With her lively and gentle invitations we find our stories and poems are everywherein hair and bones, backward poems and imaginary paintings.J. Ruth Gendler, author of The Book of Qualities

Author Bio

Karen Benke has inspired children in the art of creative writing for sixteen years as a freewrite facilitator, creative writing coach, and poet-teacher in the California Poets in the Schools program, where she specializes in leading creative writing workshops for children seven to fourteen years old. Her writing has appeared in many anthologies and national literary journals. She is the recipient of two teaching grants from Poets & Writers and is a four-time grant recipient from the Marin Arts Council Fund for Artists.