Sarah Kay (born 1988) is an American poet who began performing poetry at age 14. Sarah Kay specializes in spoken-word poetry. The performance aspect of her work is clear in all of her videos. To start getting to know Sarah Kay’s work and philosophy, watch her TEDxEast talk above, titled “How Many Lives Can You Live?”. If you find the depth that I do in this talk, visit Sara Kay’s website for access to a substantial number of her performances. Poetry was long performed more than it was written down. Performance is still a central tradition for poets in a way that reading prose is not for prose writers. Spoken-word poetry is, as Sarah explains, a combination of theater and poetry that cannot really be pinned to a page. As she is young and started performing poetry at age 14, she is a poet many of your students will be able to relate to. If you already have, or are thinking of having, a poetry stage in your classroom or school, Sarah’s work ought to help you. This is a rich, deep, well performed talk about writing. It is about writing and life and how you can use writing to experience lives that you, yourself, will never live. At the core of the greatest stories in Western literature — for example, Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert; Moby Dick, by Herman Melville; Othello, by William Shakespeare; Hard Times, by Charles Dickens, The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner; The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison — is the author’s skill in bringing characters who are completely different from each other (and from the author) into being. Whether you are a young writer or a teacher of young writers, listen to Sarah Kay’s TEDxEast talk. I know teachers will find many ideas that will fit into and enrich your current writing program. This is a piece you will want to visit many times. By way of introduction to Sarah Kay’s childhood and development as a poet, in particular the importance of her elementary education, watch this second talk below. She effortlessly glides from a standard kind of presentation to a gossamer glittering shockingly vivid and effortless gorgeous storytelling. She also links her 14-year-old self, when she first started performing poetry, to her 24-year-old self. Many students will find the link between her 8th-grade self and her young-adult self exciting and inspiring.
Teaching Writing
Writing Activity: Bringing Animal Characters Alive Through Gesture
Taking as inspiration the world of puppeteers for the play “War Horse” this activity teaches students how to use gesture to make animal characters more realistic. This 23-minute TED Talk is about how the puppet horse in the play War Horse is made to feel alive. Animals are common characters in stories written by kids, horses especially. Different authors of stories about animals bring their characters to life in different ways, but one very common way to make an animal character believable as the animal it is declared to be is to have it display behaviors that are characteristic of that animal. In this video we see that the puppeteers who created the horse for War Horse enabled their huge puppet to display several very typical horse behaviors. First, all horses (all animals) breathe. So they gave their puppet the ability to look like it was breathing. Horses can breathe very loudly! When writing a story with a horse character, it can be helpful to remember that at some point the horse may breathe out through loose lips, making that distinctive horsey brrrrrrr sound. Second, anyone who has spent time around a horse knows its ears move in multiple directions and the horse may cup its ears towards a sound to listen, even before it moves its head. In fact, a horse may divide its attention between looking and listening. The puppeteers who created the wooden horse made sure it was able to move its ears in a horse-like way. In writing a story about a horse, the cocking of an ear, the letting out of a loud breath, the flicking of a tail, a pawing gesture of a front leg — these are the kinds of horse-like behaviors that can imbue a horse character with the sense of reality that strengthens the character in the story, making it more believable. Yes! It really is a stallion! The ideas for making puppets explained in this video can be applied to any animal — dogs, cats, parakeets, rabbits, chickens. A writing project based on the video could be as simple as writing a paragraph in which an animal character moves a short distance — a cat across a room, a horse to the edge of a paddock — but in the process uses one or two movements that are characteristic of that animal. The discussion inspired by the video could expand to include a discussion of gesture as a way to delineate human characters. The nervous laugh, the unconscious brushing back of the hair, a voice that goes up (or down) under stress — these are the gestures that help define each of our personalities. The characters in a story become more believable, more real, when given the occasional dimensionality of real life.
Writing Activity: adopting a style through unusual language, with “Once Upon a Time” by Robin Eldred, 6
Introduction to This Stone Soup Writing Activity “Once Upon a Time” is an example of a story written in unusual English. This work is by a six-year-old and is a good example of how young children express themselves differently from older children and adults. You will find lots of run-on sentences and dreamlike images flowing one into another. You will also see a lot of very short sentences, that are partly a sign that the author is very young, and partly a very effective method of story telling. You will see these techniques used by famous adult authors, as well as by some of the younger authors published in Stone Soup. It is also a useful practice for people working on poetry. Project: Adopting a Style For this project, create a narrator (the person who tells the story) who thinks in and speaks in an unusual English, in an unusual style. Think of a character—a infant, an older person, a visitor to your country whose first language is different, a person who is dreaming or confused for some reason, or someone living in an imaginary world of imaginary people and imaginary language. The fun of this project, and the challenge, is to find, invent and adopt the language of your character, use it to create your world and tell your story, and to make it understandable to your readers. So, imagine you aren’t you, whether you are a different age, or from a different time or place or planet, and that you think and speak an English different from your own in structure and wording. Who and what do you see? How do you describe it? And what is the story you have to tell? If it helps you to tell the story, illustrate it too. Once Upon a Time By Robin Elder, 6, Hopewell, New Jersey Illustrated by the author From the March/April 1986 issue of Stone Soup Once upon a time there was a little girl and a little boy. The little girl’s name was Judy. The little boy’s name was Michael. They lived in a old house. They played in the backyard. Their seesaw was made out of wood, their swingset was made out of wood, and their slide was made out of wood. They had a garden. The little boy went out to play and when he swung on the swings he saw a rainbow. It was just after a rainstorm when he went out to play. He went to his sister and his sister went outside. They both looked up at the sky. They saw the rainbow. They got their mother and father and then they were all standing outside looking at the rainbow. Then they heard a big boom. Their mother went into the kitchen, their father went into the bedroom, the little girl stayed outside, and the little boy went into the front yard. The mother found a broken window, the father found the faucet turned on, the little girl found the fence broken, and the little boy found an old man. The little boy went into the house and called the police. He said, “Somebody robbed our house.” And the police came and said, “Did you rob their house?” The old man said, “No, I am the plumber. I came to fix the sink. The fence got broken by the rain. The window got broken by the lightning. And they couldn’t turn off the sink, so I came just to fix the sink.” So the policeman said, “Where’s the rain and where’s the lightning? I need to arrest them.” But then the rain came and the lightning and everyone was safe and sound in the house but the policeman. He stayed outside and tried to catch the rain and lightning. When the rain and lightning stopped, there were two pretty rainbows and then it happened over and over. And then the little boy said, “Look at the rainbows.” Everybody looked. Everybody saw one rainbow for each of them. They all climbed their rainbows and slid down and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around until somebody stopped and then somebody else and somebody else and else and else and else and else. And there was a rainbow monster and a rainbow dragon and a rainbow bunny and a rainbow deer.
