A memorable week of reading, writing and listening to interesting authors, poets, journalists and screenwriters giving lectures arrives next Tuesday at Los Altos High School.
Every year Los Altos High School organizes Writers Week, a week of workshops and events that allow students in their English class to interact and learn with people in the writing field. This is the 40th annual event and its goal is to help students learn about a writer’s path, their writing process and the variety of careers possible. There will be more than 30 speakers; the event runs through March 4–7.
Gordon Jack, an Los Altos High School librarian, said the event gives students a sense of what it is like to work in the writing field. Jack said students get to collaborate with their speakers, such as how to generate an idea and create drafts. Jack said the biggest lesson students should know from the event is that it is OK to become frustrated and experience the messiness of drafts.
“The week is writers going into English classrooms and talking about their work,” Jack said. “If they’re a novelist, the students will read maybe an excerpt of the novel. If they’re a journalist, they’ll read a story or if they’re a poet they’ll give the students kind of like a one-on-one sort of conversation with someone who created this piece of writing. Not only do they hear about the story of the piece of writing, but they also hear what inspired it, and the sort of drafts and iterations that (it) went through before it finally became the published piece they’re looking at now.”
Jack said each workshop is around 45 minutes and it varies on the activities that the students will participate in. Last year one of the participants was an Afghani who had written a novel on her experiences leaving the country, but the most engaging part was hearing her story and answering student questions and there was no need to provide a supplemental lesson, he said. The writing exercises tend to occur if one’s lessons are short or if they notice a student’s attention span is waning. He said it is important to work with teachers and pair the writers with classes where they know the lessons will be relevant to what the students are learning in their curriculum.
“Every year we pull the students and the teachers and there is always positive feedback, but there’s an occasion sometimes that the writer is just not a good fit for a class,” Jack said. “Sometimes you have either the writer really should have been with seniors or should have been placed in the film or journalism classes. We try to match the writer with the kind of writing that’s happening in the classroom as much as possible, and the personality of the writer as much as possible with the sort of personality of that age group.”
Jack said this Wednesday at 7 p.m. David Eggers, a Bay Area author who wrote novels such as “The Circle,” “A Hologram for the King” and “The Wild Things,” will present a free community lecture in LAHS’s Eagle Theatre. He said the school has been trying to get Eggers for 15 years and this year it has finally worked out. Eggers will be doing a workshop alongside a panel of students who will be interviewing him. He said he is not sure what lesson the author will involve with the crowd, but it will probably be a way for students and community members to engage with his writing by reading out loud or critiquing his drafts.
“He (Eggers) crosses all kinds of boundaries in terms of age and genre, which is just incredible,” Jack said. “He’s got such a strong commitment to education such as working with 826 Valencia and McSweeney’s Publishing. I mean, he’s a real, humanitarian, on top of being an incredibly prodigious and gifted writer. I just feel like he’s kind of the perfect person for this event because it’s a school event trying to convince students about the power of writing and the power of the written word.”
Jack said he was also excited to see at the event Maria van Lieshout, a graphic novelist who wrote “Song of a Blackbird,” a story that focuses on the occupation of Amsterdam by the Nazis during World II. Jack said graphic novels are popular among students right now and it is incredible to see a story use illustrated archival photos and graphics to tell a true story.
Jack said he joined the district 30 years ago as a teacher and transitioned into the librarian role to have access to more books and to become inspired in his writing pursuits. He was able to publish two adult novels under HarperCollins in the last few years and was inspired to challenge himself after listening to authors in previous Writers Weeks. He said in a time of critical division and overstimulation with our devices, novels allow people to reconnect with the world and find empathy.
“I feel like reading is what gives you empathy, whether you’re doing it in fiction or non-fiction, it just builds our understanding of other people, of ourselves and it’s critical, I think, where we’re so divided on so many things,” Jack said.
“We don’t spend time with other kinds of people, we’re not doing that in our real lives as much anymore. We can at least still do it with books and reading. I just feel like the humanistic aspect of school is, English and Social Studies where they’re just really focusing on those relationships.”
In a society of book bans, Jack said their school community is lucky to have an event that celebrates writers of all backgrounds. In many places across the country, writers’ voices are not protected and there are active campaigns to silence them. He said it seems like a frightening time for English and history, where people are misappropriating the truth and what can be accepted in our culture.
“As we start to silence those voices, we can never get an opportunity again to appreciate, or even see ourselves in the kinds of stories that can disappear,” Jack said.”
Jack said with people’s dwindling attention spans, the ability to read just one book will get more and more difficult. He said it has been a struggle for students since the pandemic to sit down, read a book and remain focused on their task for a long period. He said more schools should create events such as Writing Week to bring students out of their devices and offset their distractions.
“I can’t even read a book with my phone not next to me, because the urge, even if I’m not checking it, is always there,” Jack said. “I have to leave it sometimes in another room. And I’m a librarian and so for kids, I think it’s even harder to ask for them to put a device down and pick up an old artifact.”
Jack said the David Eggers lecture will precede a reception with food and games for attendees at 6:30 p.m. He said the reception is an informal event to bring people together.
To learn about the various authors who will be featured during Writers Week, visit lahs.mvla.net/Student-Activities/Special-Events/Writers-Week/index.html.
