No Masters, No Ladies. Maybe World-Dominating Cows

Monologues and the collaborative future

First, a couple of announcements:

Enrollment for next year's classes at Frog Hollow School (the writing program I run) open April 15th for new families. We'll be offering the Core Class in person in Seattle and Carnation for ages 8-12, and the Young Writers Workshop online for ages 11 and up. Possibly an online novel writing class too!

If you're in the Seattle area and want to say hi, come to Frog Hollow's Open House! 10:30-11:30 April 5th, Youngstown Cultural Arts Center.

And if you have a young poet who wants to submit a poem to the Frog Hollow Poetry Prize (fame, glory, cold hard cash!), tell them to send it on in. Submissions open through April.

Also, thank you everyone reading and responding to these posts. It makes me really happy to get to share things I’m excited about with you all. If you like what you read, consider becoming a paying subscriber and help support the work I’m doing and the time it takes to write about it. Thank you!

OK, now something super cool we’ve been up to:

Every year, my students want to write a play, and often, we do. It's fun but intense and tends to take over the curriculum. This year, we played instead with writing interconnected monologues.

It started when a student brought in the book Good Masters, Sweet Ladies by Laura Amy Schlitz. This student's a fast-talking, big dreaming kid, and when she talked about the book her eyes lit up and her hands moved and I caught her nerd-excitement and promptly reserved it at the library.

The book is a collection of monologues by a variety of children and teens living in a medieval English village and manor, written by a school librarian to solve the problem of how to make a class play that has seventeen main characters. It's a great book.

So I picked out a few of the monologues and read them to the class, but because we're us, we didn't just learn them and perform them, cool as that would have been. We wrote our own.

First we brainstormed everyone we thought might live in a medieval village and manor: blacksmiths, shepherdesses, scoundrels, night watchmen, weavers, knights, thieves, ladies-in-waiting, visiting merchants, squires, cats, sorcerers (if the people of the village believed in them, then they belonged)....

Then we thought about who our characters might be. How old were they? What was their name? What work did they do or role did they play in the village? What species were they? (We figured the medieval animals had some stories too.) What had happened to them? Who was their family? Who did they care about? Who did they have grudges against? What secrets did they have?

This part involved lots of pre-writing list-making, and also lots of talking, as stories involving more than one character began to come together.

When we knew who our characters were, we let them say their piece. This was their moment to tell their side of the story, set the record straight. Students were to write as if their character were talking to the audience, telling about things that had already happened or things they were going to do, rather than acting anything out right then. We also wanted to know what they made of whatever had happened: what did it say about how the world worked and this character's philosophy of life?

I did this with several different classes and it was a great success with pretty much every kid. Having not studied the Middle Ages beyond learning a little about the feudal system as it related to the formation of Middle English, our monologues weren't the most historically accurate (but yours could be if you mixed in more history!). But they were imaginatively engaged, dramatic, and very fun.

We had a spiteful alchemist, feuding blacksmiths, a cat and also a witch in the shape of a cat, a love-sick innkeeper, a girl who hears the voices of musical rats, the musical rats, a ghost, some sheep who don't think their shepherdess is doing a good job, a shepherdess who thinks she is, an insane uncle scheming for the throne, a lady who has fallen for a scoundrel, and a cow who wants to take over the world. Just to name a few.

Just taking over the world here

In one class, we continued on to write dialogue poems between characters (there are some great examples in the book as well). I hope to play with these more in the future. Very fun!

After working on the monologues for a couple of weeks, we shared them in our poetry readings. I was out sick and missed all of them, but I hear it was fun. We might write a play next year, but I know I'll also come back to this project again.

In fact, I have some plans for the future

I was in LA at the AWP writing conference last week. There were panels and readings and other writery things but the real magic was in the conversations I stumbled into. This time I found myself talking to a group of writers who were writing collaboratively in a future world they had imagined based on climate predictions for the year 2060. They made the world collaboratively, then different writers have been writing different stories within it, borrowing each other's characters. This was an immensely exciting conversation to me, for many reasons, including their focus on decolonizing imagination and writing a livable future into being. My mind immediately started churning on how to bring something like that to my students.

This is what I have so far: I want to write a set of monologues from a group of people/animals living in the year 2080, when my students will be old people.

First, I imagine us brainstorming problems the world faces today, and ways they could be solved or transformed by the time my students are old people. What would they want the world to be like? What changes do they imagine? What do they like about the world today and how might those things continue to be awesome in the future? What new challenges might there be?

When I've written about the future with my students before, it's a lot of robots and flying cars and less considering what it might be like to be a person. So I'd like to guide the conversation deeper before the kids start writing. I think that the questions above might help, as will thinking about the future through the lens of a character.

Once we imagine the future, I'd like them to imagine characters in that future. What are these characters' lives like? What is their home and family like? What makes them happy? What worries them? What are their deepest desires and secrets and fears? What has happened? What story do they want to set straight: all the usual questions.

And then, once these future people come into focus, we'd let them speak.