StudioSTL is an organization that helps kids find their literary voices—but it’s wider and deeper than that. Poet and volunteer Julie Dill explains it all for you.
Scott Adams, creator of the comic strip Dilbert, recently found his voice. You see, a year and a half ago Adams lost the ability to talk, thanks to a mysterious affliction called spasmodic dysphonia. Sufferers of this disorder often can speak under special circumstances—think along the lines of the Monty Python episode in which the police officers could only hear at certain pitches, speeds and volumes. Affected individuals may find that they can only sing what they cannot make themselves say. After 18 months of speaking audibly only in front of large crowds, Adams found that he could speak easily if he spoke in rhyme. While helping his child with homework, he repeated the lines of “Jack Be Nimble” until his brain learned a new path to his vocal cords, and now he can speak just fine.
StudioSTL is a St. Louis organization formed to help children ages 8–18 find their voices through creative writing. You may have visited the group’s tent at this year’s Big Read book festival in Clayton. Theirs was the “Half Baked Bakery,” filled with word games, baking puns and children scrambling to form sentences with word bricks.
Executive director Beth Ketcher thinks creative writing is the perfect way to bring the power and magic of words to children, and she’s found a group of people who agree with her. With support from St. Louis–area writers and artists, they formed a nonprofit corporation to bring their brand of literary spunk to the future of middle America.
Almost immediately Ketcher took the program on the road. She began with a classroom of 7-year-olds and a miniature dachshund named Haley. The kids learned a lesson in audience when they were assigned to write a short story specifically tuned to the dog’s taste.
I was asked to participate in a different StudioSTL production, involving a panel of speakers at a county middle school. The topic? Creative writing as a career path. A short-fiction writer, an Associated Press reporter, a children’s-book writer and illustrator and I, a poetry writer, sat in front of a crowd of jaded seventh- and eighth-graders. In our short presentation, we cobbled together a story, a news report, an illustration and a poem, all from the kids’ shouted suggestions. Our Whose Line Is It, Anyway?–style pandemonium broke through their cynicism, and the kids saw past the immediate entertainment for a peek at the creative process.
Since then, 150 sixth-graders have been given press passes to interview a “famous” author, and a group of mixed-aged summer campers have created their own newspaper, Tall-Tale Truth, including an interview with former U.S. Sen. Jean Carnahan, the diary of a new baby giraffe at the Saint Louis Zoo, VIP coverage of the St. Louis Rams football camp and an undercover fashion column titled “What I Think About You.”
These days, StudioSTL is partnering with College Bound to help two classes of high-school juniors at University City High School and the city’s Clyde Miller Career Academy. Together they are creating an anthology of writing based on students’ individual experiences.
StudioSTL is also in the third round of the application process to become a St. Louis chapter of Dave Eggers’ project 826 Valencia, a San Francisco–based writing studio for children. Should their application be accepted, they will join Chicago, New York City, Seattle, Los Angeles and Ann Arbor, Mich., in opening a storefront for workshops, tutoring and literary events.
But national acclaim is a far-off dream, and for now, the volunteers at StudioSTL are content to help St. Louis–area children achieve lofty feats of literary fancy, write their way to a brighter future and find their voices through the power of the written word.
For more on StudioSTL, go to studiostl.org.
