CHICKEN SOUP FOR THE SOUL SUCCESS!

Ok, today I need to mention a bit of my role as a Writing Coach. Each year, I get to teach a small group (twenty-some, usually) of mostly sixteen and seventeen-year-old high school students, in a course called Writing 12. That allows me to talk about and introduce them to magazine articles, personal essays, picture books, chapter books, novels, scripts and screenplays--almost every kind of writing they won't find in an English class. It's refreshing...and rewarding, to see them succeed and see their poetry and prose get into print. It gives me great pleasure to see my work and their work published, and sometimes, we connect in unexpected ways.

Here's one. I was THRILLED when I got the acceptance from the editor of Chicken Soup for the Soul : MY RESOLUTION when a personal essay I wrote, "The Write Way: Write Away," was selected for that anthology. It wasn't the money or the free books or the millions of copies they sell, it was that the essay I wrote was a special piece that explained a bit about why I became a writer and a writing teacher despite a nightmarish beginning in university. I had a writing prof who completely humiliated students (myself included) for works he considered unpublishable. I decided then and there that I would never treat my own students that way once I was a teacher.

Flash forward to July 26th, 2011--yesterday. That's the day one of my grade twelve students had a personal essay of HERS published in Chicken Soup for the Soul: JUST FOR TEENAGERS. The student, CARMEN ANG, will now receive a few hundred dollars, ten free copies of the book, and some attention for her writing--but I know her story is important to her as well--it's a piece she wrote for Writing 12! (Ok the size of the image of my book is bigger, I realize, now that I uploaded the pics, but it's not intentional, really--those were the first two images I grabbed from a Google search...really!)