Little Green Pigging

I ran my first session today at Little Green Pig, a weekly afternoon writing group for young people. The "Piglets" are 7-11 years old, and the "Saddlebacks" are 12+. I haven't done a lot of work lately with young people, so was a bit nervous going into it. I'm particularly out of touch with the younger ones, as it's been almost twenty years since I was camp counselor at a bilingual Spanish/English day camp.

I decided to use the theme of animals for both groups, talking about how authors use animal characters in different ways. We looked at picture books - younger ones for the first group, and more sophisticated ones for the teens (such as The Rabbits, Arlene Sardine, Chato's Kitchen, Willie the Dreamer). I was really impressed with some of the younger ones, who proposed that perhaps using animals wasn't so different from using people, since we all evolved from the same origins. Then I had them use their writing time to create animals characters/situations. One of the teens wrote a fantastic poem about a cat who falls in love with a dog against her family's wishes. We also had an amusing story of a leper fly who was left handed.

I read the second group the opening from Patrick Ness' The Knife of Never Letting Go, and told them how he created a talking dog as an antidote to all the non-animal-like talking animals in books he'd read. I'm hoping some of the teens will come and see my interview with Ness on May 10th as part of the Brighton Festival, as it would be great to have them in the audience asking questions. It's so hard getting teens to writing events, as I found out when directing the Brighton Children's Book Festival. So fingers are crossed.

Overall, I was happy with how things went, though it's hard to know what is getting through and effective. Anyone have any tips for good ways to activate and engage young writers? Now I have to come up with a plan for next week...