This morning, when I woke up, the first thing I thought of was writing. How do I help them love writing? How do I show them, or help them see how each stroke of a key is like a stroke of a brush, the sweep of a blending tool, the saturating color of pastels? We take the colors of a dawn and spread them in black and white across a piece of paper or a computer screen, where they wait quietly for eyes to see and then burst into the imagination in technicolor glory.

I teach kids. Well, if we are being generous, I teach kids. Somedays, I look at their weird little faces and wonder what I could possibly hope to impart to them. They are so worldly, and yet they know nothing of the world except that which they have already experienced. I want to grab their (curiously damp) little hands and step through the wardrobe into the idea that everything there is to see can be seen on the page – and the power to evoke every feeling humans are capable experiencing waits in our hands. (I have the voice of my daughter in my head reminding me that Equity and Accessibility demand that I remind us all that writing should not be ableist. Whatever means we have to express ourselves are treasured.)

We use our language to tell each other the truth. And also, the fantastical. (Some of the reasons I have been given for not having an assignment or some necessary material have been just this side of dragons.) We use language to share our secrets, to describe our fears and our fantasies. We as humans have gone to the trouble to give everything a name, and then gone even further to make extra words so that each named thing can be described and understood. Doesn’t that feel like having the power to create a miracle?

The thing is, the students in my classes seem to only see a binary when it comes to writing. There is “fun” writing, which – for many of them – means not writing more than a few words. Then there is “boring” writing, which – for many of them – is literally (not figuratively) every other writing assignment. To be fair, I have a tendency to exist in a binary too. Some writing is “amazing and feels like freedom” and other writing is merely “the most beautiful and valuable way to spend time, unless you happen to be reading.”

So each day, I wake up and the words whizz about my head as restless as butterflies waiting for wildflower season to start, and I want to liberate them. I want my students to liberate their own words, and let them spread the pollen of literacy everywhere. Now, I just have to convince them that language contains within it all the magic that created everything, and the power of immortality. Who wouldn’t want that?