Young Writers Research Articles

‘I love my class family’: Writing Realities and Relational Pedagogies

AbstractAsset‐based and relational pedagogies highlight the centrality of meaningful relationships and authenticity in teaching and learning. Foregrounding children's lived experiences, interests, and ways of knowing provides a focus for teachers to be responsive, both relationally and pedagogically. Writing workshop, as conceived in the 1980's by Donald Graves and Lucy Calkins, is a longstanding curricular structure that encourages young writers to engage with multiple tools and resources, including peers, as they compose. Through writing conferences and authors’ chairs, young writers attend to the practice of composing on paper/screen as well as how their message may be received. This study analyzes children's writing samples to underscore the presence of (a) writing identity, (b) critical literacy, (c) culturally sustaining pedagogy, (d) translanguaging, and (e) intertextuality. Chilldren's interactions with tools, peers, and others provide fertile ground for understanding the critical role of a humanizing and relational approach to teaching and learning. The following questions guide this study: (1) How is a writing realities framework reflected in young children's compositions? (2) What do children's writing artifacts reveal about relationality?

«ВИДЯ В ВАШЕМ ЛИЦЕ ГОРЯЧЕЕ, ЧЕСТНОЕ СЕРДЦЕ, СМЕЛУЮ МЫСЛЬ, СИЛЬНУЮ, КРАСИВУЮ РУКУ…» М. ГОРЬКИЙ – ЛИТЕРАТУРНЫЙ НАСТАВНИК А. С. ЧЕРЕМНОВА

Alexander Sergeyevich Cheremnov (1881–1919) was a Russian poet and translator. His lot as a writer was closely connected with M. Gorky and – at the beginning of his career – with the publishing house » Knowledge». The participants of the «Knowledge» were named the «constellation of the Big Maxim», and one of the stars discovered by Gorky soon was A.S. Cheremnov. A younger contemporary of Gorky, he was undoubtedly influenced by the personality and creativity of his literary mentor. Cheremnov corresponded with Gorky from July 1905 to April-May 1913, that is, for about eight years, and had good friendly relations with him. The correspondence was interrupted around 1913, remaining another vivid record of Gorky, a teacher, a literary mentor to many talented young writers, an artist who took thought for the future of Russian literature – his deal of a lifetime and one of the key elements of the spiritual being of our country.

Bly in Blackwell’s: A Turning Point for Mental Health and Journalism

ABSTRACT “Bly in Blackwell’s: A Turning Point for Mental Health and Journalism” tells the story of Nellie Bly, a Pennsylvania-born investigative journalist. In 1887, Bly was set with the task of writing and reporting on an infamous insane asylum in New York—The Lodge on Blackwell’s Island. To do this, Bly acted “insane” and was sent to the institution as a patient so she could report on its inhumane conditions and expose it firsthand. After over a week of work in a terrifying environment, Bly was able to leave and wrote a two-part article for The New York World that was later published as Ten Days in a Mad-House. By making this brave effort, Nellie Bly changed the course of journalism and mental health, especially for women. This historical article shares the steps of Bly’s journey and shows just how much of an effect this plucky young writer had on our world.

(Mis)representations of Asian Americans in Storybird: A Bird’s Eye View

This paper explores the misrepresentation of Asian Americans in Storybird, an online platform where users publish creative writing. Through a qualitative analysis of five stories featuring Asian characters, the study identifies recurring stereotypes, such as cultural conservatism, physical biases, and societal pressures. These misrepresentations often reduce complex identities into cultural caricatures, perpetuating misleading perceptions of Asian Americans. By shedding light on these biases, the paper advocates for increased cultural sensitivity and the promotion of more nuanced portrayals. Recommendations include engaging Asian American creators and promoting media literacy among young writers to challenge existing stereotypes and foster more inclusive content.

The Importance of Experience: Supporting Pupils’ Creative Writing About the Natural World

ABSTRACT The first part of this article considers the challenge of supporting pupils to write creatively about the natural world. It examines a text by a gifted young writer: Diary of a Young Naturalist by Dara McAnulty. It asks what the challenges might be for pupils who may be motivated to model their writing on McAnulty’s, but have limited experience of the natural world. Drawing on the scholarly work of John Dixon, Robert Eaglestone and others, the article highlights the importance of pupil experience in the formation of their writerly voice, thereby emphasising the need for writing pedagogies that deepen and enrich pupils’ experiences. In the second part, the authors present a series of interdisciplinary activities that are intended to enrich pupil experiences, and ultimately encourage creativity. The plan is aimed at pupils in Manchester in the north-west of England, but the activities can be adapted to work in other locations.

SCRUTINIZING KEY ELEMENTS OF GREEN LITERATURE ON THE CHILDREN’S BOOK TATA KATA: KUMPULAN CERITA ANAK COMPOSED BY YOUNG WRITERS OF THE TIN ISLAND

Bangka is well-known as the Tin Island. Tin mining in Bangka, both on land and at sea, actually causes environmental damage. This has been a serious issue for a long time, impacting Bangkanese lives from children to adults, in addition to air pollution. That is why the purpose of highlighting the topic is to explore the elements of green literature organized in the children's book Tata Kata: Kumpulan Cerita Anak, written by several young Bangka writers. Published in 2020, it consists of ten short stories for children at age 10–12, and one of the provided themes is environment. Interestingly, the concept of ecocriticism is present within the object itself. The study employed a descriptive-qualitative method to formulate the answers to the problem. The data were obtained through observation and in-depth interviews with the authors. The data analysis technique from Miles and Huberman (2014) played a vital role to process the data set in order to acquire profound information. The findings classified the key elements of green literature in the children's book Tata Kata: Kumpulan Cerita Anak into three categories: (a) environmental citizenship, (b) care ethics, and (c) ecoliteracy. The authors fully support the existence of these elements, as they aim to raise awareness and persuade Bangkanese children to protect and care for the environment in light of the massive emerging damage. Furthermore, the young writers implicitly criticized the nature of Bangka, which is currently endangered. It means that Bangkanese children are expected to be environmental heroes/heroines in the next few years.

Fiction Factory, Part 2

By the beginning of the twentieth century, young writers were part of an economic system that took youth as a commercial value—up-to-the-minute youth provided a fantasy that such new modes of publication seemed to advertise—while also making use of young writers glorying in such hype. Part One of these two essays explored this new character of young people’s writing to indicate an evolving understanding of the juvenile tradition. Young writers now asserted themselves as modern hacks, celebrating their proficiency in dime formulas. In surveying the literary nationalism encoded in dime formulas, Part One also explored how dime fiction kept alive a sense of perennial youth in part through youth’s recurrent and lasting association with the American character. Young writers working in dime formulas by necessity worked within these attitudes—and the baldness of dime formulas made obvious how these so-called “American” attitudes were ideological, encoding troubling assumptions when it came to race and imperialism, part of the manifest destiny and American exceptionalism that cheap print reflected. Part Two is about the afterlife of the dime novel—both in terms of how its formulas continued to haunt American letters, but also in terms of how ongoing literary-critical recovery of texts in the archive of the fiction factory have expanded possibilities for how to regard them. It concentrates on how ideological prescriptions continued to shape expectations, and to shape young writers’ work, in the early twentieth century—after the dime novel seemed to have waned in popularity. At the same time, it foregrounds how the critical afterlife that has sifted that archive informs an understanding of how to read this ongoing work.

Mixing Pedagogies to Cultivate Joyful and Creative Young Writers in an Era of Standardised Writing Tests

AbstractGlobal trends suggest that teaching writing focuses on a skills-based approach to preparing children for high-stakes standardised tests. In the early years, teachers are grappling with finding a better balance between preparing children for such tests and satisfying their sense of pedagogic responsibility to teach them to become joyful, creative writers. This paper explores an Australian Preparatory teacher’s teaching of writing framed by the pedagogic framework LAUNCH. Using video and audio recordings, as well as children-made artefacts, the paper considers the impact of this framework on the writing experiences of fourteen five- and six-year-old children. Basil Bernstein’s visible and invisible pedagogies provide the theoretical frame. Findings assert that a pedagogic mix allows early years teachers to teach children to be skilled and confident writers while nurturing their imaginations and creativity. This is significant given that current debates around children’s writing experiences are often tied to high-stakes, standardised test-based writing.

Implementing purpose‐studies: A humanising approach for bridging the spaces between writers, their worlds and the test

AbstractTeachers of young writers often feel pressure to focus on narrow, tested conventions, forms and processes of writing. These pressures can contribute to instruction that does not consider students' interests, experiences, language or cultures, but rather can further deficit views of students whose backgrounds do not closely align with those making decisions about what counts as writing in schools. This paper explores purpose‐studies—an alternative to genre‐studies—Barbara, a fourth‐grade teacher, and Alison, a ninth‐grade teacher, used to help balance the needs of their students, position students as strong and capable writers and prepare students to write for the test and the world beyond the school walls.

Ripples of Insurgency: A Reading of The House with a Thousand Stories

The inexorable presence of insurgency has vitiated Assam and the other North-eastern states for a long period of time; but the reality faced by the inhabitants in these areas are represented more sensibly and truthfully by the literature produced by the writers of the North-east. The paper looks at one such depiction by a young writer from Assam, Arun Kashyap in his English novel, The House with a Thousand Stories.

Chinese Female Writer Zhang Yueran and Fictional Features of Her Prose

In this paper, the author analyzes the fiction of contemporary Chinese female writer Zhang Yueran (b. 1982). As a radiant and influential representative of the post-1980s generation in contemporary Chinese literature, Zhang Yueran is considered to be one of most talented and strong young writers. Post-1980s Chinese writers are known by depiction of young people’s lives in big cities with elements of magical realism, however, unlike the most Post-1980s Chinese writers, Zhang Yueran focuses more on the characters’ subjectivity and their pursuit of love (parental and romantic). Her complex characters thrive for love and happiness, but also suffer from loneliness and lack of parental attention. Zhang Yueran’s writing is visceral and almost poetic in its use of metaphor. The development of Zhang Yueran’s prose can be divided two key periods. Her early works are aesthetic psychological thrillers about unhealthy love, inspired by classical fairytales that end with a character’s death and self-destruction: while the language is beautiful and almost poetic, but there is a lack of narrative depth. In her second era, Zhang Yueran returns to realism and successfully combines style and deep narrative by contrasting scenes of cruelty and mercy. At the moment her latest novel “Cocoon” embodies all significant fictional features from the perspective of both style and narrative.

Crafting scenes

Effective narrative writers create immersive reader experiences through precise linguistic choices. Teachers can support effective linguistic choice-making in young writers through the process of imaginative embodiment, a method of narrative thinking framed by cognitive stylistics concepts and their embodied effects. In this article, I assess the effects of an imaginative embodiment pedagogy on fifth grade writers’ narratives by examining how their linguistic choices contribute to immersion. As part of the study, four Grade 5 teachers attended a training session on imaginative embodiment and applied the approach throughout a nine-week narrative writing unit with 12 students via one-on-one writing conferences. To study the effects of the approach, a linguistic analysis was conducted on student writing completed before and after the writing unit. The analysis was driven by a stylistic checklist that codes grammatical features to embodied effects, as well as an interpretive analysis of these features’ overall effectiveness on immersion. Findings suggested that students’ linguistic choices changed in response to learning the process of imaginative embodiment. Specifically, choices were characterized by their embodied effects, contributing to greater textual immersion. This suggests that teaching imaginative embodiment can improve writers’ narratives by affording them specific strategies for expressing meaning.

The concept of homeland in stories (from the creation of young writers of the independence period: as an example of jav- Lon Jovliyev’s stories)

Mustaqillik davri ijodkorlari hur fikr, keng dunyoqarash bilan ijod qilmoqdaki, ularda milliy-madaniy, umuminsoniy tushunchalar o'z ifodasini topib bormoqda. Mustaqillik davrida yosh ijodkorlar safida Javlon Jovlievni e’tirof etib o'tish o'rinlidir. Zero, uning hikoyalari mustaqillik davri hikoyachiligida o'ziga xos o'rin va mavqega ega bo'ldi. Javlon Jovliev, o'z tengdoshlari orasida birinchilardan bo'lib, roman janriga qo'l urgan adib hisoblandi. lining "Qo'rqma" romani katta audotiryaga ega bo'lgan yoshlar romanlaridan biri bo'ldi. Jalon Jovliev nafaqat roman, balki hikoyachilikda ham bir qadar muvaffaqiyat qozonib, ushbu janrning ham imkoniyatlaridan keng foydalandi. lining "Stalinga maktublar", "Mustabidning hasharotlari", "Ayol" kabi hikoyalari vaqtli matbuot sahifalarida e’lon qilingan, 2022 yilda "Onam va koinot” nomli to'plami nashr etilib, unda ko'plab hikoyalar jamlandi. Javlon Jovliev hikoyalarida qahramonlar ruhiyati, ruhiy tavsir, obrazlar ichki dunyosi o'zining teran ifodasini topgan. Ayniqsa "Elbek" "Ko'k, oq va ola kabutarlar", "Ayol", "Onam va koinot” hikoyalarida ayol ruhiyati, o'zbek onasining ruhiy qiyofasi nihoyatda ta’sirli berilgan. Ushbu hikoyalarning har birida o'zgacha syujet tanlangan bo‘lsa-da, ammo qalamga olingan ruhiyat tasviri, ayol ruhiyatining fojeyaviy qiyofasi sabab mushtaraklik kasb etadi.

The Lesson and/or the master: Alex MacKeith and writing today

In this interview, award-winning musical comedian Alex MacKeith and I examine his screenplay for Alice Troughton’s new film The Lesson (2023). MacKeith goes over his creative process, from his incorporation of some of his experiences as a tutor following university to his development of individual characters, and from his project’s growth and improvement across successive drafts to the kinds of affirmation that he gets from his work in musical comedy in comparison to his work in scriptwriting. We go on to discuss his magnificent central character: the writer J. M. Sinclair (Richard E. Grant). The film follows Liam (Daryl McCormack), a young writer hired to prepare Sinclair’s son (Stephen McMillan) for Oxford, but as it unfolds, we learn, alongside Liam, about Sinclair’s personal and public lives. Sinclair’s wife Hélène (Julie Delpy) hired Liam specifically to investigate him. A living cliché, Sinclair is claiming credit for work that really belongs to his deceased son Felix (Joseph Meurer). For this film, MacKeith was longlisted for a British Independent Film Award. It has been described by Stephen King as being ‘[c]old, smart, and suspenseful’ and it is a New York Times’s Critics Pick. In this climate, when conversations about originality, notably the place of artificial intelligence in creative and critical projects, are all the rage, this interview’s exploration of authorship, intellectual property and retirement for creatives is especially timely.

Becoming the falconer: productive feedback for the redrafting of creative writing

ABSTRACT Within a wider neoliberal education system, time and space for redrafting creative writing are marginalised, with focus on the written product rather than the writing process. This precludes the development of young writers. As academics and creative writers working in university Schools of Education, we use inductive autoethnography to explore our memories of feedback on creative writing throughout our writing lives. The affective dimension of feedback, with readers having power over their writers, is emphasised. We identify how feedback can be unproductive and unempathetic, harming the writer. We also identify how feedback can be productive, nurturing the writer through the process towards an internal dialogue with their inner ideal reader – their ‘superaddressee.’ It is the internal dialogue with the superaddressee, who perfectly understands what the writer is communicating, that develops the writer over time, giving them control over the writing process and facilitating redrafting. We recommend the professional development of teachers to become self-reflexive readers, who plan focused writing assessments, and provide productive feedback as well as mentorship programmes in publishing to develop new writers. Future research should explore the psychoanalytic nature of the writer–reader relationship and what the facilitation of redrafting looks like in educational settings.

Pomponio Gaurico und die leoninen Krieger: Physiognomik als Paradigma

Abstract This essay examines how Pomponio Gaurico’s treatise De sculptura, published in 1504, attempted to establish a new visual language for sculptors based on physiognomic treatises handed down from antiquity. By including physiognomics among the fundamental elements of disegno, the young writer expanded its potential from a system of interpretation to a means of representation. It will be argued that the most significant pattern to arise from this new approach was the idealised leonine warrior that originated in the typified equestrian statues of Donatello and Verrocchio, and culminated in sculptures executed by Gaurico’s friends Tullio Lombardo and Andrea Riccio – presumably under the impression of his ideas.

Формирование «срединного» литературного поля у раннего Зощенко

The article examines the early, or “manuscript” period of Mikhail Zoshchenko’s work, covering 1914–1920. Based on the early stories (of different lengths) material; lyrical and philosophical miniatures; critical articles; writer’s letters and notes, the thesis about combining traditions of the mass magazine fiction and elite modernist literature is discussed. The humor legacy clearly attracts the unknown writer Zoshchenko (who wrote for himself) with the plot construction mechanisms: in the range of “something happens” — “nothing happens.” The “high” literary tradition was in demand by “early” Zoshchenko mainly from the literary fairy tale, short story and lyrical-philosophical essay genre traditions perspective, significant for modern culture. The indicated literary and philosophical context was interesting for a young writer due to the possibility of directly formulating a set of ontological questions about the world and human creature. The “mutually contradictory features” combination (as Yu.M. Lotman defined) forms the fiction “middle field”. The “mature” Zoshchenko unique narrative technique has a dual (in the usual interpretation — mutually exclusive) address: the ordinary readers and the connoisseur-intellectual, began to take shape in terms of updating “opposite” genre-thematic traditions precisely in the early, little-studied period. At the same time, M.M. Zoshchenko’s style (the famous “Zoshchenko’s tale”) took shape only at the next stage of the 1920s. It’s paradoxical, but true: the writer’s stylistic experiment is secondary to the plot and thematic searches.

Adrese Pasta iela 3: Liepājas kultūridentitātes metafora (1950–1980)

The study aims to identify and evaluate the main aspects of the formation of Liepāja literary and cultural environment in the 1950s–1980s. The location of the editorial office of the city newspaper “Komunists” (“Kurzemes Vārds”) at Pasta Street 3 is of great importance to the creative cultural space of Liepāja. The Association of Young Writers was founded there in the 1950s. The editorial office becomes a gathering place for young writers, actors, musicians, and artists, a cultural space for an active, creative life. Landscape identity can be viewed as a spatially unique psycho-sociological perception of a place defined in cultural space. The theoretical and methodological basis of the article is the theoretical studies on place identity and cultural memory issues by Maria Levicka, Bas Pedroli, Jan Diek van Mansvelt, William P. Stewart, Derk Jan Stobbelaar, Astrid Erll, and others. The article concludes that many talented personalities – journalists, writers, artists, etc. – worked in the newspaper’s editorial office during the time researched. Many writers and journalists, later recognised in Liepāja, the region, and throughout Latvia, started their literary activities in the Association of Young Writers. Many of them experienced their first publications in the literary pages of the newspaper “Komunists”. Many of them were also engaged in the newspaper as journalists. A close relationship is formed between the physical environment and, under its influence, the strong attachment to the creative community. Despite the ideological direction of the political era and the limitations of the creative process, thanks to the favourable, sometimes even open-minded, supportive, and trusting atmosphere prevailing in the editorial office of the newspaper “Komunists”, the cultural and literary life of Liepāja rapidly developed and improved, and has become an important indicator of the city’s cultural identity.

Futuristic Flight: Science beside the Emotive in the Early Writing of Charlotte Brontë

As a solitary mention within her juvenilia tale ‘Tales of the Islanders’ (1829), Charlotte Brontë’s fictitious reference to air balloon flight suggests a wider social and literary context for its author’s understanding of this new scientific phenomenon. This article examines the wider textual presence of this awe-inspiring invention and how her seemingly simple reference to balloons ultimately aligns her from an early age to a wider, Romantic female discourse, particularly to the writing of Mary Shelley. The prevalent references to balloon flight in newspapers, magazines and books available to Brontë at the time, imply a familiarity with these dialogues, which is ultimately suggestive of the material she read and was subsequently inspired by to include in her own writing. Brontë’s reference to balloons associates her work with a Romantic discourse contemporary to her, specifically a female one, which situates her as a young writer alert to the literary dialogue of the time, hinting at a style she would later use in her novels, one which juxtaposed scientific invention in the Industrial Age beside an emotive poetic voice.

ПЭНаўскія конкурсы маладых літаратараў і іх роля ў кансалідацыі пісьменніцкіх сіл у беларускім літаратурным працэсе пачатку ХХІ стагоддзя

The article provides a review of the contests of young writers held by the Belarusian PEN Centre in 2003–2006 and 2009–2012. The aim of the research is to determine the role of these contests in the consolidation of writers in the Belarusian literary process at the beginning of the 21st century. The author proves that for a certain circle of contemporary Belarusian authors, winning contests, as well as participation in events organized for the winners (such as literature seminars, roundtables, presentations of collections published in the outcome of contests), became an important part of their creative and professional biography. The authors themselves value highly the role ofcontests in their creative formation. The events organized for the winners influenced the formation of knowledge of finalists on the current literary process, created an opportunity to improve literary skills and publication of texts sent to a contest, to give authors a possibility to get to know each other better and, in addition, they resulted in the establishment of a creative and professional cooperation, which continued after the end of the contest. Such contests played an important role in the emergence of an informal youth literary circle, united around the person of Andrej Khadanovich, the main coordinator of contests and contest events, as well as in the formation of a circle of young literary activists around the Belarusian PEN Centre. The results of the research proved that literary contests - as one of the most important forms of consolidation of the environment of the writers – had a significant influence on many processes and phenomena of Belarusian literature of the 21st century.