This summer I facilitated our first
Song and Writing workshop, and taught Novel Writing again for the ever-wonderful
CTYI summer programme. The first was a small project which is just getting off the ground, a pilot run, and the second was something that had been pencilled in since this time last year. But in a lot of ways they were doing the same thing: bringing together a bunch of creative, interested, and engaged teenagers to do something over the summer. And it is amazing, the kind of atmosphere you get when that happens.
I have a lot of empathy for teenagers, partly because not so long ago I was one, and partly because even as a teenager I spent a lot of time writing about what it meant to be a teenager in Ireland today. And what it meant to be reflective about that, and about other things. To have opinions and to have interests and for these things to not necessarily be the kind of things other people of one's age were always going to be interested in. I also had the good fortune of having a bunch of friends, many made through CTYI, who were warm and smart and brilliant and funny and thoughtful and opinionated and interested. (As well as being neurotic and crazy and a whole bunch of other things that come with being a teenager, of course.)
So when I started talking to the people behind
giftedkids.ie, an online resource for parents and educators of gifted kids and teens in Ireland, and they mentioned the following key words in quick succession: gifted, creative, teenagers, writing. The idea was a forum, an online magazine, for gifted, talented, creative and above all
interested teenagers:
Our Voice. It's coming out of a recognition that spaces for gifted teens are few and far between in Ireland, but it's also a space for anyone who's interested, who has interesting things to say, a space for analysis and debate and reflection and commentary, and includes a separate journal for creative work, for stories and poetry and art and comics and films and music and anything else that comes to mind. It's a space for, I guess, all the stuff there maybe isn't a space for in many lives.
In many ways I want to sit down and write the thing myself. I want to write about gender stereotypes in Irish schools, in the media, in relationships and friendships. About why history matters, and why science matters but is also not some unquestionable absolute. I want to write about why books are important and why college choices are less life-defining than they can seem at seventeen. But, you know, that's not my space. It's for 13-18-year-olds, more or less, and I'm there to help out, to facilitate, not to do all the talking. So I'm shutting up now. But it's there, for teenagers, if they're reading.
(Feel free to pass on the link to anyone who might be interested. Press release can be found
here.)
Labels: our voice
