In the past couple of weeks, I have had some truly magical workshop experiences at Fighting Words. The children have come alive with imagination, contributing brilliantly original ideas like an evil chicken nugget man with a French fry army and a water bottle who’s terrified of the dark. Throughout my time here, I have been training to become a workshop leader, and the last step of that training is learning to be a storymaker. While all the elements of the workshop are crucial to execution, storymaking is a delicate process that can make or break the workshop. The storymaker is in charge of assisting the class in writing a story line-by-line. The children are the authors of the story, but the storymaker is their guide through the writing process. A good storymaker makes the task look easy, but it requires a vivid imagination, quick wit, and endless patience. I was nervous for my first attempt at storymaking, worried that I wouldn’t be able to think quickly enough or guide them in building a cohesive plot. However, as soon as I stepped into the role, I felt an overwhelming sense of confidence and competence. I kicked off the collaborative writing time by recapping all the ideas the class had come up with for the main character, their greatest wish, greatest fear, and best friend. I reminded the children that while we knew this information about our characters, our reader didn’t know anything yet. I suggested that we could begin our story by describing the characters and giving some background, or we could start right in the action and explain the context as we go. Past stories have opened with dialogue, or a walk in the forest, or crazy lore–there’s no one right way to do it! You can read some of the stories we’ve written on the Fighting Words website. In observing the other workshop leaders for months, I have developed a sense of how to shape stories without curbing creativity and how to coax ideas out of a child who has lost their nerve. Now that I am a storymaker, I can lead all parts of any workshop. I look back at my tentative participation in early workshops, where I operated as typist or feedback giver, and see vast growth in my current understanding of our ethos and processes which enables me to adeptly lead fun, enriching workshops for the children. After the children leave each workshop, there is a palpable buzz in the room. Staff, placement students, and volunteers feel the glow of being in a space where creative freedom reigns. It is rare and special to find a place as ridiculous, whimsical, positive, and encouraging as the Fighting Words workshop space. I wish all of you could experience it with me!
A couple weeks ago, I traveled to Bournemouth to visit my friend (and fellow Lumos Traveler) Elisabeth for Thanksgiving. We cooked a big meal together: a cheese board, honey-glazed salmon, balsamic brussels sprouts, rosemary parmesan mashed potatoes, and homemade pumpkin pie were on the menu. We shared the meal with her host family, and we all went around the table and shared what we were grateful for. While it wasn’t my usual Thanksgiving crowd, I felt so much warmth and gratitude laughing with them, lingering to have seconds even though we were full, and sitting next to their life-size cardboard cutout of Keanu Reeves.
We spent the rest of the weekend taking day trips, visiting Oxford on Saturday and Bath on Sunday. One thing I love about traveling with Elisabeth is that we take it slow. We stopped to admire trampled, but ever radiant ginkgo leaves on the ground, wrote silly poems line by line on a riverside bench, had multiple coffee/tea breaks each day, enjoyed destinationless wandering, thumbed through books at the coolest bookstore ever (Topping Book Co), made friends with a cool dude running a vintage shop (shoutout to Alfie and his awesome hat), crafted acronyms out of our names (the E in Elisabeth stands for eggs, scrambled), and shared memories of past visits.
What I’m about to say is not a new, or revolutionary thought, but it is an idea that has taken me a while to fully internalize. On past trips, I have felt a pressure to “maximize” or “make the most of” my time in a place– to see the sights, check the boxes, run on the vacation treadmill until I can barely walk anymore. However, so many of my best travel memories are from conversations with strangers and friends, not from snapping the same photo of an iconic landmark that millions of people already have in their camera rolls. Landmarks aren’t always inherently significant; the people who built, inhabited, and loved them are what give them history and meaning. Trip Advisor says the Radcliffe Camera is a must-see icon of Oxford, but it matters to me because the cafe beside it sells my mother’s favorite scones. Trip Advisor would probably not mention Regent’s Park College, but it was at the top of my list because I got to see the old bay window where I sat and read every morning in the summer of 2016. As I travel to new places, with friends or alone, I am seeking landmarks like those. The spots that reveal a city’s character to me are sometimes the tourist highlights, but they are more often a hand painted door, a well-placed bench, an outstanding cappuccino, a busy square on a Saturday morning, a chatty server, a one-of-a-kind sweater in a charity shop, a gifted street musician. These are the moments that I miss if I’m glued to an itinerary (although I still very much enjoy itineraries, don’t get me wrong). I keep my eyes wandering, my mind open, my ears attuned to music, my nose sniffing out local delicacies. When my senses lead the way, it is impossible for a trip to be wasted.