Every summer for about the last 6 years, I have participated in Teacher Write, which is a free, online summer writing camp for teachers and librarians. Last summer, I was traveling too much, so I am excited to participate again this summer.

For four weeks, Kate introduces mentor texts with their authors and writing prompts. This free writing camp really helped me write more often and challenged me in new ways. In the earlier days, the authors would provide feedback, and we had discussions with other teachers and writers. It was very helpful. The writer’s camp is in July, and I have not heard anything yet, but I usually receive an email in June. (If you are interested, go to her website and sign up for her email list.) 

I can’t remember what the prompt was, but I am sharing one of my writings from the summer of 2019. I was working more on the novel I wish I could finish, which is loosely based on our daughter’s adoption. I wrote this in about an hour and if I did use it as part of a novel, it would be revised about 10 times. 

When I start to crawl, my mother wraps me around her waist with a bright cotton cloth, and we walk three or four miles to the bush. The bush is ghetto. The bush is shacks, no electricity, plumbing, or phones. My mother’s mother is there; grandma, kui fefine, barely a grandma herself, for she was sixteen when she bore her first child.

“Still sleeping with married man?” says kui fefine.

She ignores her mother’s question and instead asks, “Can you take Samena for a while? She is crawling now, and I cannot take care of her and work.”

“I have five other mouths to feed, and where will I get food for them and her?” Kui fefine swats at a fly around her head.

“I will send money.”

“Did you see that woman in town who is taking babies to America? You should talk to her, better life for Samena.”

That is my name: Samena. My mother did track down the woman from America, and the woman gave her some instructions on things she needed to accomplish before she could take me to America. 

First, my mother took me to a dingy clinic in which a German doctor with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth had to sign a paper that I was fit. Then, I had my picture taken for a VISA, and I looked sad. I was three and a half by the time everything went through. I know all these things because my adoptive mother told me. I asked her over and over again to tell me about my birth mother, tell me about Tonga, tell me anything and everything.

This is what she knows, and what I know. My mother was 15 when she had me. Kui fefine kicked her out because she disgraced her family hooking up with a married man. So, my mother lived in a shack with another girl who was also in the same predicament.

I was three when I boarded a plane with a lady who put a new dress and new underwear on me. My ears hurt on the plane, and I was scared of the toilet. I watched out the window as the palm trees swayed, and the ocean stretched out. I had never seen the ocean, and I did not know what it was. I pointed, and the lady said, “tahi,” or sea. The blue-green water looked like swaying grass. I awoke once in the semi-darkness and cried out for my mother. The lady comforted my whimpering, and I fell asleep. When I woke again, the gray dawn was peeking through the small window.

Writing is hard! Practicing is hard. 

Stephen King says it well:
“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut.”

“If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”

And this quote by King as well:

” I believe the first draft of a book—even a long one—should take no more than three months.”

Yikes! Three months…well, I need to rent a cabin for three months and quit my day job of being a teacher. Seriously, though, writing is hard….

If you are a teacher or librarian, hope to see you at Teacher’s Write!