NEON WORDS, Ten Brilliant Ways to Light Up YOUR Writing

NEON WORDS, Ten Brilliant Ways to Light Up YOUR Writing written by Marge Pellegrino & Kay Sather offers ten brilliant fun ways to engage young writers or to spark your own writing.

NEON WORDS is full of ideas. If students are writing about social justice or writing for fun, NEON WORDS sparks the process as it speaks to young people who might already think writing is dumb and dreadful.  Rather than having a student stare at a blank page … grumble … draw doodles, NEON WORDS starts off a writing project – not with a blank page – but a photo, a page from a book, a poem, a drawing, maybe a song.

NEON WORDS describes – shows with clear examples – ways of stimulating ideas with “found objects,” found words, collage, brain-storming, list-making, and – my favorite –drawing.  After sketching a simple self-portrait or a character’s portrait, then create a simile for each body part. Similes might be serious or ridiculous.  Next step is to create a poem out of the metaphors. Another visual idea is bringing in a stack of photos or images from magazine. Students who thought they would never write more than a few lines, wrote paragraphs after selecting a picture from a magazine – a picture that showed the last living white rhinoceros dying, a child clinging to a mother who was wading to a foreign shore, seeking asylum, a child peering between bars, a desert cracked and dry …. a powerful, safe way to express one’s feelings about any issue and especially a current social justice issue.

NEON WORDS in the authors’ words “whether you want to be a writer, or just want to explore what it’s like to create with language, you’ll discover that playing with words can help you be more present in your life….”

and have a lot of fun!   As someone who teaches writing workshops in a variety of settings, this book is a gem.

Magination Press 2019

About the authors:

Marge Pellegrino is a teaching artist who facilitates writing and expressive arts workshops in schools, libraries, and community settings for challenged and mainstream audiences. Her books include Too Nice, My Grandma’s the Mayor, and the award winning Journey of Dreams. She co-wrote The Sculpture Speaks: A Refugee’s Story of Survival, which supports the work of the Owl & Panther program for refugee families impacted by torture and traumatic dislocation. Visit MargePellegrino.com and on Facebook https: //www.facebook.com/marge.pellegrino.
Kay Sather is a designer, illustrator, editor, and freelance writer. She’s currently completing a book about the hand-sculpted mud guesthouse she built in her desert backyard in Tucson, AZ.” from indiebound.org
A personal note from author Marge Pellegrino:  Kay (coauthor) and I are both environmentalists (check out Kay’s short film about the “mud” house she built: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1c3TF45M8j0&t=9s ) so the art components in NEON WORDS are sensitive to that — making paper from scraps, creating a haiku holder from a coffee sleeve, marbleizing tea bag paper to create a cover for a small book that can be fashioned from repurposed paper.

 

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