Fighting Words

As part of my "keep busy in Ireland" initiative, I started volunteering last year/semester.  So far it's just happening once a week but I expect to increase my hours in the new year.  I initially started by contacting a Volunteer Placement agency and then went through their gazillions of opportunities to finally pick the place I am now: Fighting Words!  FW is a creative writing center where kids and teenagers can come with their classes to learn how to write creatively and work on their own projects.  It sounded right up my alley and after having been already a few times, I think I can say it will be a pretty good fit.

They have different classes from different elementary schools come every morning of the week for field trips from 10-12.  We usher the kids in and take off their coats and bags and get them settled in the center of the colorful, brightly-lit room.  There are a couple of volunteers milling around (like myself), as well as a person who "leads" the group discussion, a typist who dictates the kids' story, and an artist who illustrates the stories.

We talk about the basic elements of writing a story: plot, characters, setting, etc.  We also explain that we have a mean editor in the office here (a man on staff who sits behind a obscured desk) who HATES children and who rarely reads children's stories but MAYBE if they're good and they come up with a completely original story, we can get the editor to read the story and publish it.  They get so excited talking to the mean editor and he makes them laugh and gets them pumped up to write a wonderful story.  And so it begins.  The leader asks the kids for 5 different characters (today's were a Princess, someone named Jimbob the Monkey, a cat, an angry toaster, and a tree) and then they all vote on the main character.  Then we come up with 5 things that the main character is afraid of, things the main character wants more than anything else in the world, the main character's best friend, the setting, the basic outlline, etc. and every time we vote.  We finally have the skeleton of the story and the kids basically take turns creating the first half of the story.  It gets pretty funny and pretty bonkers.  During the second hour, we break into groups/tables and each volunteer sits with a group of 3 kids and helps them complete the rest of the story the way THEY want it to.  After that hour, we take the stories back to the "mean editor" and he reads it and decides that it's an amazing story and he's sorry he ever doubted the kids' ability and wants to publish it.  So each kid then gets a copy of the story with the pictures that were illustrated by the artist earlier.  Pretty fun.

This week we had a group of all boys who were pretty funny and cute.  The boys that I sat at the table with were fascinated with the fact that I was from the States and asked me all about Disney World vs. Disneyland ("Well how do you KNOW Disney World is better than Disney LAND if you haven't even been to both!?" and "Oh yeah!  The Harry Potter park is near Disney World!  I wanna taste butter beer!!" and I would agree with them wholeheartedly.)  When trying to come up with a name for their character, one of them said "Well I want to name him after one of my six pets.  I have Tesco, Dexter, Jason, Jason Jr., Jasper, and Carol."  Which made me laugh.  Carol? Ha.   And when talking about sports, I mentioned that my husband played basketball and they kept asking me what team he played for.  I'd explain that he didn't play PROFESSIONALLY and they kept saying "It doesn't matter!  What team!?  What team!?" so finally I was like "Um...the Lake Highlands Wildcats...?" and they thought that was awesome.  "COOOOOL!"  Little boys are funny.

Although I don't LOVE the kids all the time (they smell funny, and they sometimes have bad attitudes, and they're punks), I just like...the environment.  In the afternoons they host similar sessions for junior high and high school kids, they have seminars on the weekends for teenagers, they have writing groups for adults at night during the week, and they love their volunteers and hook them up with cool writing things, like lectures to hear author's who are in town and other fun stuff.  AND the people who volunteer there are all into writing too!  The girl I met on my first day there asked what I was doing in Dublin and how long I'd be here and she said "Two to three years?  That's plenty of time to write a novel, like me!"  And she's right.  And today the guy I volunteered with was talking about the two books he's working on, based on the simplistic model that Fighting Words uses with their kids!  They're creative people who wanna help other young people be creative while taking advantage of all that the center has to offer!  And I like it.

So...I'll keep volunteering there and hanging out with the punks and surrounding myself with good people and we'll see what happens!