Innovative Writing Instruction: Writing Selves, Writing Stories

In this third "Innovative Writing Instruction" column, the author invited a former high school teacher on the verge of preparing for doctoral candidacy exams, an instructor and doctoral student interested in writing research/practice, and a university supervisor for teacher education preservice students to share aspects of their writing selves, writing stories. Their perspectives, formed through collaborative, democratic engagements with peers, mentor teachers, and students, reveal the significance of writing everywhere and all the time. Acts of writing, for her three coauthors, occur in classrooms and cafes, while evaluating student writing, and during virtual and face-to-face meetings. Together, their perspectives, or writing stories, can inform individuals' thinking about writing, challenge them to reconsider writing experiences that they individually author, and invite them to cherish the writing encounters they collaboratively create. Individually, these stories can reawaken their desires to be innovative and to stimulate others, as they stimulate them, and to follow the advice of poet Adrienne Rich who beckons each of us "to write as if your life depended on it".