February 2007: An Anniversary (cont.)

Some present their very first manuscript written for children in their applications, but they come with a soaring passion for writing for children and young adults.

The other reason our students’ work grows so dramatically is harder to define, but I believe I have come to understand it. Before beginning to teach with the Vermont College program, I worked with many writers, some over a period of years. When I worked with students long term, I came to discover that eventually they and I would come to a place where I had given them all I had to offer. In fact, I could begin to see that, when the same students returned to me year after year, my strengths came to be their strengths and my blind spots, their blind spots. (There was little either they or I could do about my blind spots.)

In the Vermont program, a student may work with me for one semester and then move on to work with Tim Wynne-Jones for another . . . or Kathi Appelt or Rita Williams-Garcia or Laura Kvasnoski. Each semester another faculty member will see that student’s work anew or will see the same struggles I did and respond to them in different ways. As a consequence, our writers are tugged in different directions, sometimes to their initial discomfort, almost always to their great advantage.