Foreword

Marion Dane Bauer

When I was writing What’s Your Story? A Young Person’s Guide to Writing
Fiction, I found myself confronted with an important question. Once a young writer has expended the enormous effort required to plan and write and revise a piece of fiction, what comes next? Publication, if by publication one means competing with professional writers for professional markets, is out of reach. As out of reach as a professional orchestra would be to young musicians. Probably more so, because an occasional musical genius is born, but even someone who will one day be seen as a literary genius must acquire years of living experience, not to mention years of learning craft, before professional publication is a meaningful possibility.

And so I answered the question, “Where can I get my story published?” with complete candor. I said, “You probably can’t get it published anywhere.” And I encouraged young writers to share their work in other ways. But when I was writing What’s Your Story? I hadn’t yet encountered Chris Weber or the many innovative and dedicated teachers whose methods of working with student writers he has brought to Publishing with Students: A Comprehensive Guide.
Reading this book has almost made me wish I could return to my student
days and work under one of these teachers. What a thrill it would have been when I was young to have so much demanded of the writing I love to do, to be surrounded by others who had learned to take their writing seriously too, to have my pieces read. Whatever might have come after, I would have remembered that work and that publication for the rest of my life.

This book brings together a group of inspired and inspiring writing teachers who have found practical ways to encourage, demand excellence from and publish their students. If you are a teacher, it can’t help but make you want to emulate their successes. I hope it will encourage you, too, to be teachers who write. In my journeys through classrooms across the country, I have found that no one makes enthusiastic readers more effectively than teachers who are themselves enthusiastic readers, and no one makes stronger writers than teachers who are willing to let their students see them struggle with their own writing.

As everyone knows too well, we have come to a time when there is little place left in the world’s economy for people who are not literate. The jobs as ditch diggers or cogs on a factory assembly line have been supplanted by those in which workers must be able to read and must be able to communicate clearly in writing. This fact alone makes the task of contemporary education more complex and more difficult than educating young people ever was in the past. Few of your students will make a living writing poetry and essays and stories, but all of them will be required, throughout their lives, to write. If under your tutelage they can learn to love the process, they will go into their futures supplied with one of the most important tools for success.

Student publication is more than a fun project, though it can certainly be that for everyone involved. It is more, even, than a way of bringing writers and readers together. It is a way of making genuine literacy—the ability to communicate effectively in writing—the single most exciting goal of your classroom.

Enjoy this book. Be transformed by it. Emulate the models you will find
here and see your students transformed.

Marion Dane Bauer, author and writing teacher, Eden Prairie, Minnesota. Ms. Bauer was first Faculty Chair and continues on the faculty of the Master of Fine Arts in Writing for Children program at Vermont College of Norwich University, a low-residency program out of Montpelier, Vermont.

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