As we knew would be the case, the atmosphere for RWAT 2013 on Saturday was charged with plenty of laughter and more than a few tears, as we gathered at Longfellow Middle School in Berkeley to celebrate the written and spoken word, the remarkable success of our writing support for another school year, and the look ahead as we plan WriterCoach Connection for 2013-14.
After an hour's worth of preparation, with Karen Larson greeting readers at the gate
and the sun slanting in the LMS library windows, the reading day began promptly at 8:00, Kathleen Hallam settling in as our traditional first reader.
Next up was Erica Siskind (left), displaying her skills as a children's librarian.
And on it went, for ten straight hours and 29 individual readers, plus this lively group of Longfellow students, gathered for the occasion by teacher and great WCC friend Martha Cain (kneeling in front), to read identity poems that had shouts and cheers from audience members reverberating around the room:
A traditional highlight of the day: Literay Jeopardy, a brain-busting game show put together by Annie Stine (with set-construction help from daughter Eliana). Here is Team 2 in action:
And here is Team 1, 2013 Literary Jeopardy winners:
I'm hear to tell you, we have some very smart people in our WCC family!
We had some Calvin Trillin (a donor to last year's RWAT), we had CAFL board member Denis Clifford's traditional RWAT reading of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, we even had WCC coach Chris Keeler in full regalia for some Lewis Carroll:
As the afternoon sun sailed high overhead, the group gathered for the reading of this year's RWAT play, The Laramie Project. At times during this reading, between lines, the brief silences echoed the tidal emotions of this heart-breaking story.
At long last, as the afternoon sun slanted in from the opposite direction, our traditional last RWAT reader, Lynn Mueller, settled in with her usual group of beautifully selected poems:
And suddenly, it was ten hours later, 6:00 pm straight up, and time to gather for the RWAT raffle drawing, with Annie Stine and Elic Suazo (holding the grand prize Kindle) presiding:
Donations at the event itself on Saturday totaled more than $1,200, pushing the amount raised to date for RWAT 2013 past $30,000, approaching our highest RWAT total ever with more donations likely to come in. The CAFL board put up $5,000 as a matching donation and our generous coaches and their family members, friends, and associates contributed the same, guaranteeing the match. All of this means one thing: continued writing support for students and teachers in Oakland, Berkeley, Albany, El Cerrito, and Richmond schools, offered by community members who know the importance of making sure students know someone is invested in their success.
Go here for a quick trip through pictures of this year's RWAT festivities, including photos of every reader. Click the Start Slideshow link and crank up your speakers!
The campaign continues, with donations still accepted into the summer on the RWAT site or by check to CAFL, PO Box 6098, Albany, CA 94706.
Meantime, our deep thanks to our abiding benefactors, all those wondrously dedicated supporters who donate to RWAT and/or, most especially, who give their valuable time and energy as coaches to our students.
We thank Kathleen Hallam, Karen Larson, and Elic Suazo, who were there with the chirping birds for setup as the sun rose, and Lisa Awrey, Lynn Mueller, and Elic again, who helped us sweep up and close the doors in the early evening.
And a final thanks to the geniuses who invented this annual fundraising campaign and who manage it every year, Longfellow WCC site coordinators Annie Stine and Mark Pasley, who surely were ready for some rest as we rang down the curtain on RWAT 2013:
Bob Menzimer
More than 50 guests filled the bus that took is into the renowned Oliver Ranch on Saturday for our third fundraising tour of the stunning works by internationally recognized artists.
The only way to see this art is to enter the Ranch with a nonprofit organization that has made the cut with the Oliver Ranch Foundation, and we're grateful to have been invited for a third tour. Here we are at right, under way for the Ranch on our luxury bus.
Before that, however, came our delectable riverside breakfast. Our gracious comestibles host Jed Larkin (left) of Chef Jed Catering and guest Ed Weil help serve it up, below.
Our tour guide was Steve Oliver himself. Well-known in the Bay Area as a major contemporary arts supporter, advocate, and civic leader, Steve is the former chairman of the board of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where he served as chair of Phase III of the New Museum Campaign in 1992, a role in which he was responsible for raising the final $5 million— a goal which he exceeded when he finished the campaign at $95 million.
It's a breathtaking experience to see this art. This installation, by Martin Puryear, is a mortared fieldstone sculpture with red cedar. When you peek in the front (it's hollow in there, but very dark),you have no idea what you're going to find when you walk around to the back (at right).
We decended into the installation by David Rabinowitch and Jim Jennings, "Visiting Artist Studios," architecture and carving in concrete walls, and then decided that sure, we could live and work there. Or spend a weekend. Or an hour. Whatever we can get.
Roger Berry's mammoth Corten steel sculpture "Darwin" (at right) is always a big favorite, for obvious reasons, with a scale that dwarfs a tour group.
Ditto Richard Serra's monumental six pairs of forged hyper-dense Corten steel blocks, titled "Snake Eyes and Boxcars." They are placed in precise mathematical relationships with each other and weigh up to 50 tons each. We spent a long time with them, riveted by Steve Oliver's stories about forging and transporting them. Below is CAFL board member LuNell Anderson, leaning against one with no fear of pushing it out of position! Note another pair, off in the distance. We moved on, but the pieces stayed.
Then it was on to a dual installation, Terry Allen's companion "humannature" pieces. They pretty much tell their own story, and WCC coach Paul Epstein (l.) is capturing part of it here with his camera. As for the second part of it, well, let's just say one of our guests is going to keep his belt tightened.
Near the end of the tour came one of the day's true highlight's, Ann Hamilton's famous performance tower, all eight stories of it (and that doesn't count the base under ground). It defies description, inside and out. Here we are, climbing in, and climbing (or sitting) up and down, with Richmond and Oakland Site Coordinator Karen Larson in a pose you won't see her in much while she's supervising her coaches.
It was a day to remember. We raised in the neighborhood of $8,000 (!), at least four times the amount from our previous Oliver Ranch tour two yearsa go. Many thanks to to our generous paying guests; to our organizers Shelli Fried and Kent Wright; to CAFL helpers and tour benefactors LuNell Anderson, Maureen Dixon, Kris Hafner, and Karen Larson; to our gracious in-kind contributors:
Bob Menzimer
This week at Albany Middle School, Ms. Uyeda's students, on their last coaching day, gave their writer coaches some heartfelt thank-you cards. Courtesy of AMS Site Coordinator Peg Healy, here is what was written on some of them:
* Thank you for helping me with my I-Search. I got a good grade on it and that's because of you. Thanks for all the help and I would love to work with you again.
* You really helped me bring out my ideas onto paper. All of your feedback really helped me through this project.
* You gave me ideas and helped me start the assignment I was working on every time we met. You made me think more in depth on my writing and gave me suggestions of improvement.
* Thank you SO MUCH for helping me out with my assignment. I feel like your'e one of the only adults I know that really understands the music I like. All the advice you gave me was very informative. It was fun working with you.
* I have learned a lot from you and thanks to you, I'm super proud of my final project. You helped me, and you were super nice and friendly during the meetings. The whole thing was a moment to remember, thanks to my friends, my family, my teacher, and YOU!
* I got GREAT ideas from your feedback and was able to
successfully to write amazing papers. I can't thank you enough.
* Thank you so much for the hard work you put into helping me with my I-Search. You really helped me stay on track with my project.
*I think I wouldn't have been able to come up with such good ideas without you. Thank you so much for making the I-Search easy! I miss all the conversations we had. PS I really hope you visit Brazil someday.
* Your revisions and comments made me have a much better
project.
* There were a few times when I was very stuck and needed help, so thank you for being there to help me!
* Your advice was always so amazing and you gave me ideas that I never would have been able to think of on my own. You really made the project a lot less stressful for me with all of your guidance, and it was very helpful to be able to talk to someone one-on-one about my work. You were totally awesome! PS Thanks for the mint on the 1st day!
* You have given me support, time, knowledge and an abundance of fabulous ideas.
* You helped me develop some writing skills I didn't
have before.
*I don't know what I would have done without you. I had a wonderful time working with you. Thank you again.
*You helped me improve my writing so much.
* Thank you for the help with my short story. With your ideas I was able to create a wonderful piece!
* The edits you helped me make on my short story were really
helpful.
* I really appreciate all the tips and ideas you offered. You helped me so much and I wouldn't have been able to do the I-Search without you. Thank you so much for your time and help.
* You made it really easy for me and it was just so much fun talking to you. I had a pretty hard topic but you helped me through it, giving great advice along the way. You're amazing. Thanks again for being such a great writer's coach!
* You gave me so many amazing ideas! I appreciate it! I enjoy
learning and writing with you! Thanks again for all the help!
Bob Menzimer
Springtime! And that means the biggest fundraiser of the year for WriterCoach Connection, the annual Read-and-Write-a-thon (RWAT)!
Come on over to Longfellow Middle School, 1500 Derby Street in Berkeley, on Saturday, May 18, and help us read for ten straight hours, starting at 8 a.m. Sign up for a 15-minute slot and read from your favorite literary piece. Better yet, donate to the cause, at https://www.firstgiving.com/fundraiser/writercoach-connection/rwat2013 And best of all, pass the link to your family, friends, and associates. If every one of our 600 volunteer writer coaches asks ten friends and those ten friends each gives just $10, we'll soar past our $50,000 goal.
None of us who has read aloud to our compadres at RWAT in the past can quite explain how moving it is. Who knows why, exactly, but tears have flowed. Come see for yourself!
Bob Menzimer
A tall young man ambled over to our WCC table at the
Berkeley City College Service Fair this afternoon and broke into a broad grin.
“I had a writer coach when I was at Willard,” he said, pointing to our blue and
white banner. “It definitely helped me.” Although it has been nine years, Byron
McGovern, who is now working as a lacrosse coach at Bishop O’Dowd and as a sports
coach with Coaching Corps, still recalls the impact of his WCC coach and still recalls
her name: Virginia Jardim.
“She gave me a lot of tricks and tips,” he said,
including how to remember the spelling of the the word "government." More importantly, “She
helped me understand the writing process.” He remembered working on essays,
starting with a draft, going over them together, and making revisions, before
writing a final draft.
“In 7th and 8th grade, writing even a three-page essay is a daunting thing,” says Byron. “Having someone there to say, ‘it’s not that bad’ is helpful. For a lot of kids, I’m sure that support helped them get over their fear of writing.” A recent graduate of UC Santa Cruz, with a double major in English and politics, Byron put his writing skills to good use in college.
We don’t often get a chance to hear from our students after they move on, so it was a delight meeting Byron and hearing his writer coach remembrances. And maybe his coach had other positive influences. Like our own writer coaches, Byron has already found a way to give back to the community, with his service in the Coaching Corps program, which brings after-school sports to children in low-income communities--and whose motto could be our own: coach a kid, save a life.
Lynn Mueller, Associate Director
Or, more appropriately, Where's Drew? Drew Prober is in charge of the renovation of the library at Fremont High School, and he's in this photo somewhere -- see if you can spot him.
The library at Fremont High is important to us for several reasons. One, it's where we do our writer coaching at the school. Two, it's a beautiful space, with massive arching beams, exquisitely carved and soaring high over the room. And three, its renovation presages the complete redesign of Fremont High, scheduled to take place over the next two years. The campus will look entirely different, with an appealing central open space surrounded by the buildings that will form the property's perimeter.
New campus, writer coaching for students -- lots of reasons for Oakland families to think about sending their kids to Fremont High!
Bob Menzimer
Spring, and support for WriterCoach Connection, are busting out in May at Farley's Coffee in Emeryville. Every Tuesday in May, Farley's will donate 2.5% of its sales to WCC. Farley's offers a bounteous menu of breakfasts, soups, salads, hot panini, cold sandwiches, espresso, coffee, tea and chai, tea, and other beverages, all served by friendly folks who create an active community atmosphere.
Farley's in Emeryville is at 1195 65th St. Other locations are in Oakland (33 Grand Avenue) and San Francisco (1315 - 18th St.).
The menu is tempting and the company is superb, so there are plenty of reasons to visit Farley's, especially in May!
Bob Menzimer
Ever wonder what actually happens after you've walked into a classroom to work with students alongside your fellow coach-team members? Here's the story in three quick pictures from a coaching session today at Richmond High.
Site Coordinator Karen Larson briefs the coaches on today's session,
reviewing the teacher's assignment, leading a discussion about it among the coaches, and answering questions.
Next thing you know,
the room is abuzz with the conversational murmur of coach-student pairs.
And here's what it looks like up close, coach Robert Collins and his student.
It seems simple, and in a way, it is. But it's a magical process that keeps coaches coming back year after year!
Bob Menzimer
