Back in the day, it was more about how you wrote than what you wrote. There was something to that–still is if you ask the IRA!

Are you ready for a healthy, educational competition that rewards everyone, builds students’ self-esteem, and generates positive public relations for your school?

Enter the Zaner-Bloser National Handwriting Contest—an annual event that Zaner-Bloser sponsors to promote legible handwriting. The contest is free to enter and open to all students in Grades 1–8.

Over $100,000 in cash and prizes will be awarded. Prize packages for students, teachers, and schools include an all-expenses-paid trip to IRA’s 57th Annual Convention in Chicago, Illinois, for the eight outstanding teachers of the Grand National Grade-Level Winners! Watch this video to learn more.

Give all your students the opportunity to win. Download contest entry forms today. The deadline to enter is January 23, 2012—National Handwriting Day.

Sincerely,

International Reading Association

What inspires: Pushing Through

“Unlike cooking, for example, where largely edible, if raw ingredients are assembled, cut, heated, and otherwise manipulated into something both digestible and palatable, writing is closer to having to reverse-engineer a meal out of rotten food,” -author David Rakoff, from his essay “A Writer’s Day,” published in the spring 2011 Authors Guild Bulletin.

Rakoff shared how he procrastinates, justifies, stalls before settling in to write each day. How in most things, art, for example, one progresses, learns, becomes more adept and so the work gets easier. Conversely: “Writing—I can only really speak to writing here—always, always only starts out as shit; an infant of monstrous aspect; bawling, ugly, terrible and it stays terrible for a long, long time (sometime forever).”

Still, even with the “terrors and agitations,” Rakoff pushes through—never forgetting for a moment that his is not a life of “mining coal, waiting tables, or answering someone’s phone for a living”— beginning each writing day “suffused with this sense of privilege, shell-pink and pulsing with new hope.”

Rakoff's new book HALF EMPTY, published Sept 2011, by Anchor

What Inspires: Outreach

I’m finally able to write what is on my mind. You know how it is: saying a thing (or writing it, in my case) makes it real. So often, when a thing is really sad, or bad, or scary–or all three and more–we hold off putting words to it in hopes that it won’t be so. But it is so. My lovely, lively sister-in-law Marilyn is battling breast cancer. Marilyn just finished her fourth round of chemotherapy and is facing surgery, more chemo and maybe radiation treatment. If I were she, I’d be curled up in a ball in the corner somewhere. But Marilyn has laughter in her heart and so she is trying on Andrews Sisters-style wigs

Hey Patty...or is it Maxene? Sing One for Me!

(hopefully for Halloween and not every day wear hair), rejoicing because the side-effects of the 3rd chemo were less debilitating than those of the 2nd, and sending love notes such as this: “… So, all of you, know how fabulous you are and how much I appreciate your love, care, and humor. And even when I don’t hear from you or see you, I don’t doubt that you’re rooting me on…and know, I’m in your corner too.”

Because our health care system is what it is, even though Marilyn has insurance, she is still being slapped with massive medical expenses. In an effort to alleviate some of the worry of having to scratch up the money to pay for treatment so Marilyn can, instead, focus her energy where it should be focused–on beating the cancer and regaining vigor, friends organized a benefit for her. It was a grand and loving event but it didn’t raise all the funds needed; please contribute if you’re able. And join me in sending Marilyn light and healing energy.

Flyer for Marilyn's Benefit