Tosh Taylor - The voices of New Brunswick writers are the heart of WordCraft, a podcast aimed at creating Community through Words. WordCraft is a creation of the Writers’ Federation of New Brunswick, a non-profit organization that helps New Brunswick writers to write, acquire skills, and showcase their talents to the world. The show is hosted and produced by Jenna Morton, with technical production by Tosh Taylor. The WFNB acknowledges that the land on which we live, work, and gather is the traditional unceded territory of the Woolastook and Mi'kmaq peoples. And we honour the spirit of our ancestors' treaties of peace and friendship. We acknowledge the support of the Canadian Council for the Arts.

Jenna Morton - Hello and welcome. I'm your host, Jenna Morton, and you are listening to Word Craft, a podcast by the Writers Federation of New Brunswick. This season we are diving into some of the programs that are essential to promoting writing and reading in this province. One of those programs, of course, is the Writers in the Schools program. This has been a program that has been connecting authors and illustrators with classrooms in the province for decades. To reflect on its impact, its importance. I'm going to be joined by some of the key members that are involved with this, both from the Department of Education side of things, as well as the Writers’ Federation of New Brunswick, which helps bring in the authors who are connected to the program. I am pleased to welcome Ginny Hill to the program. She is the coordinator on behalf of the Province for the Writers in the School program, as well as Valerie Sherrard and Kelly Cooper, who kind of have double duty here. They help out on behalf of the Writers Federation of New Brunswick in keeping the database together. They are also authors who have been in classrooms as part of this program, and Kelly is also a teacher as well. Welcome to you all. Welcome to Wordcraft.

Valerie Sherrard - Thank you.

Kelly Cooper - Hi.

Jenna Morton - Thank you so much for joining us to talk about this program. I know a lot of people listening will have memories of it, an understanding of it. Some people will go, oh, well, the name sounds, you know, pretty self-explanatory, but I know there's a lot more behind the framework of the program. And so, Ginny, I'm wondering if you could start us off by giving us a bit of an overview of what exactly the Writers in the School program is.

Ginny Hill - Sure. It's a Department of Education initiative. I am the coordinator, and what we try to do is introduce students all over the province to our New Brunswick writers, whether it's a small school like on Grand Manan or whether it's a big high school like Saint John High. Everyone has the opportunity. to be involved. But the important part or the way that it happens is the teacher. The teacher is the crux of all this. They have to apply to the program to be part of it. They have to set up the day and make sure it works when the author comes in as to what classrooms they go to. So our problem now is teachers are very, very busy. And in all honesty, COVID affected our program a lot. It took about three years after for the schools to be allowed from the Department of Education to expand. And it took a while to come back to life. We came back double now because some are doing it as a video conference. The majority still want you to be physically in front of them. They want to really meet that real life author, even though she can see her when we do it, and she's up on the screen, it's still not the same. But we also have some authors with health problems and fear of winter driving, so it works for them.

Jenna Morton - It's wonderful to have, different platforms, different ways, different opportunities so that everyone hopefully has the same chance. I'm hoping that we can, convince some of those teachers who might be listening that they want to have this in their classroom. And I think one of the best ways to do that is to kind of hear it, from the author's perspective, what that magic is like when you have one of these visits in the classroom. And maybe, Valerie, if you want to start by sharing some of your experience.

Valerie Sherrard - Well, I will visit students pretty well of almost every grade range. I prefer not to do 11 and 12 so much because chiefly because most of my material is not for that age group, but I have picture books, middle grade novels and so forth. And I really enjoy connecting with the students from the office perspective with respect to virtual versus in-person. In-person really can't compare or I should have said that the opposite way. That's what we writers do. Like we start something and then we revise it. So I'm just giving you like an in-person example of that. So the virtual visit, in my opinion, doesn't compare to the in-person visit. The in-person visit, you really have that connection with the students. You know, they're present right there in front of you. You can see how they're responding to what you're discussing. whether it's literacy or you're talking about a specific work or a specific subject that fits in with the curriculum and ties in with one of your works or whatever. So it's really like a come alive kind of thing when you're in the classroom or even before a larger group and you see how they're reacting, you're able to field questions immediately that nobody has to come to a microphone or pass a question to somebody else or whatever. There's a real immediacy there in the classroom that I absolutely love.

Jenna Morton - And Kelly, I know that you've also taken part as an author in this program. What are some of the things that you've taken away from being in the classroom with students?

Kelly Cooper - Well, it's, you know, it's very rewarding to watch students respond to the work, and they often have questions - like really excellent questions for the author that talks, you know, then those questions allow me to talk about words and the importance of certain words or talk about the process. Like I was doing a reading, just for example, if you'd like an example, I was reading one of my picture books, and at the very end of the book, there's a blank white page and a single word on it, and the word is home. And I had a student in grade two put their hand up and say, “why is there just one word on that page?” And then we were able to talk about how some words, they have a lot of weight. They're very important words. And we kind of all agreed at the end that home was a pretty important word and maybe it deserved its own page. So just those little opportunities that you have to reinforce the different ways that language can be used.

Jenna Morton -  I love that example.

Kelly Cooper – Yeah, it was a very nice moment as the author for the student to pay attention and notice that.

Jenna Morton - You mentioned reading from a picture book and we've been talking about some of the younger students, but this is a program that goes right through to the high school age. I'm wondering if you can, and I don't know who might want to take this question first, talk a little bit about the difference in how a program like this would work from, an elementary school classroom to a high school classroom.

Kelly Cooper - Well, I can say a few things about my most recent high school visit. I actually helped a small group edit a children's picture book they were preparing. So they were an enrichment group at a high school in Saint John, and they were preparing a children's book through a project they were working on. So they wanted me to spend the afternoon with them and help them kind of edit their work. And, and that was really interesting. And, you know, in that case, I was only working with a group of maybe five or six students. And, and then, so, you know, you can do kind of sometimes I do more workshop things. And then with the younger students, it tends to be more readings in my case.

Valerie Sherrard - Reading and, you know, the younger students, they need different things to pull their attention. Obviously, like you usually will have some visuals and you'll have some keywords and you'll have as much audience participation as you can with the younger students because that really keeps them engaged. You know, I have when I read one of my picture books, I have keywords that they have specific assignments to respond to. And they're listening carefully as I read the story because they're listening for their words so that they can say moo or ribbit or whatever their particular assigned role is. And then as you move through the middle grades, of course, it's just the level of where they're at in their education and what they've been exposed to, what subject matter is appropriate for the different age groups and so forth, and then into the higher grades. I guess like my chief concern with the higher grade levels is that most of the students are far more sophisticated than I am. So I feel often like just kind of like the misfit in the room talking about writing or talking about literacy or whatever, you know, whatever the teacher has requested. I'm never sure that I'm really connecting with them in the same way. I really feel the connection with the younger groups, the little ones, the middle grades, up to eight, even nine. But over that, usually, I feel like that it's not exactly the same. And part of that, I think, is just where they're at in their social development, that they're not that keen to be responsive in the same way that the younger ones are.

Jenna Morton - I think as a mother of a teenager, I think you've nailed that exactly. It's not their interest that's reflective of their approach there.

Kelly Cooper - I think that depends too on what kind of class. Like, you know, if you go into a creative writing class, that might be a great fit because those students have an interest in creative writing and some of them are really…They really want to talk to you about your process. They really want to ask what that's like, or they sometimes they want to ask about the money, which is, you know, you have to be honest and say, “there's not a lot of money often in this necessarily,” but they, you know, they have different questions. And I think it's partly, you know, I'm a teacher, I'm an art teacher actually, and I do that as well. And it's the teacher's role to kind of prepare the class for the, for the, I've gone into visits and the teacher had, you could tell that they had prepared some questions beforehand so that those questions would be asked at the end or they had talked about what would you ask a writer, that kind of thing. And so that that was helpful, right? If the teacher kind of sets it up so that there can be that kind of participation, because, yes, they are hesitant sometimes and quieter, and and you know, maybe a little less spontaneous than the younger kids. So they kind of need that that bit of encouragement, I think, or a bit of support.

Valerie Sherrard - I think teachers who have had students just, you know, randomly ask questions without vetting them first, sometimes get a little bit wary. Like I've seen many teachers look horrified when a student will ask me either how much I make or how old I am. That seems to be like a just a general interest at every turn. When they ask me how much I make, I say, well, it's a percentage. So like, you know, if it's 10% and if a book is, if a book is $10 and you're making 10%, if you sell, 500,000 books, you'll make $500,000. And if you make and if you sell four books, you'll make $4. And so that it really depends on sales. And they…always their faces always fall. And you say the $4 thing. I mean, that hasn't happened yet, thankfully, but you never know.

Valerie Sherrard - And it's a good chance to talk about the royalty system at that point, right? Because that's that's an important part of of the writing life is that idea of royalties and sales. So with the older students especially, you can get into that with them a bit more. And then you can also talk about, you know, if you want to, you can go into intellectual property and copyright. Sometimes it leads in that direction, how, you know, ideas have value and that sort of thing.

Ginny Hill - Unfortunately, our high school teachers are not applying as much as our middle and elementary. I think the semestering has a lot to do with it. They have two different groups of students within a year. They have certain goals and objectives they need to complete. So unless they decide, I find early in the semester that they're going to have an author, it probably isn't going to happen. But the interesting thing is when this program started, the Department of Ed gave the high school teachers’ council, $5,000 that went far, right. And it was only high school teachers that could use the program. And now I practically have to contact a teacher I know in a high school and say, look, you forgot about writers in the school this year. So I know they're very, very busy, but that's our weak link right now. And we have tried to to build it up because elementaries have really jumped on it. That's where, well, Valerie, you get called, I know the most for sure. Oh no, maybe middle with a lot of your books too. Yeah. Yeah.

Jenna Morton - Yeah. I'm wondering if you could share a little bit more about the process from a teacher's point of view of how they connect with the program and find out what is available.

Ginny Hill - But in September, the department sends out a memo that goes to every school in the province with an application form attached and explaining that if they went on to your Writers Federation website, they could find the authors that are actually part of the program. Without the support that I ended up with a few years ago, when I didn't have to come up with the list of authors, it is wonderful. The website is maintained by the Federation and it's updated. People contact Valerie still, I think, you know, if they've got a new book or whatever. So it is maintained by the Federation. So I now just have the teachers to work on. So they get this memo that comes out that goes to the principal and then we have to pray it gets passed there because they're so busy. But most cases there's department heads and so on, and they pass it on to that teacher. Or I have some teachers that have applied already. They apply every year. And then they go on and they pick the author that they're interested in, apply to me. There's a $75 charge to a school and then I pay the - which is 300 - the honorarium for the author, plus travel and overnight if it's necessary. So it's to take the time to go through the website with the list, but it tells what age the books are appropriate for and what areas they will travel to. And if your name starts with A, you probably get a few more calls.

Jenna Morton - I have to say, I did go on the website and it is very user friendly to be able to kind of go through very quickly and know, oh, I'm in, Anglophone East and I'm looking for a writer who would speak to a high school group and the names come up and it's very simple to kind of then go through and try to decide which one might match best with, the students that you have or the curriculum that you're trying to teach that year.

Ginny Hill -  And then they make the contacts, personally with once they know it's approved, and tailor it to work with what their goals are or what they are studying at that time. Our authors are wonderful with that. When I get the the evaluation forms back, she did exactly what I wanted. And, you know, there's very few complaints.

Jenna Morton - I was wondering if we could talk a little bit more about that, about, some of the feedback over the years. And I know, Ginny, that you've, you've been running this program now for decades. I'm wondering if you can share, you know, some of those moments that have really kind of stuck out and those stories that resonate that really help keep this program going.

Ginny Hill -  I like it when a school sends me little notes from the students as well as just that basic checklist that goes out or if they bother to really explain what was the strongest point about the visit. The main positive from the teachers is that the authors are interested in the curriculum base. They do exactly what the objectives for that year are. The fact that they work together instead of just coming in… way back, sometimes they weren't, they didn't converse that well, I don't think. And now they tell them what, they need to do for outcomes. And the authors are really tuned into what they want and…very positive feedbacks.

Jenna Morton - Kelly or Valerie, do you have a, you know, a standout moment in your head from being in a classroom and, you know, someone who came up to you or came up to you years later and said, I remember when you came to my class.

Valerie Sherrard - I actually had that happen this spring. I was doing a lot of visits relative to, this year is the 200th anniversary of the Great Miramichi Fire. And one of my earlier novels, Three Million Acres of Flame, is about that. So I had a lot of local school visits earlier this year. One of the teachers, after I had finished my presentation to a large group, one of the teachers came up to me and he said, “I heard you present on this book, what the year that it came out.” I said, “were you a student?” And yes, he had been a student and he'd gone full circle and now he was a teacher, and his class was there. So that was very cool.

Ginny Hill - And also the authors fill out an evaluation form on the visit to the school. And I sometimes have gone back to the schools when, you know, there's something that's mentioned, when there's not a teacher present or a teacher that has met you at the door or somebody. Like, if you're going to invite an author, you need to make it welcoming. And so I follow up on your forms as well, but they're pretty positive too.

Kelly Cooper - I had an interesting experience. My publisher had given me all these postcards with images from the book that I could give to students. So I would finish, I finished my reading and I- I gave, you know, I gave out these postcards and the idea was they could, they could write a message to a friend. But then one student brought it up to me and wanted me to sign it. He wanted like my autograph, which had never happened. And so then, of course, it being elementary school, then you can guess what happened next. Like, everybody wanted me to sign their postcard and, and I thought, well, okay. Yes, I will do that. It kind of was not the intention of the postcards. Anyway, it was very charming, actually. It was quite fun, but it was not really what I expected to happen at the end of the visit.

Valerie Sherrard - I pre-sign my postcards before I do a school visit always because I've been in that very same spot, Kelly. It's so fun when you've got, you know, 60 or 70 children and there's a two-minute window between one class leaving and another coming in, everyone wants your signature. So I just sign them. I'll just pop them in front of me when I'm watching TV or something. I'll just sign hundreds of them for a time and take them with me ready to go.

Kelly Cooper -  Good idea.

Ginny Hill - And some of you authors do hear from the students sometimes afterwards. Sometimes you turn them on to writing and the teachers have said, is it okay if I contact the author? They want her to proofread it or at least know she I did what she said was important to do. And that to me is the real positive when it goes that next step, not just go and read. and leave and hope you do turn someone on. It's really fun to find that you did.

Jenna Morton - Yeah. Well, I will share briefly with you that it wasn't the New Brunswick Writers in the School program, but in Nova Scotia, we had a similar thing. And that's pretty much why I'm here now. When I was in middle school, there was an author who came in to, you know, give a talk about his book. I remember us all kind of funneling into - It wasn't a theater, it wasn't that nice, but it was a bigger room than a classroom. And at the end, he took questions. And I wasn't brave enough to ask in front of the whole room. But before he left, I made my way up and I said, you know, if someone likes writing and thinks that they're good at doing this, you know, what should you do for university? And he said, University of King's College in Halifax. It's a great school. And probably never really even put a lot of thought into his answer, to be honest. And I took that and ran with it. And that's where my degree is from. And because of that, the rest of my career was set into motion. So it's those little moments that a lot of times you might not even know that you've had that impact by talking to a student in class, but every one of those kids has probably gone on. and told someone else about it, whether or not it's impacted the rest of their life. On that note, is there anything else about the Writers in the School program or connecting with writers and readers in this province that you'd like to share before we wrap up our conversation today?

Kelly Cooper - I would just say that I would, you know, encourage, you know, writers and schools both to participate. I think that, as you said, you never know. There's still not very many students that meet a writer who has a physical book they can show them that they have created, right? So I think it's for the few kids in the room, especially who might be interested in writing, I think it really does. It's very useful for them to see there are people out there doing this. You know, there are people out there who are creating books, like they're these, these things that we, we use every day in school. Like, here's the person, here's one of the people that actually created that, like the, the manuscript that led to that physical object. So I think, you know, there's, there's value in that for sure, uh, for, for students, uh, to see that that's a real job.

Jenna Morton - And I would think a lot of power to see that not only is it a real job, it's someone here in New Brunswick who is creating this and doing this here in this place. I don't have to leave and go somewhere else to make this happen if it's my dream.

Kelly Cooper - Yes, I think that's important for kids.

Jenna Morton - Well, I'd like to thank you all for taking the time to share a little bit about taking part in the Writers in School program, as well as thank you for all the time that you've spent in classrooms and coordinating people to get to classrooms. I think it's a fantastic program that I hope people will listen to this podcast and maybe you'll get one or two more teachers reaching out.

Kelly Cooper - Thank you, Jenna.

Valerie Sherrard - Thank you, Jenna.

Jenna Morton - Thank you so much. My guests have been Ginny Hill, Valerie Sherrard, and Kelly Cooper talking to you about the Writers in the Schools program. If you would like more information about the program, perhaps you're a classroom teacher who is now inspired to invite authors or illustrators into your classroom. You can find all the information about the program through our website. You're going to go to the Writers’ Federation website, which is wfnb.ca, and you can add the slash WISP for Writers in the School program, and it'll take you directly to the page. Or you can just look under the programs tab for Writers in the School. I hope that you've enjoyed this discussion, that you can like, share, subscribe, follow along, do all those wonderful things. Most importantly, if you know a teacher tell them about this program, ask if they've had a writer welcomed into their classroom, and that they should check out the program. Thank you so much for joining us, and make sure you tune in to the next episode of WordCraft.

Tosh Taylor - WordCraft is a project by the non-profit Writers’ Federation of New Brunswick. The show is hosted and produced by Jenna Morton, with technical production by Tosh Taylor. We acknowledge the support of the Canadian Council for the Arts. The Writers' Federation of New Brunswick acknowledges that the land on which we live, work, and gather is the traditional unceded territory of the Woolastook and Mi'kmaq peoples. We honor the spirit of our ancestors' treaties of peace and friendship.