{"id":656,"date":"2025-03-17T16:42:34","date_gmt":"2025-03-17T20:42:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.writopialab.org\/writopiaspeaks\/?p=656"},"modified":"2025-11-19T14:43:50","modified_gmt":"2025-11-19T19:43:50","slug":"struggle-and-growth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.writopialab.org\/writopiaspeaks\/struggle-and-growth\/","title":{"rendered":"Struggle and Growth"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Written by Matthew Jellison, Associate Director of Education, Writopia Lab<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m struggling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is good, actually. Isn\u2019t struggle at the center of learning? I always remind the instructors at Writopia\u2014the writing and education non-profit where I oversee the professional learning of our network of adult writers who teach writing to kids and teens\u2014that discomfort can be a good thing. I always remind myself. For the most part, us writers who teach kids are a gentle bunch. We\u2019re here \u2018cause we love words and we love kids. And so, when something comes up in the creative writing workshops we lead\u2014a behavioral issue, for example\u2014new instructors often reluctant to address it head on. We don\u2019t want to shut the kid down, we don\u2019t want to sully the room that\u2014on those days when it all clicks\u2014feels like a microcosm of unbridled creativity, we don\u2019t want this space where kids come in order to find a sort of sanctuary to feel anything<\/em> like school with punitive measures, and so our impulse is to avoid struggle. But it\u2019s important that we allow that struggle, I remind our instructors. That week or two of discomfort, of awkwardness and messy feelings, of strategy practicing, will often blossom into real learning not just for the kids in the room but also for you, I remind myself. Growth is what lives at the very end of struggle. Struggle is how we get there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So here I am struggling. And even though the struggle is good, it doesn\u2019t always feel good. What I\u2019m struggling to do is write this essay that my colleague Lena Roy asked me to write, sharing the story of how I found myself at Writopia. I\u2019m happy she asked, but I\u2019m still struggling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It should be simple enough to recall the story of a late-twenties playwright\/actor\/<\/p>\n\n\n\n

bartender\/babysitter picking up the kid he watched everyday for three years from a Writopia day camp on the Upper West Side. How the two of them\u2014extremely close despite their twenty year age gap, with a tendency to \u201cbro out\u201d together weekday afternoons watching Star Wars<\/em> or playing pretend\u2014grabbed a cold drink and a snack (a cold brew for the babysitter, a muffin for the kid) as the kid told the babysitter about his day. How the babysitter was rapt by everything the kid got to do; work on an original story for THREE WHOLE HOURS, develop a graphic novel, and play Dungeons and Dragons, tomorrow he\u2019s thinking of taking a stab at songwriting, and he\u2019s curious about filmmaking, he might give that a try, too. I could tell you that the kid and the babysitter were both acutely aware that their relationship, at least as it stood, had a looming expiration date. The kid was entering 5th<\/sup> grade and after 5th<\/sup> grade was middle school and in middle school, kids no longer have babysitters. And for the babysitter, he would be thirty that year, and maybe it was time to find something else to support himself as he pursued the financially thankless profession of professional playwright. This was their last summer together as babysitter and kid. Could the babysitter maybe teach at this creative mecca for kids where the kid just spent his day? Apparently not, you needed to be a published author or produced playwright for them to even consider you, and the babysitter\u2014while having spent chunks of his twenties at residencies and fellowships and hosting professional readings of his work\u2014had not reached the milestone of production. So it remained just a distant dream, of finding something meaningful and fun to do that also paid enough money to actually live in this city. And of figuring out what he was going to do when the kid got too old to spend afternoons with him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I could also tell you that that dream didn\u2019t stay dormant for long. A series of events led the babysitter to a production only months later, his very first, which he starred in, a play he had begun to write in the kitchen of the kid\u2019s family\u2019s apartment while the kid was in the other room one afternoon playing with a friend, and so when June came, and his parents held a goodbye cookie party for the babysitter, as the kid and the babysitter\u2019s relationship was shifting permanently, they\u2019d go watch the new Star Wars movie together over the holiday but they were no longer a daily duo, at that point, the babysitter found himself not a babysitter anymore. He found himself a produced playwright in need of some financial stability.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I could tell you that he applied for the job and became a part time creative writing instructor. And he loved it. He loved the kids. He loved their writing. He loved their voices and how they deepened and expanded in writing workshop. He loved working with all the ages, kid and teens alike, and witnessing growth and development. And a year in, he asked if they could hire him full time, even though there wasn\u2019t really anything he could do that would be practically helpful for an organization. Spreadsheets freaked him out, and he didn\u2019t have any tech skills. He was all heart. But still, they hired him full time and he grew and he learned over the years and he found immense amount of meaning and joy and yes, at times, he also struggled, to find balance with his writing, to conserve energy, with a feeling that he wasn\u2019t being his full authentic self 40 hours out of the week, and, once the pandemic hit, struggling to adapt to teaching and meeting online, a place where it\u2019s hard to know if any real learning and connection is happening because there\u2019s no physical room where it happens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But despite those struggles–small in the scheme of everything, non-existent if you\u2019re reading the news\u2014he remains inspired six years in, inspired by the work, by his colleagues, and most of all, at the center of it, the kids, of course the kids. As the world becomes more challenging to make sense of, he feels meaning in the work of helping kids tell their stories, and helping kids find some sort of peace, and he too would find those things in them. As one of the first kids he taught when he started working there would tell him on a recent Friday afternoon, after she had\u2014in astonishment to the babysitter\/playwright-turned-playwright\/educator–grown into a teen over the many years they worked together, and had begun interning in workshops with little kids, \u201cI think kids are the best people\u2026no offense.\u201d And he would turn and say, \u201cnone taken. I agree.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There it is. The story. I\u2019ve told it. Struggle over.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But I\u2019m still struggling. Something keeps nagging at me about this story, maybe it\u2019s the plot holes. There are people who shaped the playwright\/educator in such a way that when the kid started talking about what he did that day at day camp, the playwright\/educator\u2019s ears perked up. The story feels incomplete without them. Who and what made it so that when he stumbled upon Writopia, he felt like it fit just so?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Was it his dad, an actor, who took him to the theater nights growing up, where he hung out backstage, actors in their period costumes coming and going, sometimes helping him with French homework, one time consoling him when he puked backstage because of a stomach bug, some nights sneaking into the back of the house to watch his favorite scene, others viewing it all from a different angle backstage, set pieces and stagehands flying around him, a journey into the inside of a physical story every Wednesday night while mom was at night school? His dad, who stayed up late with him while they read Lord of the Rings <\/em>together in elementary school, <\/em>no not read, devoured, <\/em>forgetting time altogether as they acted out parts and made discoveries? Who stayed up even later nights to coach him on monologues for performing arts school, talk through papers in high school till 4 am the night before they were due? Nights with dad were a potent mixture of storytelling and nurture that the playwright\/educator would bring with him years later when he\u2019d conference with kids and teens one-on-one at Writopia about their own stories. Was it because of those nights with his dad that he knew how to help a young writer flesh out a character in her story or pair down the latest 1,000-word draft of his college essay, all while enforcing for them how valuable their natural impulses on the page actually were, all while gently redirecting others impulses and nurturing those that had room to grow, while inviting them on a journey to the heart of their piece, while always listening what it is they had to say?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Or was it his mom? Who would take him each September to help set up her classroom and each June to help her take it down, over the twenty years or so when she worked at a public school on the Upper West Side, first as a reading teacher and later as assistant principal, a place where, just like he was physically inside of a story when he went to theater with his dad, he was physically inside a hub of learning. His mom, who would vocalize her frustration over standardized testing, share missives and soundbites about her teaching principles that championed following the student through their journey of learning, letting kids take the lead, while still, as educators, providing structure and oversight. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Who would tell him, when he asked her years later why she left acting for teaching, that she was never very good at advocating for herself, something you have to do as an actor in a tenacious business, but felt like she could advocate really well for kids, and so that, when he was out there in the world, in his twenties, trying to get seen by a certain casting director or court an actor with a bit of a name for a play reading of his, when he was trying to tell his own stories, me me me<\/em>, he would look up at this photo of her that hung in the living room of the apartment where he grew up, his dad\u2019s favorite photo of her, and it would slowly embolden this notion within him that maybe there were people to champion beyond simply one\u2019s self, the photo of her on tour as an actor in the eighties in the Soviet Union playing Peter Pan–the musical version, the famous one–standing across from a little boy who\u2019s just come to see the show, who\u2019s meeting Peter for the first time, and she\u2019s facing him and pointing directly in that boy\u2019s direction, emphatically, ecstatically, you you you.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Or was it a series of teachers and mentors? His third grade teacher, a former Alvin Ailey dancer who–between typical third grade curricular fair like building Mayan temples and times tables–took his class to the fifth floor dance studio each day and taught them complex dance routines to Whitney Houston\u2019s I\u2019m Every Woman<\/em>, thirty or so small awkward, impressionable bodies who had ownership over nothing in their lives except, in those moments, the dance floor? Who taught him that learning wasn\u2019t simple cognition, it was physical and full-bodied? Or the seventh grade teacher whose only homework were \u201creader\u2019s letters,\u201d weekly communications about what he was reading, obsessing over words, making conclusions, triggering associations, picking up books with greater frequency than ever before with the excitement to share new insights about them? Or maybe his AP Lit teacher junior year, injecting some brightness into the playwright\/educator-then-moody-highschooler\u2019s otherwise unimaginative academic classes, by assigning the class to read To the Lighthouse <\/em>by Virginia Woolf? Or his voice professor in acting conservatory who sat him down one day to tell him that she, after years working with him on his physical instrument, believed that when he acted, the way he carried his voice, he was subconsciously trying to impersonate the way his dad sounded to him when he was growing up, an epiphany that led him to find more truth on stage? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Was it the series of adults at the 52nd Street Project, the arts and education non-profit that was his <\/em>Writopia growing up, who helped him write his first play performed by professional actors when he was ten, a zany whodunit about a detective on the hunt for Cupid\u2019s murder, or a performance of a new musical when he was thirteen, an original one-person show on his sixteenth birthday about non-conformity and pot smoking, which they\u2019d uninvite parents to in response to his play\u2019s not-so-parent-friendly material so that the teens could be uncensored in their work, who took him to London and France with their production of As You Like It <\/em>during <\/em>the summer between junior and senior year, the summer of his life. The series of adults and full time staff at the project who were all actors and directors and playwrights themselves and who showed him that working in a third space with kids was actually a job that people do?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Or was it his adult playwriting teacher, who he studies with still, thirteen years after their first session together, who uses writing exercises that involve markers and drawing and postcards and cut outs and images to activate her adult students, much the way Writopia uses games to unlock kids, who champions a warmth in feedback that focuses on what the writers brings naturally to the page, who conferences one-on-one with her students in a way that challenges and comforts them. When the playwright\/educator enters Writopia on day one, he gets it because it’s basically her playwriting workshops, but for kids. He gets to teach kids to write the same way he learned as an adult.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is no finding Writopia for me without those people; the story feels fuller with them in it. But it\u2019s still incomplete. Lena\u2019s going to kill me–she\u2019s waited patiently as I\u2019ve struggled and steeled myself against perfectionism in order to make progress on this essay–but I\u2019m not done quite yet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The playwright\/educator walked into the lab the other day and could feel the emptiness. He\u2019s felt it for some time now. Writopia is a teenager, and the pandemic has been unkind to teens. For many, we see a growing mental health crisis in youth. For the teen Writopia, what\u2019s been hit is enrollment. He remembers when he picked up the kid from day camp here, how many summers ago was that? Seven? Eight? The kid had come bursting out of the door with a whole ton of other kids at pick up, charged smiles, like a bunch of jacks in one box. He sees echoes of summers and afterschool of years past, laughter, expression, creativity, children all blooming there, instantaneously, as if they just grew out of the crevices and corners and walls. Where had they gone? Writopia has worked hard to come back after the pandemic. New partnerships have formed. Many kids have returned and a lot of new young learners are coming to us for the first time. Come to our Manhattan location on a Monday afternoon and it will feel almost like an early childhood learning center, we are home to so many seven and eight year old writers that day. But the playwright\/educator still longs for the time when you could walk through the halls and there wasn\u2019t a single empty workshop room at any point afterschool any day of the week. When we were absolutely overflowing with young learners all the time. We\u2019re told we\u2019re not alone. And in many cases, we\u2019re faring better than a lot of spaces like our own. Afterschool and youth programs throughout the country are struggling, third spaces are often empty. The playwright\/educator sees it happening in theater too, as off-broadway theaters and development institutions that were once staples shutter. We are in a new world where meeting, gathering, and communing is viewed by so many as a risk that\u2019s not worth taking. Who is the playwright\/educator without the live moment? Does he lose the \u201cplaywright\u201d in his identity? The \u201ceducator?\u201d All that\u2019s left this is a \u201c\/.\u201d He\u2019ll be forty in one year, was almost thirty when he stumbled on Writopia, maybe in the face of this new world, it\u2019s time to take another look at who he is and what he does. How does one survive a changing tide?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And then the salt of the Pacific Ocean hits his face. He\u2019s here in California for the first teen retreat Writopia has held on the West Coast, a weekend of writing workshops and poetry hikes and conversation against a gorgeous backdrop of dazzling waves and elephant seals and sunsets, a weekend of wearing a jean jacket in January while there\u2019s a polar vortex happening back home and feeling like he\u2019s beat the system, the launch of a new in-person program in the midst of an organizational struggle, an act of hope. Twenty teens show up, and they write and they talk about writing and they bond and they love the hot chocolate and they laugh and they play the writing games that the playwright\/educator and the rest of the staff run for them. One night, they begin a big round of the Writopia murder mystery game. It\u2019s like the popular game mafia if you added a short story component and in all honesty, the playwright\/educator wishes instructors were more judicious in the playing, it feels overplayed, after all we\u2019ve developed so many games, why do instructors feel the need to keep leading that one, but still the kids love it, and what writer\/educator could deny them that joy? The kids sit in the lodge by an indoor fire and design a fictional setting where their fictional characters will meet and one of them will get–you guessed it–murdered. Twenty participants mingle there as original gangsters (many with pretty solid new yawk accents) before spilling out into the outdoor bonfire. Around the fire, they give impassioned monologues, play off each other brilliantly, awash in inside jokes that they\u2019ve just created, they commit, they\u2019re very down for the bit, it\u2019s this inimitable moment, and the ever-present campfire smoke gives an extra layer of magic to it. At one point Lena–who\u2019s also there–turns to the playwright\/educator and says, \u201cwe\u2019re in the middle of a piece of performance art.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many of these teens have been through depression, anxiety, loss of a parent, some have turned to self harm in the past, or have struggled through eating disorders. The world has given kids and teens a raw deal as they\u2019ve gone through major stages of development in quarantine, as impossible body image standards and rigidity-of-thought spread through their social media feeds, inaction around a hamster wheel of school shooting, politicians that only really pay attention to education when they ban books or start \u201cwars\u201d over reading. It\u2019s heartbreaking the way the world treats kids and teens. But that night around the fire on the west coast, they are there and present and if we keep doing that, showing up for them, building the conditions, the spaces, designing games, being present in conversation about their writing and whatever else they need to talk about, and if there is a patchwork of spaces like ours, third spaces, who can also stay afloat in this tenuous moment, and bring their ethos with them to any physical space, if there\u2019s this much real presence with kids, then the hope is kids and teens will be okay, no more than okay, they will thrive and they will grow up and they will leave the earth–as the adage goes–even better than they found it, and that potential future for them is worth all the struggle there is. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

That night, as the murderer is revealed to be a sweet 12-year-old girl whose character runs a Sephora ponzi scheme, and the fire is dwindling, and we all slowly walk back into the lodge, an overcast of the brightest stars above, in that very moment, there\u2019s such great ease and nobody struggles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Written by Matthew Jellison, Associate Director of Education, Writopia Lab I\u2019m struggling. This is good, actually. Isn\u2019t struggle at the center of learning? I always remind the instructors at Writopia\u2014the writing and education non-profit where I oversee the professional learning of our network of adult writers who teach writing to kids and teens\u2014that discomfort can …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-656","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-staff-voices","entry entry-center"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9aRpX-aA","jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":296,"url":"https:\/\/www.writopialab.org\/writopiaspeaks\/a-message-from-our-executive-director\/","url_meta":{"origin":656,"position":0},"title":"Reflections on the 2018-2019 Year at Writopia Lab","author":"Writopia Lab","date":"June 17, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"\u00a0This has been such an incredible school year at Writopia across the country! We served over 5,000 invigorated kids and teens in safe space, censorship-free writing workshops at our labs, in schools, in partnership with community-based organizations, and at our sleepaway camp.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Every day, we witnessed the key to effective writing\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Newsletter"","block_context":{"text":"Newsletter","link":"https:\/\/www.writopialab.org\/writopiaspeaks\/category\/newsletter\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.writopialab.org\/writopiaspeaks\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/writopiagala-040517-226.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.writopialab.org\/writopiaspeaks\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/writopiagala-040517-226.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.writopialab.org\/writopiaspeaks\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/writopiagala-040517-226.jpg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.writopialab.org\/writopiaspeaks\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/writopiagala-040517-226.jpg?resize=700%2C400&ssl=1 2x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.writopialab.org\/writopiaspeaks\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/writopiagala-040517-226.jpg?resize=1050%2C600&ssl=1 3x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.writopialab.org\/writopiaspeaks\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/writopiagala-040517-226.jpg?resize=1400%2C800&ssl=1 4x"},"classes":[]},{"id":245,"url":"https:\/\/www.writopialab.org\/writopiaspeaks\/talk-scholastic-awards-results\/","url_meta":{"origin":656,"position":1},"title":"How to Talk About The Scholastic Awards’ Results by Writopia Founder Rebecca Wallace-Segall and Program Directors Yael Schick & Danielle Sheeler","author":"Rebecca Wallace-Segall","date":"January 27, 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"This year\u2019s results for the Regional Scholastic Writing Awards are intended to be announced in most regions on January 28th, 2021. Many of our writers ages 13-18 will find out that their pieces were honored with honorable mentions, silver keys, and\/or gold keys! We are so, so happy for all\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "For Parents"","block_context":{"text":"For Parents","link":"https:\/\/www.writopialab.org\/writopiaspeaks\/category\/for-parents\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":869,"url":"https:\/\/www.writopialab.org\/writopiaspeaks\/how-to-support-your-writer\/","url_meta":{"origin":656,"position":2},"title":"How to Support Your Writer","author":"Rebecca Wallace-Segall","date":"December 11, 2025","format":false,"excerpt":"Dear Writopia parents, Many parents have asked us how they can best support their writers alongside us, so we put together a list of tips for you. The keys to supporting your writer are 1) trust-building, 2) celebration, and 3) deep engagement. 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