Meet Victoria the grade 6 winner of Word WarriorZ contest for her sparkling entry entitled, “Under the Daylit moon.” VIctoria is a natural born writer. When I read her work I think of the female version of Rick Riodan whose swiftly catching up. Her fiction has punch. It starts off with a crackling zap and […]
Meet Aleena, the Grade 5 winner of Word WarriorZ contest. She wrote the spectacular bit of fierce fiction called “Write to Know.” Aleena’s writing is packed full of emotion. She is able to weave past and present times and include a nice jump in narrative by including her main character’s journal entries that reveal her inner […]
Meet Joshua, the winner of first Word WarriorZ contest. He is in grade 4 and I’ve had the pleasure of reading his writing all year. It is the end of term and what he submitted for Word WarriorZ was the best piece I have read from Joshua all year. His writing is full of voice, depth […]
The way to becoming a writer is like becoming a warrior. One must be brave, wholehearted and show complete sincerity and commitment to the craft. They have to fight to find the right words to express their story by scanning the imaginative landscape and battling the ego. I developed this idea of becoming a word warrior through my own […]
Adventure is everywhere in Africa. I even found it in an elementary school, which has always been the tamest place that I know. When I was a kid in Vancouver, school rarely felt like an adventure. I remember teachers trying to excite us by saying enthusiastic things like: “Lets go on a math adventure!” But such phrases […]
Follow a call. A call to what? The wild? But wild is different to everyone isn’t it? What may feel wild to me could be perfectly normal to someone else and vice versa. My norm is vancouver. A comfortable, affluent and buzzing place. A place that is full of opposites like glass towers and ceder giants, extreme wealth […]
Adventure awaits us all, it quietly bubbles away in our subconscious and can boil over and burn itself into our present mind. Often this call to the wild is hard to ignore. I mean isn’t life in itself a great adventure? Think of what newborns experience? or the baby taking her first step, or a child that climbs to the tallest slide, […]
“We are all odd socks in this world, unique from one another. It is when you grow unhappy with what makes you different that you begin to lose yourself.” The wise words of Button-Mender the main hero in the animation project called The tale of Odd Socks. This theme of being true to oneself comes […]
Hazel was a little girl with a sparkling imagination. I met her by chance at a new job as a caregiver at a before and after school program in Vancouver. I enjoyed the job because of its relaxed play based atmosphere. I remember meeting Hazel when she was five. She had vibrant blue eyes and […]
My nearly three year old is in the height of his imagination. He sees things that aren’t there all the time. This phenomenon astounds me. So many children are the same. They talk of the “people in the walls,” or they have friends called “Kiki and Bobo” that only they can see. My boy is an […]
