Story Planet

I had the great pleasure of meeting Roddy Doyle and Tom Best for lunch to chat about Roddy’s centre, Fighting Words, in Dublin, and what we’re up to here in Toronto with Story Planet.  Roddy and Dave Eggers (826) are friends and Roddy was inspired by 826Valencia to open his own writing space for kids in Ireland.

It was great to talk about the cultural differences between the countries and how that’s influenced the kinds of workshops they run and the space itself – take a look here

Here’s what I learnt and am thinking about c/o Mr Doyle:
The most important thing of all – Clarity
Treat your volunteers really well and give them their own workshops
Keep the office space small – that’s not where you want people congregating
Use ‘story’ instead of ‘writing’ or ‘literacy’ so the emphasis is for the kids not on the educational

And a small anecdote, Roddy liked the name Story Planet largely because of the word, ‘story’.  In Ireland, when you greeted someone the phrase (rather than ‘how’s it going’) was ‘what’s your story’, recently this has been abbreviated to simply, ‘story?’ – which roughly means, ‘tell me what’s going on in your world?”  At Fighting Words they’ve even honoured the word by creating a big cutout set against neon pink!  Check out the link above to the pics!

Story Rules!

We’re just editing the great alien stories from Wilmington and will be posting them in a day or so but we wanted to say thanks to Frontier College for their donation of books which the students were thrilled with!