This Is What I Do: A Writing Manifesto by Dawn Sheriff

My writing life is one of constant composing in my mind, on paper - in words, drawings, and sketching.  For me, it all comes down to one word - OBSERVE.

Art, pictures, sketching, taught me to be a writer.  Growing up, I wrote, I was not a writer.  When I started teaching, I was blessed to work with a visionary, a forward thinking, risk taking, researcher of a teacher - Dr Karen Ernst daSilva.  It was thanks to her leadership and collaboration that I began to play with pictures alongside my second graders, I attended teacher research groups and wrote about my practice.  I found ideas in those pictures and I found stories in my classroom.  I slowly began to uncover my writer.

I took the next big step in attending a Summer Writing Institute at the University of New Hampshire.  Blessed again to work with Maureen Barbieri who was open to my using pictures and sketches to find an idea and gently encouraged me to play with my writing, to find the possibilities within the idea and write.

Then, I went out on my own.  I started my own poetry anthology.  In my own free time, I was choosing to write, sketch, and draw.  I began to think, “I am a writer.”

Believing those four words, “I am a writer”, opened doors.  I taught summer institutes on Visual Literacy at the Yale Center for British Arts, I wrote memos to our staff after teacher research meetings, I had an audience.  Not only was I a writer for myself, I was developing relationships around art and writing.

As I prepared for my work in classrooms this week, I found myself making a list of what writers do:

Writers read for ideas
Writers copy
Writers revise
Writers capture slices from life
Writers play with words, ideas, genre
Writers discover
Writers reread
Writers remember
Writers share
Writers talk
Writers listen
Writers stop
Writers observe

This is what I do. This is what I believe.

The #TeachWrite Twitter Chat Blog is dedicated to providing a space for our community to connect and share their voices about writing and teaching writing.  We are looking for guest bloggers for January who would like to blog on topics related to our January theme -- GOALS.  Educators and writers of all levels are invited to join us in this space. More information can be found here.