The Weekly Writers: Inspired and Inspiring
A cousin recently shared with me a literary treasure: the complete archives of The Weekly, a newspaper her mother Flora and a friend wrote and distributed from September through November of 1936. Flora and Mary were the sole proprietors, reporters, editors, and publishers. Their writing is honest, straightforward and completely charming. Both were about nine or ten years old.
Each issue, handwritten on loose-leaf paper and bound with string, contains local news from the small town where they lived – “Kay Brothers Circus will be here Tuesday. It will be where circuses are when they come here,” plus jokes, riddles (with the answers cleverly published in the following issues), cultural advice – “If you want to be in style, read Gone With the Wind, ” a comics page, and an impressive number of original poems, of which my favorite is Rain:
The rain is raining all around
The rain is raining on the ground
It might even be raining on the sea
But I certnly know it’s raining on me.
Although The Weekly may have had a limited circulation of family members and neighbors, its reporters were indefatigable. One news item reads: “There was a fire Friday. It was a false alarm. Flora and Mary ran all over town looking for it.” And though there’s a distinctly anti-school bias noticeable in many of the articles, e.g., “We are very sorry to say the school didn’t burn up,” it’s clear that the two little girls were having a wonderful time interviewing grownups, hearing from their subscribers and, most of all, writing and drawing together. After all, they began and maintained their efforts diligently for ten weeks, despite (or perhaps in reaction against) the start of the school year with all its competing demands. One suspects that it was the greater excitement of the holiday season which finally lured them away from the pleasures of publishing.
Reading The Weekly had a special resonance for me. When I was eleven, my best friend and I switched from play-acting our favorite TV shows to making up and writing down stories together. I’ve forgotten how or why we started, but it was a heavenly time. Our stories, starring eleven-year-old girls, grew to novel-like proportions, and we took turns reading our chapters aloud. There were no rules; any fantastic idea was happily and uncritically explored. We laughed at each others’ “funny parts,” copied each other shamelessly, and admired and bolstered one another through adventure after adventure. Remembering this makes me wonder if the model for teaching writing to young children could be expanded to include more such happy, communal experiences. I once visited a first-grade class in which every child was seated at a computer with a “writing partner,” composing stories, discussing them, building on each others’ ideas – and completely absorbed in the task. What a great way to convey the lesson that writing is much more than spelling and grammar and getting the “right answer.” It’s another way of talking to one another, of connecting, and it can be so much fun.
The Weekly, October 31 issue, with joyful report of many Halloween parties given at school
Tags: communal experience handwritten newpaper writing partner writing together
October 15th, 2009 at 9:46 pm
How absolutely charming to read what was on the mind of my friend Flora when she was 10 years old. Not much different from what might be written today, I suspect; Halloween parties, Carolina-State games, and oh, why couldn’t it have been the school that burned! I’m so glad the writings were saved. They are a treasure! Thank you for sharing.