i am not j.k. rowling, but i do know cursive

My aforementioned favorite kids, Annie Lefkowitz’s Cienega Elementary fourth graders, have met their match: Bonnie Turner’s Washington Elementary third graders. I drove down to Redondo Beach this morning to do a little show-and-tell as part of their creative writing unit and was quite smitten.

“Ms. Turner and I have been friends since we were your age,” I explained. “We used to pretend all kinds of things, which is the first step in writing. We played My Little Ponies, we played house, and sometimes we would talk with English accents to make people think we were from England.”

Yeah, we were weird kids.

I showed them my CalArts thesis notebook, which is packed with notes that eventually became The Commuters, along with numerous doodles of angels, owls and the word “NARRATIVE!” written in fancy fonts. I was careful to skip over the pages where I’d scrawled things like, “George, Eamon and Roxanne go to Griffith Park, then come home and have a threesome.” I swear, I don’t think of myself as writing blue, but apparently I’m dirtier than I thought.

Then it was Q&A time. They asked a lot of really good questions—Bonnie had prepped them well, and it was amazing how similar the discussion about process was to my weekly writing class. I didn’t have the heart to tell them that Step 1 (pose a question, problem or mystery) would still be plaguing them 20 years and two college degrees later. But since no one in my writing group has ever asked me who my favorite movie star is, here is a list of my favorite supplemental questions:

• Did you write Harry Potter?

• Do you know the person who wrote Harry Potter? Because you said you used to talk in an English accent, and everyone in Harry Potter talks with an English accent.

• Do you like parks?

• Do you like Green Day? Billy Joe got inspired to write “Jesus of Suburbia” when he was taking a walk.

• Do you like Reggae?

• Did you write your book in cursive?

• The ghost that you said is in your other book, was it a real ghost?

• How do they get the big pages to be little book pages, and put the spine on and stuff?

• I have all the Little House on the Prairie books.