Last week, I held a workshop at the American School of São Paulo, with the 10th and 11th graders who are interested in creative writing. I spoke about my writing path and my childhood in Bosnia and Spain and read them a flash essay about my parents’ weekend house just outside of Sarajevo when I was little.
The students were from Brazil, China, S. Korea, and the States, and during the session, they wrote about their own childhood neighborhoods and the people who inhabited them. One wrote about a man who’d come down the street, piled up with boxes, to bring his family their weekly fruit delivery. A couple of others said the exercise brought up memories they didn’t know they had.
It was an energizing, deeply engaged session, and I was left wishing we could have had more time together. I also heard from one of their teachers that a couple of students asked whether “Miss Lana could come back.” ❤️
Lana Spendl 