The Play

Last week I gave the sixers a little talk about my diss. I told them that I’m pretending I’m an editor of an independent press. I named my press, went over the mission statement and talked about the press’s list of publications, all of which focus on social justice themes. Then they started sifting through their writers' notebooks to identify themes for their publications. First period will be creating theme zines and second period will be doing social narrative fiction stories. One second period sixer showed me a notebook entry about Las Vegas he wanted to include in his story. “I know I want the story to be set in Las Vegas, but I don’t have a theme.” We had written down a list of themes from the texts we’d shared last quarter. I pointed to where he had written “class” and said, “That might be good. Or money. Especially if your characters are in Las Vegas.”
He nodded and said with surprise, “That’s not a bad idea, actually.”
Next week they’re writing book proposals and submitting these with self-addressed stamped envelopes, so I can send them book contracts.
One kid asked, “What if you don’t like our proposal?”
He simply grinned back at me when I offered my happy response, “You get to redo it!" I love working in an elementary school. Even the sixers can get into the figured world of the independent press. Listening to my imagined identity, they nod their heads and play along. For now anyway.