Literacy Matters - Vol 21 - Winter 2021

Writing Marathon: An Authentic Writing Experience for BuildingWriterly Identities

by Tamra W. Ogletree, Robert A. Griffin, Jennifer K. Allen and Bethany L. Scullin, Department of Literacy and Special Education, University of West Georgia

Reading Matters Writing Matters

ABSTRACT —Educators need to experience the transformative power of writing to convey their passion for writing and inspire their students to be writers. A writing marathon empowers educators and students by providing time for self-selected writing without fear of judgment. In this article, we walk readers through the history and educational importance of writing marathons, describe the steps and procedures for implementing a writing marathon, and share what a writing marathon might look like in a variety of contexts. Our goal is to inform educators about the writing marathon. This non-threatening writing experience can help teachers and their students foster a writerly identity, which can help teachers develop their own voices as writers and encourage the development of student voices. [Keywords: writing marathon, authentic writing, teacher and student empowerment, teacher-as-writer mindset] Writing Marathon: An Authentic Writing Experience for Building Writerly Identities A group of teachers gathers together with notebooks or computers in hand. They are outside, and the day is bright and beautiful. The smell of salty ocean air breezes by. Multicolored cabanas and beach chairs pepper the sandy shore. Seagulls squawk and dive all around, tempting writers to notice them. The setting is ideal for a writing marathon. A facilitator encourages the writers to turn to one another and say, “I am a writer.” Then, the facilitator invites the writers to break into groups of three or four and choose three nearby places they would like to visit. Groups of writers will stay at each location for about half an hour, absorb their surroundings, write, and then share. After all groups have decided where they will go, the facilitator reminds the participants that the writing marathon on which they are about to embark is about the writer and the writing. There are no rules to this writing marathon experience; participants are just to be in the moment and write. The facilitator reads a short passage of inspiration and then instructs the groups to be back in two hours to debrief and share some of their writing with the whole group. As the groups depart for their first destination, the facilitator overhears a participant remark, “This is so different than I had thought it would be. I did not know a writing marathon would be without writing prompts, and we would have a voice in where we go and what we wish to write. I think I will like this.” This vignette, drawn from the facilitators’ field notes, depicts what occurred during a writing marathon workshop at a recent national conference for literacy professionals and sets the stage for the possibilities that an authentic writing experience, such

as this one, can offer writers. The purpose of this article is to (re) introduce teachers and teacher educators to the authentic writing experience known as a writing marathon, which promotes the joy of writing by giving writers the time and freedom to write what matters to them (Louth, 2011, 2015; Radcliffe & Stephens, 2010). As teachers and teacher educators, we often become bogged down with teaching, grading, preparing lessons, going to meetings, etc. that we lose the joy of simply writing for pleasure. Sometimes we need permission to write just for the sake of writing without fear of judgment (Cremin et al., 2020; Honeyford, 2017). As such, this article is informed by the authors’ collective expertise as teachers of writing with over 70 years of expertise among us and our conviction that engaging in authentic writing promotes identity building and allows writers to consider and reflect on their lived experiences to bring a keener sense of self-awareness (Behizadeh, 2019). By authentic , we convey the value of writing as an end in itself, and we present the writing marathon as an authentic writing experience. As such, writing marathons involve writing for the sake of writing, a means for writers—teachers and their students alike—to explore the world around them and their place in it and develop a writerly mindset (Duke et al., 2018). In this article, we conceptualize writerly identity for educators as one in which “a teacher names, claims, and then draws upon an identity as a writer when thinking about and enacting writing instruction in the content of relationships with student writers” (Whitney, 2017, p. 76). As such, teachers who have developed a strong writerly identity model “acts of writing in front of a classroom of students as a content expert” and have developed “habitual patterns of writing outside of the classroom” that they call upon in their writing instruction (Premont et al., 2020, p. 2). This article will share information about writing marathons (Goldberg, 2005; Vitulli & Martin, 2018), walk the reader through the history and educational importance of writing marathons, describe the steps and procedures for implementing a writing marathon, and share what a writing marathon might look like in a variety of settings and contexts. Our goal is to help develop the writerly identities of teachers and their students and inform educators about a non-threatening writing experience that will help them develop their own voices as writers and encourage the development of student voices. What is aWriting Marathon? The writing marathon was conceptualized by Natalie Goldberg (2005), who was inspired by American author Ernest Hemingway’s (1964/2010) A Moveable Feast , a memoir in which he shares his observations and experiences as a struggling young migrant

Literacy Matters | Volume 21 • Winter 2021 | 65 |

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