Random Writing Acts of Kindness

The coolest thing happened this month. Let’s call it a “random acts of kindness” writing event. What began as a simple yet thoughtful writing activity prompted a chain of responses that showed just how much…

january community outreach

Here’s what we’ve been up to this past month! If you are interested in bringing a program to your school or organization, email Jennifer Chauhan at jennifer@projectwritenow.org.

Motivating Kids to Write: Ways Parents Can Help

december community outreach

Here’s what we’ve been up to this past month! If you are interested in bringing a program to your school or organization, email Jennifer Chauhan at jennifer@projectwritenow.org.

november community outreach

Here’s what we’ve been up to this past month! If you are interested in bringing a program to your school or organization, email Jennifer Chauhan at jennifer@projectwritenow.org.

october community outreach

Here’s what we’ve been up to this past month! If you are interested in bringing a program to your school or organization, email Jennifer Chauhan at jennifer@projectwritenow.org.

Six Ways Building A Writing Portfolio Changed My Life

september community outreach

Here’s what we’ve been up to this past month! If you are interested in bringing a program to your school or organization, email Jennifer Chauhan at jennifer@projectwritenow.org.

august community outreach

Here’s what we’ve been up to this past month! If you are interested in bringing a program to your school or organization, email Jennifer Chauhan at jennifer@projectwritenow.org.

july community outreach

Here’s what we’ve been up to this past month! If you are interested in bringing a program to your school or organization, email Jennifer Chauhan at jennifer@projectwritenow.org.

june community outreach

Here’s what we’ve been up to this past month! If you are interested in bringing a program to your school or organization, email Jennifer Chauhan at jennifer@projectwritenow.org.

Statement of Solidarity

Project Write Now stands in support of our Black students and their families and the entire Black community.

may community outreach

Here’s what we’ve been up to this past month! If you are interested in bringing a program to your school or organization, email Jennifer Chauhan at jennifer@projectwritenow.org.

april community outreach

Here’s what we’ve been up to this past month! If you are interested in bringing a program to your school or organization, email Jennifer Chauhan at jennifer@projectwritenow.org.

Q&A with Laura Cyphers

Project Write Now is excited to introduce our newest instructor, Laura Cyphers, who will be teaching remotely from Virginia. Laura is teaching two poetry classes—one for adults: “Poetry & the Natural World” and one for teens: “Teen Poetry.” We recently “virtually” sat down with Laura to learn more about her love of poetry and to find out why she is looking forward to teaching these classes.

march community outreach

Here’s what we’ve been up to this past month! If you are interested in bringing a program to your school or organization, email Jennifer Chauhan at jennifer@projectwritenow.org.

A Q&A With Jamie Sussel Turner

Project Write Now is excited to announce our 4th annual Writing on the River: A Spring Retreat for Teachers, which will be held Sunday, March 29, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the Oyster Point Hotel in Red Bank.

february community outreach

Here’s what we’ve been up to this past month! If you are interested in bringing a program to your school or organization, email Jennifer Chauhan at jennifer@projectwritenow.org.

january community outreach

Here’s what we’ve been up to this past month! If you are interested in bringing a program to your school or organization, email Jennifer Chauhan at jennifer@projectwritenow.org.

december community outreach

Here’s what we’ve been up to this past month! If you are interested in bringing a program to your school or organization, email Jennifer Chauhan at jennifer@projectwritenow.org.

november community outreach

Here’s what we’ve been up to this past month! If you are interested in bringing a program to your school or organization, email Jennifer Chauhan at jennifer@projectwritenow.org.

october community outreach

Red Bank Middle School: This month, to help generate ideas in our notebooks, we focused our weekly writing workshops with our 7th and 8th grade AVID students on topics we are familiar with and places that are special to us. We kicked off the month drafting stories about our names and the impact they have on our lives after reading “My Name” from The House on Mango Street, by Sandra Cisneros.

september community outreach

We LOVE the start of a new school year! It was a short month, but we accomplished a lot …
Red Bank Middle School: We are so excited to be back writing with the 7th and 8th grade AVID students at RBMS! Our 8th graders were thrilled to see us again–some even ran up to give us hugs and high fives! And the 7th graders seemed just as happy to start writing with us. …

celebrating five years!

Five years ago this month, we opened our doors with a bold plan: to help people become better writers. We had one small classroom on the second floor of a cool, industrial-style building in Red Bank and a staff of four. We were excited to share our mission and our passion for writing. At the time, we had no idea how life-changing the writing experiences would be⁠—not only for our students but also for our own organization.

august community outreach

Summer is coming to an end, and although we are sad to say goodbye to students in our summer programs, we are excited for the new school year. We are gearing up to head back to our Tuesday writing sessions at Red Bank Middle School and our Monday afternoon program with the 21st Century Community Learning Center in Long Branch. And we are ready to provide college essay support to select groups at Red Bank Regional, Long Branch High School, and the Poseidon Early College High School.

july community outreach

We can’t believe July is over! We have been so busy with our summer programs, we’ve hardly had a chance to remember that it is, in fact, SUMMERTIME! Here’s a little of what we’ve been up to: Teen Internship Program: Teaching Assistants: During training, our teaching assistant interns created lesson plans to teach in our summer programs. But first, they practiced those lessons on us and one another!

june community outreach

The end of the school year is always bittersweet. We have to say goodbye to the students we’ve been writing with throughout the year. At Red Bank Middle School, we get to see the culmination of their hard work both in the publication of their writing in anthologies and through our Writers Celebration. We are so grateful to have had the opportunity to work with these talented young writers!

The Power of Visualization

As much as I love words, my mind operates in images. When I was a little girl, movie reels of stories from my imagination played constantly in my…

Inked It Up!

Curious about the artwork and writing we create in our Ink It Up! camp? There are no limits to where our imaginations can take us as we stencil…

Using What Kids Love to Inspire Writing

I remember when my kids were little they had things they were obsessed with, mesmerized with, and simply in love with. They went through…

Reflections on Visiting Writer Katie Arnold

Last week, Katie Arnold, author of the memoir Running Home, joined us for lunch at the studio to talk about her work.

Q & A with Gravity Goldberg

We are honored to have author and educator Gravity Goldberg present at our third annual “Writing on the River: A Spring Retreat for Teachers,” to be held Sunday…

Q&A with Ray Brunt, PWN’s Newest Instructor

Project Write Now is excited to announce a new addition to our pool of instructors. Ray Brunt has been around Project Write Now for a while now, participating in events…

Behind the Summer Camp Scenes

As the Project Write Now team came together to discuss our next blog post, we thought—what better way to showcase our summer camps than to hear from one of our students? So Lisa…

Embracing Rejection

At eight months’ pregnant, the trip from my apartment to the mailboxes in the lobby felt long. Every day, I trudged down the foil-wallpapered hallway in flip flops because my feet were…

Low Stakes, Lasting Impact in a Summer Writing Camp

Some people wonder if it is possible for parents and teachers to make writing enjoyable, as well as deeply engaging for kids. Not only is it is possible, but it’s one of the MOST important…

Why Kids Need to Joy Write

As someone who has loved writing since I was a little kid, I used to imagine my own children—now ages 12, 11, and 9—walking around with decorated notebooks in hand, ready to scribble…

On the Importance Of Writers Groups

During the summer between 8th grade and high school, I decided to leave my bedroom. Prior to this, I believed writers were supposed to be alone. I spent a great deal of my time by…

It’s Coming Together!

Last night, I drove home up the Garden State Parkway in a euphoric daze singing along to, of all things, “Party in the USA,” by Miley Cyrus. I had just left Project Write Now’s studio,…

Dear College Essay Writer

Dear College Essay Writer, You are about to go through a huge transformation. All that stress you’re feeling about writing the most important essay of your life? It’s going to be gone. One day, a…

Why Being a Writer Is Essential to Being a Teacher

I have always loved to write. As a kid I kept journals, chronicling the day-to-day ups and downs. In middle school, I was captured by Sweet Valley High romance novels and wrote my own sequels.…

Life Stories: Keep Delivering

My mom died last summer. Her sister, my Aunt Mary, died nine months before that. Eight months before that, her other sister, my Aunt Doris, died. In the span of a year and a half,…

Just Another Day at PWN

The first assignment was to find love poems — short ones. Having just graduated with a degree in literature, hewing close in my studies to brief lyric poetry (not out of aesthetic concerns so much…

For Our Young Writers: Telling Their Stories Is Key

The inimitable Toni Morrison once said, “If there is a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, you must be the one to write it.” I’ve carried this adage with…

The “I Love” Epic Poem

This poem is the culmination of The Red Envelope Project, a community project about spreading love and gratitude as far and wide as it can go. During the month of February, Project Write Now team…

The Red Envelope Project: Spreading Love & Gratitude

The other night in class, I drew a big heart on the whiteboard and asked my teen students to name some of the things they love. As I began filling in the heart with their…

How Project Write Now Changed My Life

One summer morning, not long after my high school graduation, I googled local writing workshops. I had been accepted to Emerson College, but it was deferred until January 2017. I knew I needed a place…

When Memories Are Shared

I love Thanksgiving. It’s always been my favorite holiday. I remember as a kid being so excited to go to my Aunt Carol and Uncle Joe’s house, an hour’s drive away on the North Shore…

The Universal Writing Prompt: I Remember

In my third semester of graduate school, I became seriously stuck in my writing. I was avoiding the blank page, afraid that what I wrote would suck and need to be scrapped, or, worse, that…

Love, Loss & Everything In-Between: My Interview Experience

  Imagine you’re 85-years-old and no one has ever asked you to sit down and talk about your life experiences. Think of all of the things you’re dying to say and the things in life…

Fight for your Write: Girl Power

They didn’t know what to expect. Neither did I. What might come out of a “girls only” writing group? Their experiences were all bound to be very different from one another; what was too sensitive…

The College Essay: What an Application Reader Has to Say

One of my favorite jobs at Project Write Now is coaching the college essay. It’s a moment when seniors can take a break from the frenzy of selecting colleges, studying for the SATs, and boosting…

Sending Them Off With Something More

Recently Allison Tevald and I said goodbye (for now) to a special group of young writers. They were the first class to welcome us at Red Bank Middle School in January 2015, and last week…

Supporters of PWN Experience PWN

Saturday, June 18, Beth Herbruck arranged a Good Folk Supper Club dinner that started in our studio at Project Write Now. We facilitated a writing activity, people shared their written memories…

What a Teacher Discovers in Her Summer Writing Camps

Last year was our first summer of writing camps at Project Write Now. I must say that at first, I was skeptical. All of my classes at the studio had been an hour or an…

Voices of the In-Between

I remember being 13 like it was just yesterday. It was the hardest year of my life. Hormones at their highest. Starting a new school. Constantly judging my self-worth against others. My parents not listening…

Why I’m Signing My Children Up for Summer Writing Camps

My son has never liked sitting quietly and coloring or painting. The closest he came to working his fine-motor skills―which his pre-K teachers said were lacking―was making his toy trains and cars go vrooom. I…