YPG Cares Shows “Story Love”
This article was contributed by YPG member Leigh Camp. If you are a YPG member and would like to contribute articles on publishing-related topics for our site, please contact Stephanie Bowen at sbowen@randomhouse.com.
On Wednesday, February 16 at 7:00 pm, 28 members of YPG Cares from over 13 AAP member publishing houses met in midtown Manhattan’s Drama Book Shop (http://www.dramabookshop.com/) to volunteer in collaboration with the Story Pirates (http://storypirates.org/) on their Story Love project. As our latest YPG Cares literacy-related non-profit partner, Story Pirates is an organization which passionately supports the arts and creative writing. In their Story Love program, Story Pirates encourage elementary school students to write short stories, and then the Pirates perform a lucky few in front of the children.
At the event, YPG members read stories written by grade school children and wrote encouraging, personalized comments about each student’s story. This individualized feedback is a crucial part of the Story Love program because it ensures that even students whose stories were not picked to be performed will know that their stories were read and appreciated. This was a popular and highly anticipated volunteer event (with a waiting list of thirty people), and it did not disappoint. The children’s stories were creative, clever, and (often) hilarious. The Story Pirates encouraged anyone with a particularly good story or one-liner to stand up and share it with the group. Rodent astronauts! Vampire talent shows! Talking dogs! Cockroach sandwiches!
The time flew. Before we knew it, we were fresh out of stories to read, not something that happens often in our line of work! This event was a fun-filled success, and wonderful opportunity to reach out to children and offer words of encouragement and positive reinforcement to young writers. Check out photos of it below and join us in April for another night of Story Love!
