826LA Presents: A SPELLING BEE FOR CHEATERS, a tournament of verbal smarts and fraudulence hosted by 826LA and the creators of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.

The event will take place at Lincoln Middle School in Santa Monica at 2:00 p.m. on August 14, 2010. Participants will register online and raise money beforehand to increase their chances of winning. This year, Spike Jonze, Catherine Keener, Judd Apatow, John Krasinski, Dianna Agron, and others are scheduled to appear. Will YOU be there to out-spell and out-cheat the competition?

All money goes to support 826LA's free writing and tutoring programs for Los Angeles students, ages 6–18. Registration is open to the public at http://www.826la.org/spellingbee. Space is limited, so register today!

Among the many projects 826LA embarks on, the Young Authors' Book Project is perhaps our greatest and (objectively, of course) most exciting endeavor. This project always results in students becoming published authors while still in high school, a fact we find hard not to be proud of. With that said, we at 826LA are more than eagerly anticipating the upcoming release of the newest YABP book, You Never Forget How to Ride a Bike: Lessons Learned by the Students of John Marshall High School. The young authors lead us through the moments that have shaped their lives—among them encounters with Def Leppard albums, wormy peaches, campus police, and Salvadoran gangs—and share with us the things they've learned about the kindness of strangers, resolve in the presence of naysayers, and the value of a dollar. A celebratory release party is in the works for Wednesday, June 23, at Skylight Books. You won't want to miss these young (and newly published!) authors reading their works aloud and the first opportunity to buy this highly anticipated book.

Also, you can watch a video on the making of this book by 826LA's very own Darrell Gabonia.

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Last week at Echo Park tutoring, after-school student Oscar told us he'd been awarded the March Student of the Month at Micheltorena Street Elementary School in Silver Lake, where he's currently in 6th grade. Oscar has been attending after-school tutoring at 826LA East since the second week we opened (in January 2008)! Here's a little something he wrote a couple months back:

My name is Oscar and I am 11 years old. I go to Micheltorena. I like soccer and baseball. I live in an apartment that looks like a house. I like hanging around with my friends. That's all.

Congratulations, Oscar! That's all. (<--- one of Oscar's trademark last lines)

For tickets and more info, click here: http://826ladronesscreening.eventbrite.com/

Please join 826LA for an exclusive screening of Drones
followed by a Q&A with members of the cast and crew
and an after-party featuring Dan Bern and Common Rotation

Tuesday, April 13, 7:30 p.m.
at the Egyptian

Get your tickets now!

Online pledge-a-thon fundraiser.

Full-length album.

Mini music festival.

Get chicken love.

Way back in December, LA Chamber Orchestra composer-in-residence Derek Bermel came to 826LA East with his clarinet Clarence. He spoke with our students (or rather Clarence did), and that kicked off a discussion about the different ways humans and other creatures communicate–with words and music, barks and squeaks and honks.

Since then, a number of students have explored these ideas further and written poems inspired by Saint-Saëns's Carnival of the Animals. These poems will be presented at this Sunday's LA Chamber Orchestra family concert. A few of them are below—enjoy!

"Tortoises"
by Nicholas

They
love to eat
lettuce.
They are tiny and big and fat and slim.
They are very…

…slow

"Kangaroos"
by Oscar

I am a kangaroo
I can jump high
I am brown
I like being brown
That’s all

"People with Long Ears"
by Malik

They need one more person
Evil people trying to take over the world
Scary, Virus, Zombies
Deformed ears: Big, Saggy, Stretchy, and Long
Rule the World

"Pianists"
by Anthony

Someone is alone in the park.
The man wanted to get married.
The man was poor.
He was single.
He wanted a dog,
and a cat.
A wolf is by him.
He is old and he has white hair.

"Fossils"
by Alexis

Someone dancing sitting alone
All so lonely
Thinking of someone to dance with
Then finding someone to dance with
For a contest to do
So we do this contest
For a trophy to win
She finds somebody to dance with
While they’re dancing
They look at each others eyes
They say you have beautiful eyes.
Then dance slow
Like you’re in a talent show
Like a love story by Taylor Swift.
And thank you.

One of our notable accomplishments at 826LA is giving students the chance to play with the technology they might need one day as working authors. Just as our volunteering handbook says good writing isn't always born out of lightning and thunderbolts (i.e., it's not instantaneous), we believe good writing education isn't always done with the quill and inkpot. You may be following our blog, our RSS feed, our online journalism content, or our occasional YouTube offerings. One of our students, Cammeron, 13, even tweets from the Venice Writing Lab.

Many of our school offerings merge old and new ways of writing, too. We go into classrooms and sometimes bring lucky classrooms to 826LA, where they have great tools at their disposal. Just a couple of weeks ago, two classrooms from West Hollywood Elementary came with Mr. Acosta and Mr. Vasquez to tackle a Storytelling & Bookmaking field trip. Ordinarily, our typist works on a Mac while our illustrator draws by hand, but for this field trip, we test-ran an idea from one of our pro instructors and past Volunteers of the Month, Brick Maier. Brick's already known to many of our students for teaching Tabletop Moviemaking. He took a stab at doing illustrations digitally, on a Wacom Graphire pen tablet as students came up with a plot.

Brick writes:

I arrived early to test out the projector, Photoshop, and pen tablet setup. Satisfied, I used a high-tech cup of pens in front of the projector to conceal my work with the group. Nearly 40 kids poured in, and I found a curious gallery of students had strategically placed themselves directly behind me to check my progress. I am used to working under deadlines, but I could barely keep up with the ideas for these stories. Every 15 minutes or so I would come up for air and reveal what I had been working on. It was fun for them to see characters emerge from their collective story. My final showing was received with a general round of applause. One observant student suggested that the bucket of bananas used for the bow and arrow to fight the evil spider should have a bit more yellow. Fair enough. A bit more yellow it is.

We turned the morning group's story into an illustrated book, The Day the Brothers Saved Their Sister. Here's a little piece:

Once upon a time in the future, on a planet called Magoogle, there lived two apes named Bob and Max Janette. They were brothers and partners, and they had a golden flying car. They really liked to race their golden flying car, and they also liked to watch TV. The brothers were generally very happy. However, the brothers were very competitive and would sometimes get into fights… One day Tracy stole the keys to the golden flying car and took it to her boyfriend Boogle's house.

An important part of our work as a writing center is the community presence we've offered via brick-and-mortar spaces in Venice (since 2005) and Echo Park (since 2007). Volunteers who tutor at 826LA are serving predominantly local families, by-and-large neighborhood people who benefit from one-to-one writing instruction (offered during walk-in after-school hours and Make-an-Appointment Tutoring) and wouldn't have it elsewhere for free. Beyond the basic writing we cover to help kids with their homework, we believe kids should control writing, plan writing, and dream about writing. That's why we fill their time at 826 with creative prompts like the ones from our After-School Tutoring chapbooks.

If you're looking for a late holiday gift or just a unique document of what young people are thinking about, consider picking up one of our student chapbooks when they're released. They're available for various low prices at our Echo Park Time Travel Mart store, and if you subscribe to our donor community as a Chapbook Patron you'll not only receive regular copies in the mail, but also get a thank-you, to boot (for your help funding in-house production). Supporting 826LA is like supporting an independent bookstore, an academic skills program, and community of working artists all in one.

Our most recent book produced by 826LA West students was the Morrissey-inspired The More You Ignore Me, the Closer I Get. Each student who contributed to it had the responsibility to select one song by the Smiths or a Smiths member solo project, use that song as a title, and conceive a situation where that title might have an interesting meaning. You'll have to visit the store and read an actual copy to get a look at the works themselves, but a couple of stories that didn't quite get released with the regular anthology are included in this post to give you a taste. See what our students can do with their creative minds (and a tutor's help)!

Pretty Girls Make Graves
by William

Every boy goes through a breakup a couple of times in a lifetime, but some breakups are worse than others. Some can be violent, but some can be confrontational only because of the words. Girls can put any guy down if they're close enough. Even at a guy's happiest times, it's possible. To all guys: be careful who you let in your life.

"Pretty Girls Make Graves" is a Smiths song from their self-titled debut album. William goes to Mark Twain Middle School and is in the 7th grade.

Suffer Little Children
by Margarito

Little children will suffer when they're young because they will start doing homework in kindergarten. They will start crying because they don't want to go to school and they will feel bad about having to go to school for the rest of their lives.

"Suffer Little Children" is the closing track on the Smiths' self-titled debut album. Margarito goes to Westminster Elementary Computer Science and Math Magnet and is in the 5th grade.