The first time I taught writing, my students were little old ladies at the National Council for Jewish Women in Los Angeles. Maybe some of them were not so old, and certainly some of them were not so little. All of them, however, were NCJW members who for one reason or another wanted to take a class in writing. That I was their teacher was due solely to the fact that I had a part-time gig editing the Chapter’s newsletter. What I knew about teaching writing was what I had gleaned as a student in writing courses at Pitt—which is to say, very little. I was, as I usually do, flying by the seat of my pants. I don’t know if any of my students went on to publishing success. As I recall, they mostly wanted to write their memoirs for their grandchildren.

The next time I taught writing, I had been well-prepared in composition pedagogy by the English Department at Cal State Sacramento. I was a newly-minted Teaching Assistant with a newly-minted syllabus that had earned me an A in the Teaching Composition graduate course I had just completed. Book learning I did have, but after that first day in front of a class, I was, once again, flying by the seat of my pants. Learning about teaching and actually doing the job are two very different things, and my carefully honed syllabus bit the dust after a couple of weeks. It was lofty, but unmanageable. In the classroom, I was dealing with real people who tend not to work the way theory says they should.

Since then I have taught writing to: the scions of the upper classes in Pennsylvania; the sons and daughters of the middle-class in California’s Central Valley; the kids of Latino and Asian immigrants (legal and not) in East LA; not to mention, male felons incarcerated in a California state prison. I’ve taught creative writing, poetry, screenwriting, non-fiction writing, basic composition and remedial writing. I’ve had classes of as many as fifty and as few as one. And to tell the truth, I’ve loved it. Not all of it; true I hated the grading of essays. But breaking down the process of writing until everyone I was talking to “got it”—that I loved.

The simple fact is I know the power that comes from being able to communicate in writing. To commandeer one’s thoughts, to harness one’s emotions, to find the words and the syntax that drives them straight into a reader’s mind: it is, I believe, the ultimate power, far greater than physical prowess or financial. It is that power I had in mind when I started MidLifeBloggers. To empower those of us in midlife to recreate ourselves and our world by writing “about each and every issue–big and small, real and imagined–that any one of us is experiencing as we are wending our way through this period in our lives. If you’ve thought it, felt it, worried about it, wanted it, cried over it, laughed at it, feared it enough to write a blog post, then surely that’s a blog post the rest of us need to read.”

I knew from the outset that there would be those among us who were Writers with a capital W and some for whom the W stood for Wannabe. My goal was to do what I could as a teacher and an editor to meld the two groups together. Over the past year or so that MidLifeBloggers has been in existence, I’ve worked with a number of writers to that end. Now I’m opening the process up with the creation of the MidLifeBloggers Writer’s Workshop. As much as I can, I want to simulate what happens in a real-time writer’s workshop.

Edited to Add:  Didn’t work that way.  Despite the best of intentions, etc. etc. etc.  So now the Writer’s Workshop is a weekly post–a Wednesday post…making it the Wednesday Writer’s Workshop.