The Young Writers Program (YWP) at Lighthouse connects children and teens to writing, new friends, and their own artistic voices. As part of this program, we often partner with other organizations to enhance the writing experience for our young writers.
Writers, ages 12 to 16, had the opportunity to participate in a Sci-Fi Writers Club at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. This four-week club, taught by award-winning poet and writer Alexander Shalom Joseph, brought students to the museum each week to work on a writing theme connected to an exhibit.
Hear from Alexander Shalom Joseph on what makes this class so special:
What’s Cool About Sci-Fi Writing?
I wanted to teach the sci-fi writers club class at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science because I thought it was an awesome opportunity to help young writers use the real world to write fantastical things, and even to discover the fantastical things that already exist in our world, which can be discussed and described through writing.
This class marries science and writing in a very unique and thought-provoking way. By having the opportunity to look through the special collections and walk through a specific exhibit with a guided tour each week, students can deepen their understanding of the world around them, and then through the opportunity to write about it and to create fictional stories, they can learn how to dream and wonder and world build using realistic settings and science to make their writing more grounded and then even more creative.
Check out a poem I was inspired to write from a special moment during a session with the club.
Poem Inspired by the Sci-Fi Writers Club
I am teaching a class for middle schoolers, at the museum of nature and science for the next couple of weeks.
We start each class with a museum educator bringing in some artifacts,
which fit a theme and then I offer writing prompts for the students to engage with on the same theme
then in the second hour of the class, we go to an exhibit which exemplifies what we have thought about already,
deepens it, brings it into the real and then we come back into the classroom to write a final piece
this week’s theme was “deep time,” it covered meteors and gems and minerals and caves and space and obviously time too
we began by walking around the classroom, looking over some of the special collections that the museum staff brought in
there before us scattered over the desks
lay all manner of pieces of the earth and the universe
the students were allowed to touch them, feel their weight, ask questions about their origins, on their makeup too
there were lava rocks and piece of slate, there were geodes and gems, spongy pieces of limestone
there was even a fist sized section of an iron meteorite, which fell to earth in 2600 BCE in what is now Argentina, but which is 5 billion years old
there was a quiet awe
as we walked around the tables and looked upon all these physical embodiments of ancient time
of other worlds
of far off stars
of as close to forever as you can come
after twenty minutes of discussion about and engagement with these objects we sat together
and I offered a prompt in which I asked the student to write from the perspective of one of these objects
how it experiences time
how it experiences humanity
one student, a small thirteen year old, with a poetic writing voice,
and a quiet speaking one, asked if he could hold the meteor while he wrote
I said “of course”
and he took it in his hand and sat beside me and began to write
one hand on the pen
the other gripping the meteor
I watched this and I was moved almost to tears for some reason,
trying to let it happen without letting him know I was watching but unable to look away
he wrote with a fervor I’ve not seen in him in the last two weeks of classes, one which I have seldom seen in anyone in fact
when the time for writing ended, and the time for sharing began, he looked up wide eyed as if he had been someplace else
and when it was his time to share what he wrote he first spoke of what it felt like to hold the meteor as he did
how powerful it was
how he could feel the weight of it
the energy of it
through his whole body
straight into his heart
he said he could sense all the time it held within it, that the spirit or something of this thing pulsed through his fingers
then he read his piece and the other students did too but I could not focus for I was stuck on this moment
on the boy who held a bit of the universe in his hands
how I saw it move him
how I saw the connection there
in this I saw the basis for all religion, for all holy moments, for the most potent poems, for the best works of art, for the greatest aims of humanity
for perhaps all we can really do is hope to find what this boy did as he held this meteor tight
perhaps all we can hope for in this life
is to reach for moments like this in which we can grasp onto something so much bigger than ourselves
and find there, some bit of infinity we can carry with us forward into all else we do
I hope you find your own way grip infinity too
reach now
Get Involved
Learn more about all the programming available through the Young Writers Program, like youth workshops and summer camps, and how to bring our activities to your school.
