Still Alive

To the Editors:

Readers of The New York Review who have followed the work of the Teachers and Writers Collaborative through the writing of Herbert Kohl and Kenneth Koch may want to know that the Collaborative is still alive and working in the New York public schools. We’ve recently set up new quarters at PS 3 (the Charrette School) in the West Village. We’re starting a writing resource center for teachers here and, hopefully in the future, a print shop and darkroom for the children in the school.

Twenty writers are working in fifteen schools, sending us diaries and children’s work regularly for our quarterly Newsletter. We have a few special projects: a team of five writers and a playwright working together at PS 75 on the upper West Side, a poet and painter working at a school in Central Harlem, and a collaboration between a photographer, video specialist, and teacher at the George Washington High School Annex.

We have two new publications: Imaginary Worlds, Richard Murphy’s work with children on inventing Utopias—new places, new religions, new ways of fighting wars, different schools—and A Day Dream I Had at Night, a collection of oral literature from children with language and school difficulties, made into books and class readers by the kids, the author Roger Landrum and two collaborating teachers from schools on the lower East Side. Half of the book is an account of the ways in which the stories came to be written; half the book reprints the children’s writing, with sections of Chinese Stories, The Black Idiom, A Book of Dreams, and many other unusual and creative tales.

Both of these publications are available from Teachers and Writers at $1.00 each. Subscriptions to our Newsletter are four issues for $3.00.

We welcome, as always, letters, comments, articles on children’s writing and contributions of writing from children. Address all correspondence (or make checks payable) to Teachers and Writers Collaborative, c/o PS 3, 490 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

Martin Kushner

Steven Schrader

New York City