Longtime teachers and writers Mark Henry Larson and Bob Boone have collaborated for more than thirty years. Along with coauthoring
Write Through Chicago, they have written two other creative writing books,
Moe's Cafe and
Joan's Junk Shop. They have taught an online creative writing course for Northwestern University's Center for Talent Development and now manage a website for teachers, writethroughamerica.com. Larson and Boone also conduct workshops to help teachers incorporate creative writing into their classrooms. In the future they plan to establish a center for the support of creative writing. On his own, Boone has written a sports biography, a memoir, and a collection of short stories. Larson is the coauthor of the
Creative Writing Handbook and various articles on writing and teaching.
KIRKUS REVIEWS www.kirkusreviews.com
...Useful for anyone "curious about Chicago and anxious to write."...Covers nearly a dozen of the nationwide Common Core State Standards for writing, including orienting students to the rhetorical forms of argument, exposition and narrative, and to disciplines like planning, revising and rewriting. The authors approach their task by presenting students with a series of archived headlines from different pivotal points in Chicago history, from the days of fur trader Jean-Baptiste Pointe DuSable in 1790 to the passage through town of President Lincoln's funeral train in 1865 to the Great Fire of Chicago in 1871, as well as the Chicago World's Fair of 1893, the World Series of 1906 and newly elected Barack Obama's victory speech from 2008....The authors encourage writing students to extrapolate from the headline and quick bullet points of the event, with pointed motivations to consider as many angles as possible, such as the president's Secret Service detail or the engineers on Lincoln's train....Students are encouraged to envision a new scenario spun off from the headline's setting but involving them personally....Students are carefully guided through the use of educator Benjamin Bloom's Taxonomy of Learning Objectives...The headlines are well-chosen to represent a wide range of interests-everything from the social reforms of Jane Addams and Hull House to the poetry of Carl Sandburg and the prose of Studs Terkel-and the concept of making writing exercises come alive through local history is an inspired one. A stimulating, well-presented approach to getting students interested in writing.
