When I was young, I wanted to write. I wish I’d found a book like Poetry Matters: Writing a Poem from the Inside Out by Ralph Fletcher (HarperCollins, 2002). In this book, Fletcher writes for kids, directly focusing on what poetry is and what young writers can do to learn to write it. I loved his basic approach to teaching writing as finding the “spark” inside of you and then nurturing it. I’ll talk briefly about these two sections in his book.Continue Reading