Our summer interns Jen, Jane, and Erin invite you to stuff your face and feed your mind at the 826DC book and bake sale! Come hungry for homemade baked goods and gently used books at our table in Eastern Market on Saturday, August 7th from 9 am to 3 pm. Download the flyer here.

Your support is greatly appreciated as we make big moves this fall to open up our new center and storefront, The Museum of Unnatural History, and provide greater resources to feed DC’s young creative minds.

Baked goods will be individually priced provided by our volunteers (who also happen to be culinary geniuses). The books available at the swap will come straight from the shelves of our erudite volunteers, and will be all-you-can-carry for a donation of $20 to 826DC.

So save the date! We’ll see you at the market!

With our lease signed, permits secured, and our build and design teams all in lock-step, we’re proud to announce that this week construction officially kicked off on the Museum of Unnatural History, a monument to the long-forgotten “Unnaturalist Society”—a group of bizarre, outcast scientists who believed that “the path to truth often leads through the absurd.” More importantly, the site will will also double as 826DC’s own writing center, hosting workshops, drop-in tutoring and innovative publishing opportunities for students throughout the district (learn more here, and here, and here).

But first: demolition. Our construction team, HITT Contracting, Inc., descended onto our new site in Columbia Heights this week to gut the ceilings, strip the floors, and set the stage for museum displays, “build your own species” stations, dioramas, as well as student study and tutoring areas come this fall.

We’re on our way, but we still need all the help we can get. So if you’d like to donate to help construction or future programming, you can find out more here.

In the meantime, check out the gallery below for a tour of the contained mayhem, and stay tuned for more construction updates as we move toward our opening.

Recently, I had coffee with Jen Girdish, who has been heavily involved in coordinating 826DC’s student publication projects (and was most recently a recipient of the “Ladies Prosthetic Grower Award” in May’s “Moustache-a-thon”). Jen’s a journalist who likes to run, watch TV, and cuddle with her fiancé.

She talked with me about the “bad, unrequited love poems” she wrote in college, falling in love with Joan Didion, and what it takes to bring student voices to life on paper for 826DC.

***

Tell us a little bit about yourself.

I grew up in Pittsburgh and even though I desperately wanted to get out of Western PA, I ended up going to the University of Pittsburgh. And even then, I moved around a lot between quite a few “underdog” cities like Pittsburgh. I moved to Austin and spent a lot of time getting coffee for people and escorting Jack Valenti to the bathroom. I also lived in Kansas City and Laurenburg, NC where you had to drive forty-five minutes just to see a movie. I recently spent some time in Little Rock when my fiancé was working on the Healthcare Campaign. I’d like to think that my sacrifice of eating nothing but fried food contributed directly to the bill passing.

Recently you helped publish Get Used to the Seats, a collection of essays and poetry by seniors in DC area high schools. Can you tell me about your role in the student publication projects and how they come to life?

I was the managing editor and project coordinator, so I helped organize and run all aspects of the production of the book. That involves organizing workshops, editing student work, selecting the pieces, and coordinating the design and production. The concept of book started in Belle Belew’s class [at Wilson High School]. Her students had a “Dear Freshman” assignment, where they wrote a letter to their freshman selves, and one of them suggested it should be a book. We agreed. There were three different classes and each class met once a week. We played with a variety of writing styles such as text message poems and essays about “getting caught.” Eleven students even got to record their essays at NPR, which was recorded onto a CD and included with the book.

Read more of our interview with Jen here.

Things are moving fast here this summer, and as we move into another busy school year we’re on the lookout for some fun excellent folks to come join our team. Click the links below to learn more about the positions:

Executive Director

Fall Internship

So if you’re interested in teaching, writing, fun and hard work (not exactly in that
order), please submit your materials to the appropriate contact for each listing.
We look forward to hearing from you.

In June, we asked ninth graders at Duke Ellington School for the Arts what they believe.

Here’s what they told us: That you can learn a lot more from Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law than you ever wanted to know; that the pen is not always mightier than the sword; and that personal successes can far outweigh public ones.

We learned those and many more bits of wisdom throughout the five weeks of our “This I Believe” workshop with Ms. Foster’s journalism class at Ellington. Led by volunteer Cathy Smith, it focused on the possibilities of the personal essay, and was patterned after the famous NPR radio series (which, sadly, went off the air last year).

The workshop culminated in a few students having the opportunity to record their finished essays, such as Madison Hartke-Weber, whose essay “Friendships, Destiny, and Dependence”—subject matter: self-explanatory—you can listen to below.



"Friendships, Destiny & Dependence" by Madison Hartke-Weber by 826DC



Big, big thanks to Madison (also a recent winner of the ArenaStage Student Playwrights Project), Ms. Foster, sound technician Billy Hickey, Cathy Smith, our participating volunteers and the rest of the students who helped close the school year with this fun, enlightening project.

We believe there’s no better way to end a school year than to publish some student writing. For the last four weeks, 826DC volunteers have worked with Ms. Lerenman’s seventh graders at KIPP Key Academy to write and produce chapbooks that feature an array of short poems that include sobering insights about the current economy as well as odes to Pizza Hut.

From the Declaration of Independence-style poems to pantoums, 826DC volunteer Eleanor Graves presented students with a new form each week in which to express themselves through writing. They began each session with freewriting on topics ranging from their favorite foods to politics to what goes on in the hallways of their school.

“We wanted to introduce the kids to some new ways of creating poetry that would also be fun for them,” says Eleanor, an award-winning poet whose work has appeared in journals like Phoebe, Practice, and Hayden’s Ferry Review. “We discovered that writing can be both formal and free, serious and silly, all in one poem.”

Our thanks to KIPP’s seventh grade teacher Flora Lerenman, as well as the 826DC volunteers who helped students brainstorm through bouts of writer’s block. Check out some of the students’ work here.

The last few months have been a pretty busy around here for us. We launched our second publication, grew moustaches, completed our 262nd workshop and served our 1036th unique student. But we couldn’t do any of it without the help of our tireless core of volunteers, who staff our workshops, help edit our publications, and keep us going with their creative spirit, drive and fundraising efforts.

The least we can do each year is throw them a barbeque. So on June 26th, that’s what we did. About 40 volunteers gathered at 826DC Board member Matthew Klam’s house in Friendship Heights for our annual Volunteer Appreciation Party, featuring grilling, World Cup soccer and grade-A appreciation for everyone’s hard work. While there were ice-breaker games and delicious food, thanks to local donations we were also able to raffle off some fantastic gifts to those who came, so we’d like to thank the following community businesses for helping us spread good cheer:

Amsterdam Falafel
Flow Yoga
Georgetown Cupcake
Homemade Pizza Company
Maddy's Bar & Grille
Mr. Yogato
Vida Fitness
Z Burger
The International Spy Museum

Special thanks to the Capitol City Brewing Company and ACE Beverage for donating beverages for our party, but mostly thanks to our volunteers for making this past school year our most memorable yet.

The year was 2007 and 826DC volunteer Steve Souryal was living the dream: A room in a house in Newport Beach, California, a gig as a guitarist in a rock band, and a day job as an accountant with a skateboard shoe company. The only problem?

“Basically,” Steve explains, “I hated accounting.”

So when the European office recruited him, and he held in his grasp the even greater dream of becoming an accountant for a skateboard shoe company in Amsterdam, he did the logical thing.

He quit.

The decision launched Steve, then only 28, on a personal quest not unlike those portrayed in mid-life crisis movies. He listened as his neighbor—a nomad who founded the Speedo swimsuit company later in life—reassured him that everything would be fine. He took a motorcycle up the coast highway, Che Guevara-style. He almost landed a sweet job with a San Francisco design firm.

But the best thing he did was wander into the pirate supply store at 826 Valencia, the flagship 826 writing center, and sign up to volunteer.

“I would stop by 826 to tutor kids after school,” Steve says, “and it was the best part of my life. It made me feel like a champ. I realized how important teaching and helping others is to me.”

Now that he’s in D.C., Steve co-leads 826DC volunteer orientations and hosts “the lowercase,” a monthly reading series for 826DC volunteers at Big Bear Cafe. He works at a local non-profit advancing the cause of peace in the Middle East.

“After doing so much that doesn’t matter,” Steve says, “it’s rewarding to be making my mark. I feel useful. I feel like I’m part of something.”

826DC’s month of May has been a rather exciting one (or should we say, a hairy one) since it began with the start of the Moustache-a-Thon 2010 which came to its final stretch just this past week.

All month long, daring and eager 826DC’s volunteers grew moustaches, both organic (real) and prosthetic (fake), to raise money for the center’s mission of free writing workshops and tutoring sessions for DC’s students. Each grower’s progress (and donations) were measured weekly, and together we raised over $8,000!

On June 1 even the Washington Post joined for the annual Moustache-a-Thon Awards, given to various growers of distinction. The real victors were DC school students, of course, but here are our volunteer’s award-winning ‘staches:







See additional photos of the event here.

826 National’s latest publication, The Secret Miracle: The Novelist’s Handbook is a compilation of interviews about the craft of writing, straight from the minds of today’s most notable authors.

Edited by Daniel Alarcón, the interviews delve into what ideas float around in authors’ minds before they become full drafts. The book features advice from Amy Tan, Curtis Sittenfeld, Paul Auster, Haruki Murakami, and others as they tackle simple questions ranging from whether or not they outline to the more complex, age-old question of What makes a character compelling?

From the mysterious mind of Stephen King to the hilarious and absurd Gary Schteyngart, The Secret Miracle provides answers to a wide range of questions—What do you read before/during the writing of a novel? Are you always a novelist? Are you able to turn it off?—with funny, serious, simple, blunt, and beautiful advice that demystifies the art of writing.

You can be a keeper of these secrets, too. Order your copy at the 826 National online store.