Education
The very first sentence of Grant Faulkner’s bio reads “As a boy, I spent my allowance on all sorts of pens and paper, so there was never much question I would become a writer.” Reading that, I knew we were going to have a fun conversation on the podcast. Among many other things, Grant is the executive director of National Novel Writing Month. If you are not familiar with NaNoWriMo (as it is known by), every November tens of thousands of people from around the world take to their keyboards with the goal of writing a 50,000-word draft of a novel before they flip the calendars to December. It appears that Grant enjoys challenging himself when he writes because he is also the co-founder of the literary journal 100 Word Story and has published a collection of one hundred 100-word stories titled Fissures. On top of all the National Day on Writing resources that are available here for you, Grant and his team also provide a NaNoWriMo’s Young Writers Program that has everything teachers would need to spend the month of November writing with their students. All of this is completely free to those who want to use it. I should add a special warning to this episode: if you’ve always dreamed of writing a novel, you might not want to listen to this one, because by the end of it your plans for the month of November may need to be changed. Of course, we hope that this episode and every episode of the Why I Write Podcast will inspire you and those around you about the importance of writing and teaching writing. If you have suggestions for great future guests, please send us an email today. Happy writing!