# data[].attributes.body
Long Way Down by Jason Reynolds

# data[].attributes.body
Written by Matt Hetherington

# data[].attributes.body
Yesterday I Had the Blues by Jeron Ashford.
This is a video of the book being read/illustrated.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Yesterday I Had the Blues by Jeron Ashford Frame, illustrations by R. Gregory Christie, used with permission from Tricycle Press. Text ©2003 by Jeron Ashford Frame. Illustrations ©2003 by R. Gregory Christie. All Rights Reserved.

# data[].attributes.headline
Using detail to create a setting, Visualization, Action

# data[].attributes.subject
Using detail to create a setting, Visualization, Action

# data[].attributes.body
The Wild Girls by Pat Murphy

# data[].attributes.headline
Addresses all 5 Ws of nonfiction text in one paragraph

# data[].attributes.subject
Addresses all 5 Ws of nonfiction text in one paragraph

# data[].attributes.body
Chasing Lincoln's Killer by James Swanson

"From 1861 to 1865, the United States endured a bloody civil war between Northern and Southern states. The conflict had begun long before over the right to own slaves and states' right to secede, that is, to leave the union if they disagreed with the government"

# data[].attributes.headline
Reflection, Visualization, Setting, Think about what they would miss

# data[].attributes.subject
Reflection, Visualization, Setting, Think about what they would miss

# data[].attributes.body
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver
http://bit.ly/2Hiz2kU

# data[].attributes.headline
mood/tone, repetition for effect, setting, lists for effect (asyndeton, polysyndeton)

# data[].attributes.subject
mood/tone, repetition for effect, setting, lists for effect (asyndeton, polysyndeton)

# data[].attributes.body
News of the World by Paulette Jiles

"Everything was the color of biscuit, the color of yellow sunlight and the sulphur shades of gunpowder smoke."

# data[].attributes.body
The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins

# data[].attributes.headline
figurative language, sentence structure, imagery

# data[].attributes.subject
figurative language, sentence structure, imagery

# data[].attributes.body
Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak

That very night in Max's room a forest grew, and grew — and grew until his ceiling hung with vines and the walls became the world all around

# data[].attributes.body
Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls

WHEN I LEFT MY OFFICE THAT BEAUTIFUL SPRING
DAY, I HAD no idea what was in store for me.
To begin with, everything was too perfect
for anything unusual to happen. It was one
of those days when a man feels good, feels
like speaking to his neighbor, is glad to
live in a country like ours, and proud of
his government. You know what I mean,
one of those rare days when everything is
right and nothing is wrong.

# data[].attributes.body
Song: The Rose that Grew from Concrete by Tupac Shakur

# data[].attributes.headline
mood/tone, unusual sentence structure, figurative language 

# data[].attributes.subject
mood/tone, unusual sentence structure, figurative language 

# data[].attributes.body
Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo

"Most of the buildings in this part of the city had been built without foundations, many on swampy land where the canals were haphazardly dug. They leaned against each other like tipsy friends gathered at a bar, tilting at drowsy angles."

# data[].attributes.body
The Veldt by Ray Bradbury

He showed it to her. The smell of hot grass was on it… and the
smell of a lion. It was wet from being in the lion’s mouth, there were tooth marks on it, and there was dried blood on both sides. He closed the door and locked it, tight.

# data[].attributes.body
The Once and Future King by T.H. White

"Ah, yes. How did I know to set breakfast for two? That was why I showed you the looking-glass. Now ordinary people are born forwards in Time, if you understand what I mean, and nearly everything in the world goes forward too. This makes it quite easy for the ordinary people to live, just as it would be easy to join those five dots into a W if you were allowed to look at them forwards, instead of backwards and inside out. But I unfortunately was born at the wrong end of time, and I have to live backwards from in front, while surrounded by a lot of people living forwards from behind. Some people call it having second sight."

He stopped talking and looked at the Wart in an anxious way.

"Have I told you this before?"

"No, we only met about half an hour ago."
"So little time to pass?" said Merlyn, and a big tear ran down to the end of his nose. He wiped it off with his pyjamas and added anxiously, "Am I going to tell it you again?"

# data[].attributes.headline
mood/tone, vivid verbs, setting, characterization, figurative language

# data[].attributes.subject
mood/tone, vivid verbs, setting, characterization, figurative language

# data[].attributes.body
Oranges by Gary Soto

And asked what she wanted -
Light in her eyes, a smile
Starting at the corners
Of her mouth. I fingered
A nickel in my pocket,
And when she lifted a chocolate
That cost a dime,
I didn't say anything.
I took the nickel from
My pocket, then an orange,
And set them quietly on
The counter. When I looked up,
The lady's eyes met mine,
And held them, knowing
Very well what it was all
About.

# data[].attributes.body
Owl Moon by Jane Yolen

# data[].attributes.body
Priscilla and the Wimps by Richard Peck

"This school was old Monk's Garden of Eden. Unfortunately for him, there was a serpent in it."

# data[].attributes.headline
repetition for effect, setting, figurative language, 

# data[].attributes.subject
repetition for effect, setting, figurative language, 

# data[].attributes.body
Devil in the White City by Erik Larson

"It was so easy to disappear, so easy to deny knowledge, so very easy in the smoke and the din to mask that something dark had taken root."

# data[].attributes.headline
repetition for effect, sentence structure 

# data[].attributes.subject
repetition for effect, sentence structure 

# data[].attributes.body
Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut

"Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else."

# data[].attributes.headline
mood/tone, setting, lists for effect (asyndeton, polysyndeton)

# data[].attributes.subject
mood/tone, setting, lists for effect (asyndeton, polysyndeton)

# data[].attributes.body
Cannery Row by John Steinbeck

"“Cannery Row in Monterrey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses."

# data[].attributes.headline
lists for effect (asyndeton, polysyndeton)

# data[].attributes.subject
lists for effect (asyndeton, polysyndeton)

# data[].attributes.body
Stepping on the Cracks by Mary Downing Hahn

"Under my bare feet, I saw Hitler's face on the cement- his beady eyes, his mustache, his mean little slit of a mouth."

# data[].attributes.headline
mood/tone, repetition for effect, unusual sentence structure

# data[].attributes.subject
mood/tone, repetition for effect, unusual sentence structure

# data[].attributes.body
Quote by Samuel Butler

"oaths are but words, and words but wind"

# data[].attributes.body
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie

"I was born with too much grease inside my skull, and it got all thick and muddy and disgusting, and it only mucked up the works.

# data[].attributes.body
The Red Pony by John Steinbeck

"And Gitano was an old man, until you got to the dull dark eyes. And in behind them was some unknown thing. He didn't ever say enough to let you guess what was under the eyes."

# data[].attributes.headline
mood/tone, dialogue, characterization, figurative language , sentence structure 

# data[].attributes.subject
mood/tone, dialogue, characterization, figurative language , sentence structure 

# data[].attributes.body
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer

"Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all other lives I'm not living."

# data[].attributes.headline
repetition for effect, appositives, sentence structure 

# data[].attributes.subject
repetition for effect, appositives, sentence structure 

# data[].attributes.body
The Great Mouse Plot by Roald Dahl

# data[].attributes.headline
mood/tone, punctuation, figurative language 

# data[].attributes.subject
mood/tone, punctuation, figurative language 

# data[].attributes.body
The Essence of Imagination

# data[].attributes.headline
repetition for effect, unusual sentence structure, punctuation

# data[].attributes.subject
repetition for effect, unusual sentence structure, punctuation

# data[].attributes.body
The things they carried by Tim O'Brien

"They all carried fragmentation grenades-14 ounces each. They all carried at least one M-18 colored smoke grenade- 24 ounces. Some carried CS or tear gas grenades. They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried."

# data[].attributes.headline
mood/tone, lists for effect (asyndeton, polysyndeton), sound devices (alliteration, softness/hardness)

# data[].attributes.subject
mood/tone, lists for effect (asyndeton, polysyndeton), sound devices (alliteration, softness/hardness)

# data[].attributes.body
Unknown by Melody Beattie
"Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend."

# data[].attributes.body
The Pearl by John Steinbeck

"A town is a thing like a colonial animal."

# data[].attributes.body
Freak The Mighty by Rodman Philbrick
"I never had a brain until Freak came along and let me borrow his for a while, and that's the truth, the whole truth."

# data[].attributes.body
Ireland on Fast Forward by Richard Conniff
The light finds its way mysteriously around the clouds. It comes in from the sides. It lifts up off a white horse or a beach and scatters through the moist air with a numinous glow. It rises from earth toward the heavens. Then it's gone.

# data[].attributes.headline
Playing with Time, Different Perspectives

# data[].attributes.subject
Playing with Time, Different Perspectives

# data[].attributes.body
“I Go Back to May 1937” by Sharon Olds.

# data[].attributes.body
Where I'm From, a poem by George Ella Lyon

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In response to the fear- and hate-mongering alive in our country today, I have joined Julie Landsman?a writer, teacher, and activist based in Minneapolis?to create the I Am From Project. Through our website ( iamfromproject.com) and Facebook page, we?re collecting art from around the country prompted by that theme. You can listen to our interview on the National Writing Project radio here: https://www.nwp.org/cs/public/print/resource/4673.

We want to gather the diversity of our voices, and we plan to archive the results online and to present them, in some form, in D.C. We?d love to have your voice among them!

The Kentucky Arts Council has wrapped up my Where I'm From?project with a total of 731 poems from eighty-three counties. My thanks to everyone at the Council, especially Tamara Coffey, who put all those poems online. You can visit this website to find the map where you can click on any county and read offerings from poets of all ages.

"Where I'm From" grew out of my response to a poem from Stories I Ain't Told Nobody Yet (Orchard Books, 1989; Theater Communications Group, 1991) by my friend, Tennessee writer Jo Carson. All of the People Pieces, as Jo calls them, are based on things folks actually said, and number 22 begins, "I want to know when you get to be from a place. " Jo's speaker, one of those people "that doesn't have roots like trees, " tells us "I am from Interstate 40" and "I am from the work my father did. "

In the summer of 1993, I decided to see what would happen if I made my own where-I'm-from lists, which I did, in a black and white speckled composition book. I edited them into a poem - not my usual way of working - but even when that was done I kept on making the lists. The process was too rich and too much fun to give up after only one poem. Realizing this, I decided to try it as an exercise with other writers, and it immediately took off. The list form is simple and familiar, and the question of where you are from reaches deep.

Since then, the poem as a writing prompt has traveled in amazing ways. People have used it at their family reunions, teachers have used it with kids all over the United States, in Ecuador and China; they have taken it to girls in juvenile detention, to men in prison for life, and to refugees in a camp in the Sudan. Its life beyond my notebook is a testimony to the power of poetry, of roots, and of teachers. My thanks to all of you who have taken it to heart and handed it on. It's a thrill to read the poems you send me, to have a window into that many young souls.

I hope you won't stop there, though. Besides being a poem in its own right, "Where I'm From" can be a map for a lot of other writing journeys. Here are some things I've thought of:

Where to Go with "Where I'm From"

While you can revise (edit, extend, rearrange) your "Where I'm From" list into a poem, you can also see it as a corridor of doors opening onto further knowledge and other kinds of writing. The key is to let yourself explore these rooms. Don't rush to decide what kind of writing you're going to do or to revise or finish a piece. Let your goal be the writing itself. Learn to let it lead you. This will help you lead students, both in their own writing and in their response as readers. Look for these elements in your WIF poem and see where else they might take you:

a place could open into a piece of descriptive writing or a scene from memory.

your parents' work could open into a memory of going with them, helping, being in the way. Could be a remembered dialogue between your parents about work. Could be a poem made from a litany of tools they used.

an important event could open into freewriting all the memories of that experience, then writing it as a scene, with description and dialogue. It's also possible to let the description become setting and directions and let the dialogue turn into a play.

food could open into a scene at the table, a character sketch of the person who prepared the food, a litany of different experiences with it, a process essay of how to make it.

music could take you to a scene where the music is playing; could provide you the chance to interleave the words of the song and words you might have said (or a narrative of what you were thinking and feeling at the time the song was first important to you ("Where I'm Singing From").

something someone said to you could open into a scene or a poem which captures that moment; could be what you wanted to say back but never did.

a significant object could open into a sensory exploration of the object-what it felt, sounded, smelled, looked, and tasted like; then where it came from, what happened to it, a memory of your connection with it. Is there a secret or a longing connected with this object? A message? If you could go back to yourself when this object was important to you, what would you ask, tell, or give yourself?

Remember, you are the expert on you. No one else sees the world as you do; no one else has your material to draw on. You don't have to know where to begin. Just start. Let it flow. Trust the work to find its own form.

Where Others Have Gone with "Where I'm From"

Watch a visual poem based on "Where I'm From" by George Ella Lyon, created by Julia Daniel for Tamalpais High School's Academy of Integrated Humanities and New Media (AIM), fall 2010:

A Young Artist's Own "Where I'm From" in Words and Image:
In Winter of 2008, Sage Hennequin Kuhens was enrolled in University of South Carolina Upstate's "Write Here, Write Now: Sharing Slices of Life Through the Magic of Digital Storytelling," a series of writing and publishing workshops sponsored by the Spartanburg Community Writing Center. At eight years old, Sage was the youngest among her group of about 50 or so students, and was determined to be as independent as she could be. Her delightful instructor, Tasha Thomas, encouraged her independence.

I'm from big blue herons to small river otters,
I'm from big Metasequioas to tall stalks of bamboo,
I'm from cousins that were unknown to the closest of friends,
I'm from my mom and dad to my lab-beagle dog, albino rats, and Madagascar hissing cockroaches,
I'm from roaring water falls to silent flowing streams,
I'm from terrifying Zombie walks and Scarowinds to a gentle princess-loving godsister and godbrother
I'm from pepperoni pizza to microwaved meatballs,
I'm from my inspiration station drawing and writing to a homemade book,
I'm from my old dog Chani to red-shouldered hawks,
I'm from Jack the magic clown to my weird parents,
I'm from a tiny baby to an educated sister showing baby MinMin what school's like,
I'm from bold looking deer to relaxing foxes,
I'm from making a fire in the county to ridin' in a cotton combine,
I'm from a fan of Alexa Vega and Miley Cyrus to a spy lovin' tween (me),
I'm from playing with cockroaches with a friend to Joe and I together,
I'm from my heritages to Mom's mystery heritages,
I have an opinion that none can change...life is great!

-Sage Hennequin Kuhens 1-29-08

The Hale Pono Boys and Girls Club of Hawaii posted ?Where I?m From? by Dixie Castillo on their blog. Read it here.

Here?s a poem based on ?Where I?m From? written by an eighth grade student as part of a study of The Killer Angels. The lesson plan is here.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
official site of george ella lyon writer and teacher

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
new words: poems from the appalachian poetry project

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Where I'm From, a poem by George Ella Lyon, writer and teacher

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Where I'm From, a poem by George Ella Lyon, writer and teacher

# data[].attributes.headline
mood/tone, unusual sentence structure, breaking the rules for effect, figurative language, 

# data[].attributes.subject
mood/tone, unusual sentence structure, breaking the rules for effect, figurative language, 

# data[].attributes.body
From the novel: The Fault in Our Stars by John Green

"A boy was staring at me. I was quite sure I'd never seen him before. Long and leanly muscular, he dwarfed the molded plastic elementary school chair he was sitting in. Mahogany hair, straight and short. He looked my age, maybe a year older, and he sat with his tailbone against the edge of the chair, his posture aggressively poor; one hand half in a pocket of dark jeans. I looked away, suddenly self conscious of my myriad inefficiencies. I was wearing old jeans, which had once been tight but now sagged in weird places, and a yellow T-shirt advertising a band I didn't even like anymore. Also my hair: I had this pageboy haircut, and I hadn't even bothered to, like, brush it. Furthermore, I had ridiculously fat chipmunked cheeks, a side effect of treatment. I looked like normally proportioned person with a balloon for a head. This was not even to mention the cankle situation. And yet - I cut a glance to him, and his eyes were still on me."

# data[].attributes.body
Firegirl by Tony Abbott

# data[].attributes.headline
Historical context (southern), 1930 Time Period

# data[].attributes.subject
Historical context (southern), 1930 Time Period

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
As I Lay Dying has 111,711 ratings and 5,592 reviews. AmyAmy said: I know you're supposed to love this book because it's Faulker, but I HATED IT! I kno...

# data[].attributes.body
Ball Don't Lie by Matt de la Pena

# data[].attributes.headline
Using Picture Books to Teach Literary Devices

# data[].attributes.subject
Using Picture Books to Teach Literary Devices

# data[].attributes.body
Swimming to Antarctica by Lynne Cox