This spring, Youth Board members Shannon Daniels and Emely Paulino helped lead our series of digital workshops held in partnership with Parsons the New School for Design. The focus? Creative publishing. Here’s what Emely and Shannon had to say about the experience in the Preface for the forthcoming e-zine!
When we talk about writing, we usually picture someone sitting alone at a desk furiously scribbling into a notebook. What we often don’t realize about writing is that this image is not always accurate. Not only have we learned through Girls Write Now that writing can be a collaborative effort, but that it can also be a digital one, as well.
This spring, we’ve had the pleasure of seeing the worlds of digital publishing and traditional storytelling come together inside the walls of the New School’s technology lab. With the help of Parsons’ graduate students, a handful of mentee-mentor pairs were given the privilege of learning how to use In Design – and so were we!
In these “Dorkshops,” not only were the plot and dialogue of a story important, but also the way the story was told and appeared on the page. We’ve been there from image-sizing to “kern”-ing, from grumpy gardeners to Malala Yousufzai, and from pieces saved on flash drives to this e-anthology. Throughout it all, we’ve seen these pairs’ struggles and elations as they ventured into this new world.
This group of amazing women have some equally amazing stories to share. We hope that you will find them just as inspiring.