I got the surprise of my writing life last week at our annual Young Writers Conference in Greater Kansas City. With more than 150 middle schoolers and 30 teachers, it was the GKCWP's biggest ever -- but that wasn't the surprising part. We have a phenomenal director, Katie Kline, whose energy and professionalism just keep attracting more and more students and teachers to the GKCWP. The surprise came at the end of the day, after all the kids had finished their writing workshops, devoured some pizza, and were assembled one last time in our university's main auditorium to receive awards and say farewell. Then, this:

"Would any of you like to come up to the stage and share what you've written today?" Katie asked the assembly of young writers.

"No way," I thought to myself. "No way will more than two or three of these kids want to get up and read their own stuff in front of everyone."

But six or seven of them immediately hopped out of their seats and lined up on stage, and while the first started to read at the podium, a few more students walked up clutching their freshly written pages, and then a few more, the line stretching out, until maybe thirty kids had stood on stage and read into a microphone the brand-new poetry and fiction they composed that day. They had written, many eloquently, about experiences of belonging and of isolation, about their families, about traveling, about school, and about their dreams. Some were hilariously funny, and some were so moving I felt tears coming on. Kids from private schools, public schools, from rough neighborhoods and nice neighborhoods -- they wrote fearlessly and they read their work aloud, and to each other. It was a sight I'll never forget: all those kids lined up, pages in hand, waiting for their turn on stage, while their peers and teachers listened attentively in the audience, applauding and laughing and nodding in recognition. 

The National Writing Project isn't just about days like this, of course. It's about being a year-round community of writers -- teachers and students, both -- a community that matters in everyday classrooms and everyday learning. But this one event, one Young Writers Conference on a spring day in Kansas City, so clearly illuminated the surprising impact that NWP can have. The program isn't just about writing more, it's about writing better, and it's about learning to be confident that you have something to say.

I'll close with one high-minded assertion, and a nod to novelist and educator Dave Eggers: The written word nurtures democracy. Reading and writing, publishing and sharing -- as a democracy, we should prize these tools above all. They are the key to almost every success we, as a country, have achieved and now aspire to. And that is the surprising bottom-line answer to the question of whether to commit financial support to the National Writing Project: In doing so, you support our shared future.

Liz Tascio

Graduate student, composition teacher, and the assistant to the Greater Kansas City Writing Project director, Katie Kline, in Kansas City, Missouri