Sari Wilson: Writer and Educational Consultant

History Detectives: The Interactive Experience

sariwilson — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 05:07:52 +0000

I just had the very cool experience of playing through a module of HD Lab, the interactive detective game for which Sandhya and I created the content. It’s based on the popular PBS show History Detectives and features you as the player taking all the steps of a real detective. This module asks you to investigate an old knife and leads you to Hawaii. It features a sugar expert, a land clerk, and a snobby, germaphobic lady. But, sshh, I can’t say anymore–you’ll have to play the game! It’ll be up soon on PBS’s website…

Here are a few teaser screenshots:

Click to view slideshow.

Writing the Future: NCTE Annual Convention

sariwilson — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 17:45:55 +0000

I’ve been so busy wrapping up the History Detectives gaming project (more on this soon) that I am just now planning for the upcoming NCTE Convention. I’m really excited to be on a panel moderated by the educator and author Katie Monnin, who is spearheading a great initiative in getting comics into classrooms. TRANSFORMING 21ST CENTURY AND PRESENT-DAY GRAPHIC NOVEL READERS INTO FUTURE GRAPHIC NOVEL WRITERS will be a hands-on session for educators in reading and writing in the graphic form. Also on the panel: Josh (our first time on a panel together!) and James Bucky Carter, as well as some other amazing creators. I’ll be bringing copies of my Scholastic book Forward 54th!, illustrated by Aaron McConnell, and some other nonfiction graphic novels that I think are worthy of study in the classroom (there are more and more every day!). I’m honored to be part of the National Council of Teachers of English Centennial celebration–with, what seems to me, a very appropriate slogan “we are reading the past and writing the future.”

State of Emergency is due out soon, but I don’t have a copy in hand yet. Still, I like to gaze at Josh’s art on the cover. I’m proud of our merging of prose and comics forms in what feels like exciting ways.

Forward, 54th!

sariwilson — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 14:26:54 +0000

My nonfiction graphic book Forward, 54^thForward, 54th!: The
Story of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment is out from Scholastic! It’s so exciting to see the wonderful illustrations Aaron McConnell did to bring the historical moment to life. You can also read about Aaron’s process of illustrating on his blog.

The Game of Life

sariwilson — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 16:20:58 +0000

I’m working with an incredibly talented team of game designers, interactive producers, and content managers to create an original and, we hope, visionary online educational game. The deeper I get into development, the more I see the parallels between gaming and life. Gamers learn through feedback. In our lives, too, we are constantly learning through feedback—that’s how we adapt to our environment. Is it too programmatic to offer that if our behavior does not get us what we want, we modify our behavior? At the very least, we question and test our environment and then adapt. So, the challenge for game developers: How to create both an authentic gaming universe/experience that also works as a teaching platform? That is, how to observe life so deeply that we can both reproduce this world–or a simulacrum of it–and write it large in an altered universe (because, finally, the game is a game, not life)?

On the Record

sariwilson — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 19:09:41 +0000

State of Emergency is almost done! It’s been great to be involved with a book of this caliber from scratch–from the outline stage to the cover art. I loved working through the editorial issues and point of view issues with Scholastic Library division’s excellent editors. All the prose is done now (I think). And I just did my first author Q&A, which was a lot of fun. It was a good chance to look back over the project and think about all the stages–the planning, the research, the writing, and the research again, and how deeply through this wash-and-spin cycle I imbibed the story of Katrina from a number of different angles. All in all, it felt kaleidoscopic. I’m eager to see the final book and, luckily, am closer to that possibility because Josh has gotten to draw the cover for it. He has published an in-depth walk-through of the cover art and design, which is a really interesting look at how this process happens and how a book evolves and shapes under the guidance of various hands. This is what interests me so deeply in the book-making process: how did something so essential collaborative by nature become so associated with a single vision, and, as cultural product, defined by the auteur voice?

Here are some of Josh’s early sketches for the cover (you can see even more sketches and the final cover on his blog):

sariwilson — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 18:37:30 +0000

We’re busy here at Dojo Graphics these days. What began as a dream is turning into a reality—a still-evolving reality. The projects keep coming and we’re moving in the direction of cross-media narrative studio. Josh is completing his next book, a collaboration with NPR’s Brooke Gladstone, to be published by Norton later this spring. You can read about it here. I recently completed a nonfiction book for Scholastic called State of Emergency that features a comics-and-prose mashup of one of the storylines in A.D. I’ve also started writing an online narrative educational game for a TV production company, which requires a blend of writing skills—novelistic treatment and visual narrative construction. It’s a prototype, so there’s a lot that we’re developing from scratch, which I find really exciting—to be on the cutting edge of 21^st century literacy. And at the heart of it all is the ever-evolving form of comics: old-as-time and totally of the moment.

La Mariposa

sariwilson — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 03:02:24 +0000

Today we translated Mario Benedetti’s haiku “La Mariposa.” In Spanish, it goes:

La mariposa/Recordara por siempre/Que fue gusano

The English translations varied, but ran along the lines of:

The butterfly/will always remember/that it was a worm

We spent a long time discussing which word to use: caterpillar or worm. Which one indeed? I voted worm because I like the hard, unbeautiful sound of it. One boy chose caterpillar because, “I think the poet means that kids want to be grown up, but when you are grown up things are really hard, and you want to be a kid again.” He wanted a word that captured nostalgia. So much wrapped up in word choice, no?

Poetry Inside Out

sariwilson — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 21:49:07 +0000

I’m involved in an innovative project called Poetry Inside Out. The project is based around groups of mixed-level fluency students working to translate poetry into English. It’s a joint project of the Center for the Art of Translation in San Francisco and Teachers and Writers Collaborative in New York and funded by the NEA.

It’s being piloted in a mostly Spanish-speaking middle school in Washington Heights, where I’ve just finished my first week of teaching.

These kids are amazing. They get what living in a bilingual/bicultural world is all about. They understand translation on an organic level. They may need help with the written part of it, but they get it in a way that someone like me, raised monolingual, has to work to understand.

While the Poetry Inside Out pedagogy revolves around translating poetry, it is also more broadly about interpreting another’s vision while making it your own.

When I write graphic novel scripts, they are for someone else to interpret—to translate—into visual reality. When I am working on my novel, I am laboring to translate a vision of a book—or of my character—effectively into words, into scenes.

In fact, the more I think about it, the better metaphor of translation is for the work of a writer.

Funny how life works. Mulling this over, I came across this beautiful New York Times essay by Michael Cunningham on the translations of The Hours, and on the broader meanings of translation.

Future Issue: The Oxford American collaboration

sariwilson — Sat, 11 Sep 2010 17:36:02 +0000

"The Island." Text by Sari Wilson, art by Josh Neufeld

Josh and I have a new collaboration in the current issue of The Oxford American. The Oxford American is an excellent literary magazine and this issue is really fascinating.

The concept: Life in 2050. Close enough to our lives to be able to do what fiction can do so well—be prescient, be absurd, be invasive. As Marshall McLuhan said, “Art at its most significant is a distant early warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen.”

Our one-page comic deals with the question “What happens to decommissioned oil rigs?” Of course, it was on our minds. DeepWater Horizon, etc. Well, it seems, we stumbled onto a good question. No one really knows! But there are plenty of ideas. Given that it can be damaging and costly to actually remove these rigs, ideas abound.

“Around 4,000 oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico will be decommissioned within the next century. Given that an average deck on one of these rigs is about 20,000 square feet, that’s potentially 80 million square feet of usable space just off the coast of the United States,” reports Business Week. The most popular ideas include a resort/convention center, artificial reefs, wind farms. Riffing on that, we came up with an eco-farm and casino.

But, and here’s where we really let our minds go to the fantastical: Who—or what—will be inhabiting them?

Greetings

sariwilson — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 13:51:03 +0000

Photo by Seth Kushner

I am a New York-based educational writer and curriculum developer with an interest in interactive content and graphic literature. My experience includes interactive educational content and games, books for classrooms and school libraries, and educational marketing materials. I also create teachers’ guides, lesson plans, curriculum guides, and perform outreach to educational communities. Clients include Lion Television/PBS, Scholastic, Holt McDougal, Glencoe/McGraw-Hill, Classroom, Inc., and Teachers & Writers Collaborative.

I am also a published fiction writer. Click here to see more.