North Graduates Return To Lead Writing Workshops

Adam Rubin went 10 years without visiting New City despite growing up in the hamlet.

Rubin graduated from Clarkstown High School North in 2001 and went to Washington University in St. Louis, where he studied creative writing and received a degree in design. He moved to Chicago, where he worked in advertising and spent time as an improviser. He now lives in Manhattan, but still hadn’t returned to New City.

That is, until last week. Last Friday, Rubin returned not only to New City, but to North, as he was asked back to participate in the school’s 10th annual Sticky Notes Writing Conference.

“I asked a former student of mine to participate because she works in publishing and I thought she’d have an interesting perspective to bring for the kids,” said Karen Czajkowski, chair of North’s English Department and an organizer of the conference. “She couldn’t make it, but suggested Adam, who was another former North student.”

Since leaving Rockland, Rubin became a New York Times best selling author with his children’s books Dragons Love Tacos and the Those Darn Squirrels trilogy. Rubin was one of three former North students asked back to lead workshops at the Sticky Notes Writing Conference. The others were Shari Maurer, a young adult author, and Remy Maisel, a Huffington Post blogger who graduated North two years ago and currently attends Penn State University.

Maisel’s workshop, “NEWSworthY: Blogging In The 24-Hour News Cycle,” was on effectively blogging and ways to get started.

“The students seemed pretty engaged in the workshop,” she said. “A lot of them had their own Tumblr already, which was good. That’s the site I suggested they start on if they’re looking to start blogging because it’s simple to use and share posts with others. We talked about ways to get started, guidelines for good blog posts and ways to get interest.”

Maurer led a workshop on creating believable and interesting characters called “It All Starts With Strong Characters.” She spoke to the students about using specific words to help their readers visualize the worlds they create, although giving the readers freedom will allow them to do that however they see fit.

“The magic of writing and reading is that is it’s yours to read into it and paint pictures and create worlds from the words,” she said.

Rubin’s workshop was called “How to Strangle a Penguin In Under 5 Seconds” and dealt with the importance of brevity and imagery. Rubin works in advertising, which he thinks helps him as a children’s author.

“My day job definitely has some similarities with picture books,” he said. “The books need to be quick and direct, which is what I was trying to teach the students.”

Rubin said a lot of younger writers aren’t forced to write short pieces, and so in his workshop he had the students write one-sentence captions for pictures.

“Some of the kids were a little tentative at first,” he said. “All I was hoping for was for them to use their imagination, and once they loosened up, they really started getting creative.”