Inga Hansen is an Executive Editor/Associate Publisher of MedEsthetics magazine. She was the Managing editor of DAYSPA magazine and is also a freelance writer. Some of her clients include All Access magazine, Beauty Store Business, CelebLife, Celeb Staff, Massage magazine, Men’s Fitness and Rock City News. Recently, Inga mentored a group of teenage foster girls in a Creative Writing Workshop at Aviva Family and Children’s Services in Hollywood. This is her story.

Creative Writing at Aviva

By Inga Hansen

Every Thursday from 7:00 pm – 8:00 pm, I met with a group of teenage girls aged 13 to 17 at the Aviva Center in Hollywood. The residential facility serves youth who have been abused and neglected. They spend their days in school and two evenings a week taking part in “enrichment classes” that include cooking, yoga, basketball, painting and creative writing. As a magazine editor and former freelance writer, it was my goal to foster and possibly even spur interest in writing as part of my creative writing enrichment class.

As a new volunteer, my trepidation was that I’d run through my readings and exercises for the first night in 20 minutes and we’d been staring at each other, twiddling our thumbs for the rest of the class. What I didn’t expect was the enthusiasm and willingness of the girls to jump right in. Our first class was on poetry. The students took turns reading poets like Mary Frye, T.S. Eliot and Maya Angelou, then shared their own free writes and poems. Some of the students were aspiring writers who brought pieces they’d been working on, others were curious about creative writing, and one of my students attended in hopes of using the program as an opportunity to improve her English skills and test scores.

Maya Angelou’s “Still I Rise” and Gwendolyn Brooks “We Real Cool” were hits. The girls took copies back to their rooms at the end of class to share with friends, and two of the students performed an impromptu rap and sing-along to the “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”

We started each class with a 10-minute freewrite. I brought prompts each week to get us started--one week it was a bag of interesting objects; another it was black and white photos. But the girls didn’t need them. “We’re not allowed to swear or get angry. It’s hard to even get really excited about things when you’re in here.” said one student, “So I save things up each week.”

Writing had always been an outlet for me to lose my temper, expose my vulnerabilities and pontificate on world affairs, then decide whether I wanted to share that particular piece or just keep it for myself. It hadn’t occurred to me that was what we were providing them--a safe place to express themselves.

The girls wrote about their plans for the future, their current crushes, the people they admire most and their fears and insecurities. We had our ups and downs--poetry was a big hit, both the readings and the writing exercises. We had a blast taking photos on Sunset Blvd. that we used to create personal photo journals. On our second night of short fiction, I chose a story that was far too convoluted and long to hold anyone’s interest--when I tried to abort the story about one third of the way through, the reader said, “Oh no, we’ve gotten this far, we’re finishing this thing.” But it took some convincing to get them back on board to finish the class.

At the end of the session, we had a graduation celebration with cake, gift bags and Certificates of Completion provided by Create Now. Each girl came and thanked me for coming. It was a really special and joyous night. Not just for us, but for all the girls as they ended their enrichment classes for that session and said goodbye to their instructors. With a little experience under my belt, I’m looking forward to my next course series at Aviva, perhaps even working with a few familiar faces.

What the girls had to say (names anonymous):

“I like the workshop because I like to express my feelings so I’m happy that every Thursday I get to come here and share my feelings. The book (journal) doesn’t judge me and I get to share my feelings and express myself.”

“After our hard week, we get to say something and no one can yell at us about it and no one can judge us about it. It’s cool. We get to write it all down and it helps to get a lot of pressure and anger out and sadness and even happiness out that we don’t get to show as much as we want to so we get to write it.”

We thank Oprah's Angel Network for making this project possible through their support of the Write Now literacy program.