The fourth annual Dickens Day of Writing took place on Friday, February 7, Dickens’s 213th birthday. High school juniors and seniors from Santa Cruz, San Benito, Monterey, and Santa Clara Counties took part, as did students in San Mateo and even further afield—Atlanta, Cleveland, and this year, Lake Isabella, CA. Activities varied from place to place, but all venues included workshops, tutoring sessions, and, of course, ample student reading and writing retreat time. In Santa Cruz, 43 students attended, representing five high schools. Twenty-four community mentors were also in attendance, in addition to teachers.
This year, the DDOW featured another work by Dickens, the 1853 essay “Gone Astray” from Household Words. The essay is narrated through the perspective of a young boy who merges the reality of the city with his imagination as he wanders the streets. DDOW intern Molly Bingham says, “The essay speaks to childhood wonder and the lasting experience that getting lost [as a child] had on Dickens. Due to my background in theater, John Jordan, Courtney Mahaney, and I were looking to find a Dickens essay with theatrical elements, and this was the text we landed on. Toward the end of the essay, the boy even attends a theatrical performance by local players and gets caught up in what is real and what is pretend.”
In addition to assisting with the selection of the reading, Bingham helped oversee and organize the event, and she led one of the workshops on Feb. 7. She led students in an exercise that had them walking around the room “leading with different parts of their body, such as the top of their head or their nose,” she says. “After this, I asked students to walk around the space and interact with each other three more times, once as if they were giants, once as if they were wealthy bankers, and finally as if they were a lost child.” The result was that “students seemed more comfortable and excited to engage with each other and the text,” Bingham says. “We all came together as a group and spoke about how it felt to walk around the room as different characters and how this experience related to the themes in ‘Gone Astray.’” She feels strongly that “Seeing how intently some students at the DDOW engaged with Dickens's work makes it even more apparent how important it is to find ways for the younger generations to experience the magic of Dickens's writing.”
Other schools are invited to join next year’s DDOW, which is supported by Julie Minnis, the Friends of the Dickens Project, the Jordan-Stern Presidential Chair for Dickens and Nineteenth-Century Studies, the Humanities Institute, David A. Perdue and The Charles Dickens Page, The Charles Dickens Museum, and the many Dickens Project High School and Teacher Scholarship donors. For information, go to https://teachers.ucsc.edu/dickens-day-of-writing/.
