Witchy Woman – Jen McConnel Tells Us the Secret of Isobel Key

Jen McConnel - author of The Secret of Isobel Key

Jen McConnel – author of The Secret of Isobel Key

Today I’m celebrating the release of the new adult novel The Secret of Isobel Key with an interview of the book’s author, Jen McConnel. In this contemporary romance, a recent college grad sets off to discover the secrets of a woman accused of witchcraft in the seventeenth century.

You started out writing poetry. How did you begin to write fiction? What was it like to make that leap?

Jen: When I was young, I wrote everything, but the fiction sort of faded away by the time I got to college. Maybe because I was an English major, analyzing literature on a daily basis, I began to pursue publication with my poetry before I returned to fiction. I still write poetry, but my focus has really shifted, and the shift started when I was teaching middle school. Spending my days trying to get kids excited about reading and writing must have rubbed off, because the summer after my first year of teaching is when I started to seriously write fiction. Continue reading

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Where Did the Green Man Come From? / WordSparks

Green girl power!

Green girl power!

Here’s the second in a series of posts about last week’s WordSparks Creative Writing Camp at the Salem Museum. I was genuinely thrilled to see these young people enjoying the fun of live drama as they gathered materials for their Green Man (and Woman) Masks and created an origin story for the mysterious Green Man seen for centuries in art and architecture. The kids came up with fantastic stories about how the green folk turned green! I’ll let the pictures talk for themselves.

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Plotting out the play

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Good idea!

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What a smile!

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Ready to go!

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The audience awaits…

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Wait a minute! We’re still working!

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Follow the leader!

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The play begins!

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The boys plot their play

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Action!

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Tada!

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The afternoon group gathers greens

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Nice!

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Collecting from the garden

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… and more collecting

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So lovely!

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Howard and Kaylan

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Bagged!

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Making the masks…

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At work!

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Yes?

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Rainbow eyes!

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The team

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Green Man (and Woman!) Masks

(photo copyright Mary Crockett)

(photo copyright Mary Crockett)

I’m gearing up for leading WordSparks Creative Writing Camp next week, so I’m getting my kids busy trying out a few of the projects I’ve planned. The first one we tried out is the Green Man (or Woman) Mask.

Basically, the Green Man is a leafy-faced dude who has appeared in art and architecture since ancient times. He looks like this:

(Green Man photos courtesy of Wikimedai Commons. First image by Johannes Otto Först, second and third by Simon Garbutt.)

The idea for the craft is to gather natural materials from the gardens and park surrounding the museum to use in a Green Man or Green Woman mask. Then we’ll write a mask poem… or mask story for the prose inclined.

As I got my kids to  make some prototypes, here are a few things I’ve learned:

1. There is no “wrong” way to do this (at least by my standards).

2. Glue-gun glue is HOT!

3. When you go outside with a big basket and start throwing in lots of leaves, flowers, twigs, grass, etc., and them come back in and dump it all on your kitchen table, you can expect to find tiny bugs on and around your kitchen table for quite a while.

3. My baby makes a super cute Green Man.

The bearded lady. (photo copyright Mary Crockett)

The bearded lady. (photo copyright Mary Crockett)

Diablo. (photo copyright Mary Crockett)

Diablo. (photo copyright Mary Crockett)

Mr. Chin Music. (photo copyright Mary Crockett)

Mr. Chin Music. (photo copyright Mary Crockett)

The Green Girl. (photo copyright Mary Crockett)

The Green Girl. (photo copyright Mary Crockett)

The Stache. (photo copyright Mary Crockett)

The Stache. (photo copyright Mary Crockett)