New Releases by Karen Benke

Unleash your creativity! Explore creative writing in new ways that will have you cutting, folding, tearing, and ripping the pages! This is the activity book for out-of-bounds creative writing fun. Full of 52 zany, silly, and thoughtful prompts—perfect for elementary-aged kids—this book will take your writing to new places, literally! Write a haiku and fold it up into a paper crane, write fortunes and tuck them in places for people to find, write out all your accomplishments and then let your talents soar as a paper airplane—there’s no end to the imaginative ways to use words and paper.

Connect to your friends through handwritten notes, cards, letters, and postcards—an interactive workbook that encourages creative interactions between friends through the written word, complete with cross-outs, smudges, and parenthetical asides. Put down that smartphone and pick up a pen! Texting and e-mail have taken over our correspondence, but Karen Benke is ready to change that. Through prompts that invite penning short postcard-size notes, ideas for sending cards "just because," and inspired letter-writing exercises, Pass That Note! offers limitless possibilities for connecting with your friends in more personal, unique, and creative ways. Use the book for its letter-writing ideas, tear out pages to send to friends, or write in it as a journal to record big ideas for future correspondence. No matter how you use it, you'll be connecting with the people you care about the most in ways that are surprising, fun, and heartfelt. Contributors include: Neil Gaiman, Jon J Muth, Ruth Ozeki, Wendy Mass, Gary Snyder, Norman Fischer, Natalie Goldberg, Jane Hirshfield, Claire Dederer, Albert Flynn DeSilver, Alison Luterman, Sam Hamill, Ava Dellaira, Lucille Lang Day, and J. Ruth Gendler.

Invite your jittery mind into quiet slips of timed or untimed writing experiments that are designed to encourage your timid heart to forge forgotten feelings and entice your shy-self to make friends with emerging emotions. With a bounty of prompts to select from, you’ll be inspired to explore all the wacky, confusing, brave, soul-stirring wonderings and wanderings of your emerging life’s inner treasure in a way that’s sure to unleash what you most need to say. In this book you’ll find: • On-the-Spot Drops that offer quick “free-fall” prompts on different themes, such as short-winded poems and seven-line stories. • Mini Memoirs to unlock personal narrative to share, or not. • Suddenly a Story suggestions to explore feelings and states of being like fear, reluctance, compassion, kindness, anxiety, anger, jealousy, happiness, and more. • Surprise Yourself Surveys for those who think they know everything about themselves. • Untie-Your-Mind Word Lists to jump-start stalled imaginations. • Definition Decoders to introduce new ideas and styles of writing. Created especially for tweens, teens, and other earthlings, this book provides you with a chance to create imaginative poems, stories, fragments, and real-life on-the-spot sketches. All that’s required is that you take a breath, relax, reset, and leap write in!

Here are the ideas, experiments, and inspiration to unfold your imagination and get your writing to flow off the page! This is the everything-you-need guide to spark new poems and unstick old stories, including lists of big, small, gross-out, and favorite words; adventurous and zany prompts to leap from; dares and double dares to help you mash up truths and lies into outrageous paragraphs; and letters of encouragement written directly to you from famous authors, including: Annie Barrows, Naomi Shihab Nye, Lemony Snicket, C. M. Mayo, Elizabeth Singer Hunt, Moira Egan, Gary Soto, Lucille Clifton, Avi, Betsy Franco, Carol Edgarian, Karen Cushman, Patricia Polacco, Prartho Sereno, Lewis Buzbee, and C. B. Follett. This is your journal for inward-bound adventures—use it to write, brainstorm, explore, imagine—and even rip!