This year, I’m more grateful than ever for my teaching career. (I have an entire file on my desktop called “Books I tried to write.”) I’ve never been a daily writer and often spend summers on first drafts, some of which work, and some of which don’t. Beyond revisions to Spin with Me, I haven’t written since last summer. (Basically, it’s just a hard time to be a person.) Everyone’s trying to keep their head above water. This is a really hard time to be a student, and it’s a really hard time to be a teacher. From another perspective, it looks like writing. When I reflect upon my practice of digging into things and extracting truths, from one perspective, it looks like teaching. In Spin with Me, Ollie and Essie are obsessed with optical illusions: the butterfly/painted hands the old woman/young woman the duck/rabbit. Each is about digging into a person or situation, finding underlying truths, and making those truths visible so they can be built upon or celebrated. On the most basic level, for me, teaching and writing are indistinguishable. After all, my friend wanted to know what was going to happen next!Īs an author-teacher, how do your various roles inform one another? What can you tell us about trying to write while also working with students during this challenging time? In retrospect, I realize that this process motivated me. In the moment, I wasn’t sharing my draft to create accountability for myself I was sharing it because it was fun to essentially write a novel text by text. I texted them to my friend one by one as I wrote them. The book consists of fairly short chapters now, but in my first draft, the chapters were even shorter.

I wrote the first draft of Spin with Me a few summers ago. This works for me I don’t do well when I spend too much time in my head. I love all three of my jobs, but because I have so much on my plate, I have to take whatever I can get when it comes to writing time. In addition to being a writer, I’m a seventh-grade English teacher and a mom, so my life is a bit of a juggling act. My writing process has never looked the same twice. Was there anything different you noticed about the process of writing Spin With Me? Welcome, Ami! What can you share about your “inner” journey as you write? Is it different with each book, or do you have a fairly reliable emotional process with ups, downs, etc. With the organic ebb and flow of an authentic “getting to know you-really” first love, the story delves deeply but gently into the question of naming and labeling who we are, and the importance of finding wholeness as humans in relation to ourselves and others. Spin With Me is a dual-narrative story about Essie, a thirteen-year-old girl who can’t wait for her 110 days in a new school to end-until she meets Ollie, who is nonbinary.

Ami polonsky