Beth Ain
COLLEGE COACHING + TEACHING
Now Is Not the Time to Panic is the title of one of my favorite novels by one one of my favorite authors and which is also what the year before college should be called, or maybe just life in general.
But anyway, now is the time to panic is what I’m saying. Finding your writing voice is not more school, so, like, don’t panic.
Working with me is a like taking a mini-version of one of my college writing classes called Finding Your Frequency: Fiction, Poetry, and Playlists. We read novels, we recite poetry, we play music. We explore identity, transition, and the "before/after" moments that shape us.
I am famous (okay not famous, but like people say hey to me on campus sometimes) for making my students develop Hinge-style profiles in Canvas, what's your cry-in-the-car song, building stories out of song lyrics and texts. We write in multiple forms. We make art.
If you want to hang out with me, so will you. We will form a writing identity that feels good and real and which you will test out when you go to college and write e-mails to your professors and texts to new friends and to club presidents, and maybe even when you write short fiction or poems or songs. I know. Just me.
But for now, we chill. We find your frequency.
Beth's Inspo Playlist
SONGS AS TEXTS:
Lyrics are stories. Joni Mitchell and Janis Joplin, but Ani DiFranco for a while in the 90's, and then I'm going to go ahead and say Taylor Swift and Billie Eilish. Kendrick Lamar, Dylan, Frank Ocean, John Prine, and others, like Goose and probably Geese because I recently became a hipster. The Grateful Dead. But I will stop for now. I don't want to lose you. We are a music family. We are never not listening to music. I will write about it until my dying day. This list like my Substack could go on for a lifetime and I will edit it tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.
BOOKS: Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, Curtis Sittenfeld, Prep, and I once read Edward P. Jones' The Known World when I was in my 20s, and sometimes it pops back into my head and I don't know why it isn't required of every American and also The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud, and of course The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer. But most recently I would read anything written by Sarah Andersen, who has a book coming our called Fallow and who wrote a short story called "Take Me to Kirkland," which going forward all of my students will be reading like it's Catcher in the Rye.
POETRY: "God Says Yes to Me" by Kaylin Haught, “Unreliable” by Sarah Kay, "Go to the Limits of Your Longing" by Rilke, every single poem on the grieftolight instagram feed, more or less. I love the poetry my students write in my classes and the inventories they write and the stories they write and their reflections. It all reads like poetry to me.
Roots Leadership Program
@Port Washington Library Foundation
Roots is a leadership program for local high school students at the Port Washington Library, but we are not your typical résumé-builder. We collab. We listen. We workshop. We pitch. We bring in local mentors and civic leaders to help model and guide our students.
We encourage them to figure out what they actually think and then learn how to say it out loud, in a room, to people who are listening.
Every year our teens develop and pitch original ideas for programs, initiatives, and businesses. It is a little bit Shark Tank, a little bit TED Talk, and a lot of real conversation about who they are and what they want to put into the world.
If you are a Port Washington teen who wants to find your voice, or a parent who wants that for your kid, come find us!
On Instragram, we are @PWLFROOTS
