This page is written by Joyce Hackett, the creator of Washington Write-a-Story Day. I organized the project, which combines my obsession with public space via my profession as a creative writer, while serving as the writer-in-residence at GW. Its goal is to map the city via narrative.

The following is a first draft background narrative. The writing is not the best. Since I've had inquiries, I wanted to give people who are interested some idea about where the project came from.

A few years ago I was struggling to finish my first novel, which I'd been working on for over a decade, and living in the neighborhood of Columbia University, where I went to graduate school.  Though Harlem was just 13 blocks away, I had no friends there; my community consisted of people like me: white writers, editors and scholars.  I was a member of my block association, a duty that was discharged by gathering with six neighbors to drunkenly peruse tree catalogues.

Then Columbia attempted to build a building next to mine, and this plan catalyzed widespread opposition. In the process of working on that issue, I fell down a rabbit hole of community service that transformed my thinking.  I fell in love with my local community board, its simple exercise of the most basic form of democracy, and I became addicted to going to meetings, which were mostly in the projects I had always avoided.  In one meeting, a senior executive at Columbia was challenged about the university's plans for Harlem, and she paused, probably because the north end was boundaried by a steep wall designed to keep Columbians in and neighborhood residents out.  "The north end of the campus is like the prow of a ship," she said.  "We're pushing through...but it's choppy."

What a metaphor!  University students and professors in the boat, neighboring communities, the choppy water. The worst that could happen, it seemed to imply, was a breach in the hull.  Her assumption, I realized, was the tip of the iceberg in a set of assumptions that had been in the air as I earned my degrees. I began to think more deeply about universities, they way they often train students to compete and win, but not as often, focus on how they can make the greatest contribution to their society. Her remark seemed to me to reflect the tip of a very large iceberg of subtext about the purpose of my education.

After my novel was published, I was appointed as the 2004-05 Jenny McKean Moore Writer-in-Washington.  The daughter of Margaret Sargent, and the mother of the writer Honor Moore, Jenny Moore endowed a fellowship at GW that stipulates that fellow teach one class to students, and one free workshop to adults in the DC community.  I dug up Jenny Moore's book, The People on Second Street, about ministering in the slums of Jersey City just after the war.  Moore and her husband Paul, who eventually became the Episcopal bishop of Washington, were patrician in background, but they threw themselves at ministering in a way so startling to that generation that they ended up on the cover of Time Magazine.  After the couple settled into the parish house, they offered assistance to a first group of needy neighbors, in the form of shelter and odd jobs; when a second group requested assistance, one of the first men they'd helped grumbled, asking why the Moores had to keep on continuing their open-door policy.   Exploring the desire for safety, and the way it provokes us to circumscribe our community, Moore argued: If we define our community as "everybody", we are, each of us, enlarged as individuals.

That sentence struck a chord. It embodied a stance I had been moving towards for some time. I started thinking about how to do just that in Washington, and the result is Washington Write-a-Story Day.

Throughout the planning I kept referring every morning to my literary mug, which has the Eleanor Roosevelt quote : "Do something everyday that scares you." (And that's why the timing is that w/end, because it's closest to her b-day).

WWASD is my attempt to do something that scares me; to help people who have a story to tell do something that scares them; to bring the resources of the literary community to people who don't always benefit from them; to map the city via narrative; and to open a conversation between Washingtonians about their experience of public space and of each other.

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