Our book, Leaping Off into Space: A Travel Guide to Risk and the Imagination by Janice DeRuiter and Helen J. Shoemaker is finally available on Amazon. Right now it’s the paperback edition. The Kindle Edition will be out shortly.

There is a brief description on the Amazon page but just so you know, the book is in two sections. The first section of the book is a dialogue between Helen and I that explores how the imagination and the developing child are connected. Helen reflects on the situations that arise for me as students strive to write and risk freeing their imaginations. She also discusses the stages of human development and how those stages play into the developing imagination.

The second section contains ten lesson plans that I used over the years to teach everything from primary to secondary grades. They are presented in a simple format. My goal was to make the lessons accessible to the regular classroom teacher if a poet could not be present. For each lesson I included a poem by me to show how the student writer could use the model poem to arrive at their work. All the model poems are easily available on the internet. Links are included in the manuscript.