Yesterday, I composed six word stories with a group of middle school students. They are my favorite age group; they’re raw. Most of them have not yet learned the subtle art of aloofness. We used pages torn from magazines, scissors, and glue sticks with canvases cut from colored card stock. They were silly, but engaged. It was a challenging task for the last class of the day. I told them the pages were taken from environmental magazines, and someone noticed they were earthy. The kids pushed the boundaries of convention, but that’s the creative process and adolescence in a nutshell.