The World is Full of Time Machines (on "Breakfast on Mars", edited by Rebecca Stern & Brad Wolfe)

Breakfast on Mars: Your Favorite Authors Take a Stab at the Dreaded Essay Assignment

This collection of essays begins with a foreword from Margaret Cho, who admonishes teachers who have used writing as a form of punishment. She tells a story about how she first realized that words had power and introduces the anthology by saying that it's "a collection of essays by authors who understand that writing about ideas should be fun and real, not a drill. The authors in this book get that essays don't have to follow the same rules that someone made up forever ago."

I wish I could run out and buy 30 copies of this book for my classroom. The short, focused essays are excellent models for a writing workshop. (The editors have included a related prompt for each essay, which makes the collection more accessible for teachers revising their curriculum because their state has adopted the Common Core State Standards.)

REASONS I LIKED THIS BOOK:

1.) The opening of "Creative Boot Camp" by Joshua Mohr (186-190):

Sometimes we forget to celebrate our imaginations. We take them for granted. We slack and never muster the energy to walk them. We fail to make sure they're eating quality calories. They get lazy and bored.
Neglected, our imaginations lie on the couch, eating Doritos and wearing dirty clothes. Our imaginations spend hours on Facebook stalking our boyfriend's ex-girlfriends or our ex-girlfriend's last boyfriend or our old BFF who we now completely hate or the strange cousin we met at Aunt Martha's crab-feed in July.
We look at our imaginations, sadly curled on the sofa, and we scream at them, "Get up!"

For the record, this essay ends with the imagination and "you" walking off into the distance together as artist and best friend, which is adorable and perfect.


2.) The close of my very favorite essay in the anthology: 
 
"The world is full of time machines. You can fight that truth. Or you can ride." (31)
 -Steve Almond in "The World is Full of Time Machines" 

3.) The first line of another great essay in the anthology:

"I confess that I have always wanted a tail for personal reasons." (99)
 -Ned Vizzini in "Why We Need Tails"

4.) An excellent argument in favor of pictures in essays and books:

"...how did we get from a world where illustrations were plentiful, and where illustrators could be powerful partners in creation, to our modern-day world, where there are hardly any pictures in novels at all?" (20)
-Scott Westerfeld in "Warning: This Essay Does Not Contain Pictures"