Last year, when she was in second grade, Kristie De Luna couldn’t wait to do her homework. It was assigned for the whole week each Monday, and she’d come home and want to tear through it all. “I’d get tired,” says her father, Gonzalo, “and have to persuade her to save some for later.”
Chicago’s center, open to kids 6 to 18, has been in the works since 2003, when executive director Leah Guenther, then a grad student in English lit at Northwestern, and a handful of other writers, teachers, and students met at one of Eggers’s appearances. They put together an advisory board of local big shots–including Roger Ebert, Aleksandar Hemon, and Audrey Niffenegger–and started looking for money.
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Guenther says they plan to offer not just drop-in tutoring but workshops on everything from SAT preparation to zine making to “writing for your pet.” They’ll also bring classes from local schools to the center, where the kids can write a story with a cliff-hanger ending as a group, then finish it on their own and take it home bound into a little book. “In talking to parents, I’ve been trying to emphasize that what we’re offering is tutoring, but it’s not all meant to be remedial,” says O’Brien. “We’re also just looking for kids who want an outlet for their creativity–to write a story or write a book, to do something beyond what they’ve got the time and attention to do in a school.”
“There’s only so much fund-raising you can do without anything to show people,” Guenther says. “We just kind of had to take a leap of faith. I don’t think it was completely comfortable for any of us, but I think it’ll be better in the long run, because there’s no more imagining what the program can be. We can show people what it is.”
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