Yesterday, the third official National Day on Writing, was a huge success! You definitely don’t want to miss out on hearing from five writers via the National Writing Project’s blogtalk radio show. Listen to the show online here. I’m there in the last section of the show, talking about how writing with my students led to two published YA novels. Other guests include writers for the New York Times and The New Yorker and a teen who uses Figment.com to share his writing. Really great stuff! Some of my favorite bits from the show include Katherine Schulten talking about “drinking the Koolaid” at the National Writing Project (I did, too!),  Fernanda Santos describing what it’s like to work for a world-class newspaper when writing in a second language,  Dana Goodyear describing how Figment.com grew out of her experiences interviewing Japanese women writing novels on their cell phones, and teen-writer James Loveless describing his journey from closet writer to member of a vast community on Figment (apparently Figment users are called “Figgies”!).

Many partner sites are running posts with more extended reflections on why folks from different walks of life write. Mine for the National Writing Project is here. I love HEATHER WOLPERT-GAWRON‘s Edutopia piece on what writing has meant at different stages of her life. Here’s one section that resonated with me:

When I was 35, I wrote because a fire was lit within me and I discovered the National Writing Project. I was introduced to the greatest teachers of writing. I was introduced to a room of educators who believed that they could change education by teaching students to communicate their logic, their passions, and their dreams, through their writing, regardless of one’s subject matter.

Read Heather’s whole essay here. You can also cruise to the bottom of this NWP page to find annotated links to heaps of essays by writers from science teachers to memoirists to novelists. Really, really good stuff.

There’s also a nice recap of the #whyIwrite tweets at the fun, formidible, and f**k-where-were-you-when-I-was-a-teen site, Figment.com:·http://blog.figment.com/2011/10/20/whyiwrite/. Of course, you ought to go explore the thousands of #whyIwrite tweets for yourself–that’s what hash tags are fore, after all.