I stumbled across The Writer’s Block last winter, while visiting my grandmother in Las Vegas. Overwhelmed by Sin City’s bright lights and the constant whirring of slot machines, the charming bookshop became a sort of refuge, and I visited it multiple times during my week-long trip. On one of those visits, co-owner Scott Seeley showed the store’s backroom to my cousin and I. The bright, welcoming space serves as the classroom for Codex, a writing program that offers workshops and book groups to K-12 students at the in-store space, as well as in the occasional public school. I returned to Vegas this past August to spend a weekend with my grandma and, while there, had the opportunity to sit down with Seeley and chat about his background as a teacher, Codex, and the joys and challenges of working in K-12 creative writing education.

How did you get involved in creative writing education?

Half by accident. I'm trained as an artist, and I decided to go back to graduate school to get a master’s in education. While doing that I was working for an architect to pay for school. That's when I met an author named Dave Eggers who had just started McSweeney's in Brooklyn, and he invited me to design a storefront for him that McSweeney's would run out of. This was the first McSweeney's store in about 1999. We ran McSweeney's out of the back, very high concept, not a kid thing at all. Flash forward a couple years later. Dave moved to California and eventually McSweeney's moved out there with him and they started 826 Valencia, which was the first 826 chapter, in 2001. Dave reached out and said, "Do you want to start one in New York?" So another educator and I started 826 New York in 2004 and then I ran that one for ten years.

How did you end up at The Writer’s Block in Las Vegas?

The first year or two of 826 New York was super fun, it was just us and the kids and we're doing stuff. Ten years later when you're the executive director, all you do is beg for money and go to cocktail parties and get grants. I wasn't working with the kids anymore and that’s what I loved about it.

So there's this gentleman, Tony Hsieh, who is instrumental in this revival of downtown Vegas. He was aware, through some mutual friends, of the 826 program. A mutual friend, she's a journalist, reached out to me. "Hey they might be interested in doing an 826-style thing, do you know anybody interested?" I was like, "Well yeah, actually, me." Drew, who's my co-owner and husband, grew up in New York and I had been there since the late 90s, so we were ready for a change. I visited here twice, and I loved the new energy of downtown Vegas. It reminded me a lot of what Brooklyn felt like in the 90s before Brooklyn became the brand it is now. I got excited about being a part of that again.

Tony, whose Downtown Project was our primary investor, did not want to do nonprofit, and for all the reasons I said before I had absolutely no problem with that. So I said, "Alright, we can do the same thing and we're going to try it as a for-profit." Same thing, free program, we don't charge anything for the kid's stuff, but to raise all our money I focus my energy on running this store.

So the bookstore funds the writing program?

Exactly. We get donations of supplies, parents will bring markers with them. Or if they can afford it they'll buy something from the store on their way out. So it's a little more of this trade. Not all of them can afford to do it, which is totally fine, but those that can do, which is wonderful. Or they teach workshops, they donate their time. We have a really great relationship with the university, which has fabulous MFA and PhD writing programs. The students there volunteer their time to teach classes. It doesn't really cost a lot to run this program, thankfully, so far we've been able to do it three years in.

Could you go over all the programs that Codex offers?

Yeah! They are somewhat modeled after the 826 program. We do writing workshops, those are typically on weekends and those have mostly come to be focused on the littler kids just because the demand is so high. Five to eight, nine to twelve, occasionally twelve to fourteen. They are mostly three sessions, sometimes as many as five to six sessions, one hour or two hours long. There’s always the goal of creating something—it's usually a book. They're not exclusively books, but there's always writing. We’ll pair up our kids with film students at UNLV, together they'll write a screenplay and then the UNLV film students have to turn it into a short film. Sometimes the kids star in them, and then they show them at the Las Vegas Film Festival. So the first time the kids see them is in the theater, they see them on this big screen.

And they get to work with college students on them.

Which they love. It's super cute because it's so one-on-one. It literally becomes this collaboration between these crazy little brains and these weird college kids. We get great results from them.

We've done some drama stuff, we did improv. Sometime with the littlest ones we'll do some kind of craft as well. We’re working with someone now who’s an environmental scientist. She did a workshop where she taught the kids about cactus and we made little field guides where they wrote about cactus and roadrunners. Then she collaborated with a local artist who helped them make these paper mache cacti and a big road runner up front that you can see, too. Tomorrow she's teaching them about bees and they're making bee boxes. Same deal, they'll make field guides and they’ll write their observations. Also we do bookmaking, so this is one where [Seeley shows me a hand-bound book] they made their own books. So that’s workshops.

Number two is the field trips. Usually it's public schools—sometimes we'll do homeschool groups—elementary all the way up to fifth grade. This is modeled after another 826 program we used to do. The bus shows up, drops off twenty to thirty kids. They come into the store, I explain to them that I work here at the bookstore with Drew and James and whoever's volunteering that day. We have a very mean boss named The Baron, he's from Russia. I say, "He's in a terrible mood today. I'm so glad you're here. The Baron has read every book in this store twice, if I don't have thirty new books by two o'clock today I'm going to get fired, James is going to get fired. So we have a secret room in the back where we have everything we need to do to make books but we don't have any ideas for stories and we're panicking.”

First thing, they get their author photos taken. We tell them that authors are very serious people who never smile and that they all wear glasses so the kids put on glasses and they make these serious faces. Then they sit in rows here and I stand in front of the screen and I have a typist and we collaborate on this story together. We write the story up to the point of the climax. All the while The Baron—who now is mostly played by Drew—is miked in with this Russian accent. They never see him. "Ahh, where are my books, Scott?!" He's really grouchy. We build it to the point of a climax and then the kids have to write their own ending to the story, so they all break off—this whole program takes an hour and a half, two hours—and they do their own illustrations if there's time. This was a cute one [shows me a book], it was about a boy mermaid named Herman, Herman the Merman. So they send their books out to the Baron, who they still have not seen. And then my favorite part. I sit there on the stool and the kids are in rows of chairs and the Baron calls on each and every kid, and they come up and stand next to me. I've told them, "Your book is either going to get approved or not approved, and he's never approved all the books, so no pressure." But they'll stand there, and they're so adorable, some of them are holding on to me. And then he says something specific about their book and says, "It's approved!" So he goes through each and every one of them and then they get their books back with this approval sticker on it and then we finally get to meet The Baron. Have you met The Baron?

Yeah! It’s your bunny, right?

Exactly. They don't know it's a bunny. They come out and it's this moment of, they'll look at him and be like, "Oh, wait a minute, how does he talk?!" It's so cute.

Last thing we do is the in-schools program. This is a collaboration with a high school teacher. We’re in for at least a semester or each semester we switch the program. In this case we're collaborating with three different tenth grade classes at the Equipo Academy. Each class is responsible for writing essays, poetry, and short stories. They form an editorial board by volunteer. The editorial committee is in charge of art direction, they decide which kids work goes in, doesn't go in. Everybody gets at least one piece in but not everything goes in. At that age they're able to see that there's a level of quality that you have to be working towards and that you have to do revision, revision, revision, that kind of thing. They publish their books, and then they have a big release party at the end and they all get their books.

We have a couple clubs. We have book club and we have high school writing club, they meet every Thursday afternoon, although we're off for the summer. We have a teacher and they used to do mostly just exercises but this volunteer thought it would be really fun if they culminated into this collaborative story. It took them about three months and they came up with this really strange House of Leaves kind of wacky story. It's a bizarre story of this conspiracy where people are being turned into sheep.

From a literacy standpoint, do you think offering interdisciplinary workshops helps?

Yeah. In my mind it's always been our mission to make writing fun, to figure out how to make the in-road. This is the luxury I have of not being in the system. I don't have to answer to tests or anything like that. It's always project based because I think it's super important that they take something with them that they've created. I think that's massively critical. A lot of the schools have turned onto that, too.

Then we try to meet them where they are. I'll often have a UNLV student come and they want to do an allegory in Dante's Inferno and no, seven-year-olds are not going to enjoy that in the least. So let's do dragons! You have to find some in-road and then you can work in your weird poetry exercises and all that kind of thing, but we have to make it fun, because the kids don't have to be there. It's great because we have kids who come over and over again and sign up for every workshop.

What programs do you like to teach?

I love doing the fieldtrips. My employee in New York who did them was an improv actor and I learned a lot from watching him do it. I love it because it is like doing improv, because you've got all these kids in front of you, you have no idea what's going to come out of them, but you have an hour to somehow form it into something, all the while controlling the one that's like "Ahhhh!" and the little shy one over here and the one that's pissed off for whatever reason. I love doing those because it's just so energizing.

Workshops are fun—it depends. Some of them work great, some of them you get the kids who are just so difficult and mom forced them to take this thing and they're going to fight you tooth and nail—but those are mostly fun. Every once in a while I'll run a Dungeon and Dragons group, I did that as a kid and I loved it, it totally made me love reading. It has a reputation for being super nerdy and that's sometimes the case, which is awesome because it allows those introverted kids to really have their moment, but it's a great way—it's like The Breakfast Club, you have the nerd, the jock, and they all come together in a little team. They form sort of an avatar character of themselves. So my nerd might be playing a nine foot barbarian, and my jock might be a little hobbit in the fantasy world. I love that about it. It's very improvisational.

The high school stuff is great because it feels so incredibly impactful. When you're finally reaching that age where—these are kids that are a year away from college maybe.

The high school students seem to be doing substantial projects.

They're long. I couldn't do them without the collaboration of the teachers really. James will usually go in once a week, I'll go in once a month. James will work one-on-one with the kids, he's a poet and a writer, and he's closer to their age so he kind of hits a note with the high school kids, which is great. The reason we work with The Equipo Academy so closely is because the teachers there—and the administration—are wonderful. The kids there are from rough areas and they're really working well with it.

How do you engage with the teens in your programs?

Meet them where they are. It was interesting to watch James, new, go into a high school with what I call the Dead Poets Society mentality of "I'm going to inspire them to read Ulysses!" I was like, "Back it up a little bit." Chances are we're going to meet with ninety-nine kids, twenty of them you're not going to get through to, not on this level, you can keep trying and just be you because sometimes that's all it takes, for them to be like, "Oh he boxes, and he's kind of a cool dude, he's got tattoos, and he likes books so maybe it's not as nerdy as I thought." Another fifty of them give or take will be like, "Oh yeah, that's kind of fun, whatever." Then twenty of them, this is going to change their life. Going in knowing that is important.

Let them express themselves the way they want to. They're going to write bad poetry, that's what high school kids do. One of his very first exercises that James does with the kids is have them write a really bad poem. He tells them, "It's got to be terrible." Then they'll write their bad poems, read them out loud and talk about why they were bad. "Oh, because it's got a lot of clichés in it." They'll start to hear these things like, oh don't do clichés, now I know what a cliché is, don't do that. Or it's corny. All that sort of stuff.

I think quality is super important, especially for high school students. For them to know that they’re going to write this thing and it's going to go to a level of print quality that looks professional. I'll often work as the designer on these with the kids and I'll take their ideas and give them options and they'll say, "That's not the way I imagined it." "Okay well what about this version?" Then they go home with a book that is on Amazon, grandma can download it and get it printed, they feel like professional authors, it has a price on it. I think that's important in engaging teenagers.

What are some of the unique strengths and challenges of running these programs and workshops in Las Vegas?

Unlike New York, the challenge is getting the kids here. They can take Subways and trains and stuff like that there. Here, not all parents are going to be able to get to us. That's more for the workshops because that would be where we tend to have less of the at-need kids, because those kids don't have a way of getting here a lot of times.

Strengths are kind of what it was in New York. A huge amount of diversity. I think one of the things that is great about the workshops is that they bring together kids from all different parts of the valley to one class, unlike the school programs where they're doing it with the same group they're in with every day.

We have a lot of freedom. There's a lot of enthusiasm for what we're doing. It's one of the perks of not being a nonprofit—I don't have foundations to answer to, I don't have granters, funders. We can be as creative as we want to be with these sort of things and I don't have to hand a questionnaire to parents afterwards or ask a kid on a scale of one to five what did they think of the workshop.

I get this idea that we need to reach at-risk or underfunded communities, but it's very strange as to how you figure out to do that without stereotyping people or putting them in these boxes that are unnecessary.

Many of the schools in Tucson are really underfunded and struggle with tests scores and yet at the same time in these schools there are incredible teachers and there's no quantitative value placed on how much a teacher commits to in the classroom, engaging students--

And out of the classroom, too.

Yeah! What’s on paper about each school feels so different from what's actually happening in the school, seeing teachers work with the kids.

I think you strangely find yourself making the kids sound less empowered than they are for the sake of funding. Some of these kids, maybe they don't have a lot of money, but they're parents are very strong, hard-working, great people, they're just in bad circumstances. How do I get that nuance in here without making it look like they're just a bunch of poor kids and we're these great heroes?