Pocket Stories
Pocket Stories was written by the students of Tuesday and Thursday Night Tutoring Program in Mar Vista and Echo Park in 2025-2026
Introduction
This year in Tuesday and Thursday Night Tutoring—known for more than a decade as TNT— the students wrote more. More than past years, more words, more depth, and with more imagination. The 20 minutes we dedicated each session to writing sometimes stretched into forty. Our five-minute mindfulness journal—once just a single minute in past years—filled with paragraphs of stories and feelings, from volunteers and students alike. And if it weren’t for the constant hum of students talking and laughing, praising each other’s work while volunteers offered advice, you’d hear the sound of keyboards typing just as loudly.
As a writing teacher and an advocate for teenage voices, I can’t help but constantly think everywhere I go, “How can TNT students have a better program?” I’m not kidding, and summer 2025 was no exception. I realized students needed to write more than one story per year, not to pile on work, but to match their creative speed. It was a challenge, both new and a little terrifying, but also deeply thrilling. It was a challenge to write more, with more variety of prompts, with less time to hesitate and more time to act. Schools were already teaching them how to write, I saw it in their lengthy essays and well-crafted prose. So, my role became clear: leverage those skills by adding creativity and freeing them from the pressure of a grade. We shifted from writing one story for a single book to building a full portfolio of four stories and a zine. Across four units, students brainstormed, drafted, gave and received peer feedback, and fully revised each piece, emulating portrait poems, generating prompts with playing cards, experimenting with horror microfiction, and finally—what students had been asking for years—choosing their own prompts.
What did I see as the sessions went on? Voice. It emerged like a butterfly from its cocoon, like a student yearning to get thoughts, ideas, and feelings out, needing only a pen. The constant turnaround from one unit to the other liberated them to write whatever came to their minds, no lingering, no time to doubt.
Brandon, one of our students at the Mar Vista Writing Lab, said to me one afternoon as he walked in early, “Writing stories is boring but it's interesting at the same time,” he paused, “And it makes me think.” If you’ve ever taught middle or high schoolers, you know this is one of the highest compliments you can get as a teacher: you made students think.
With all my heart, I hope the stories that TNT students wrote this year have a warm imprint in their future memory of this program, and forever in their voice as they navigate the world.
Julia Malinow
In-Schools and Tutoring Program Coordinator