I’ve got a pot of green chile stew simmering on the stove. Beside me at the kitchen table, I’ve got a print-out of my first draft of this column, marked up with arrows, cross-outs, add-ins, squiggly lines and a personal code of circled letters and caret symbols. _ is is my preferred way to work, culinary and verbal juices simmering together; ideas and vegetables, words and spices, seasoning one another.

The writing process may be harder to map than the human genome, especially since every writer’s method, indeed every individual project, varies so much. Some writers begin by freewriting. Some start with an outline. I have a friend who takes walks while speaking ideas into a tape recorder.

Today’s writing shift began with chopping an onion, some mushrooms, a couple of zucchini and a few potatoes. I browned a half-pound of ground beef, scraped corn off a fresh cob and pulled one of the last bags of last year’s green chile from the freezer and put them on the stove to simmer. Cooking is a frequent part of my writing routine, especially when I have the house to myself and can unselfconsciously test ideas and phrases aloud while I chop and sauté. Who knows why it works. Maybe the sensory experience of slicing veggies and crumbling herbs between my fingers relaxes my verbal brain. Maybe the satisfaction of whipping together a savory concoction lulls me into confidence to begin wrangling words. I don’t know. But the process works for me, and my husband and son appreciate the culinary implications.

If only writing were as simple as following a recipe. Even the most prolific writers confess how difficult it can be to coax words onto the page. (Dorothy Parker: “I hate writing, I love having written.” John McPhee: “On a certain scale, it looks like I [produce] a lot. But that’s my day, all day long, wondering when I’m going to be able to get started.”) For the heck of it, I googled, “Why is writing so hard.” More notable than the pages that popped up was the fact that Google suggested my complete question when I had just entered “why is wr.”

Not surprisingly, teaching writing is also difficult. Methods differ widely and seemingly contradict — as illustrated in this issue’s three Wordweaver articles by three teachers at local elementary, middle and high  schools.

Janie Chodosh is a novelist and high school English teacher. In her creative writing classes at Santa Fe Secondary School and summer writing workshops, she invites teens to discover their voice through fun exercises in a safe atmosphere that de-emphasizes rules and structure. “I want my students to loosen up and get away from the fear that their own voice isn’t good enough,” she writes in “Neutralizing the Red Pen,” page 18, “because after all, writing — if nothing else — is about voice. Yes, writing is technical. Yes, there are rules and grammar and sentence structures to master. But without voice, without having something to say and a unique way of saying it, the rest hardly matters.”

Gretchen Peck introduced the Santa Fe Girls’ School to the Jane Schaffer Method, otherwise known as “Chunk Writing.” To Peck, rules and grammar and sentence structures are essential precursors to finding one’s voice. “Practice exercises, even fun and fresh topics, don’t help when students don’t understand the rules or how to reach a desirable outcome,” she says (“Getting Your Facts In Order,” page 16). The Schaffer Method teaches writing through a sequential process, with a prescribed framework and objective criteria. Students progress up a ladder of basic skills before taking on more complicated ones, much like advancing up levels of a video game.

Then we have Bridget Green, a first-grade teacher at Rio Grande School, who believes that even children who are just learning to write have a creative voice. She offers fresh, charming ideas for developing children’s creative writing skills as they are first learning academic ones, so that a child’s natural voice stays alive and matures. “Even in the first-grade classroom, students take writing seriously. We take them seriously as writers…. We focus less on mechanics during creative writing, so that students will trust their skills and get through to forming their ideas.” (“To Write is To Write is To Write,” page 14.)

If these teachers seem to rebut one another, consider that their techniques reflect different objectives. Peck’s focus is academic writing. Thee Schaffer Method is ideally implemented from kindergarten through 12th grade, so that in each new school year children can build on lessons and achievements from the previous one. (I’d love to see more Santa Fe schools adopt — or adapt — this method schoolwide or district-wide.) Chodosh’s creative writing classes are offered as electives or summer workshops, presumably to teens with enough confidence with the written word to take on the challenge of creative writing. Green’s first graders are so new to writing that they don’t draw a hard line between fun writing and school writing, and her delightful exercises aim to keep that connection alive.

But the differences in these methodologies also address the fact that good writing, whatever the genre, has many components: mechanics, sentence structure, voice, conformity and individuality. Blending all these ingredients in a tasty stew takes an adroit verbal chef.

In my own writing life, I’ve reaped lessons from variations on all these approaches. I was lucky to have early teachers who encouraged young students to channel imagination into written words. Being a writer was my earliest “What I want to be when I grow up” fantasy (along with kindergarten teacher and figure skater, as simultaneous careers).

Somewhere in junior high school, writing anxiety set in. At that point I wanted to be a biologist, enticed by the idea of quietly observing things all day (which, basically, is what writers do before they sit down and write things).

Then in 10th grade, I had an English teacher named Monica McMindes, who forced her snarly adolescent students to write compositions according to a strict outline, corralling our ideas into a structure a bit similar to Schaffer’s. I hated it, resented it, felt I was too good for it. (Did it really matter if I used words that didn’t actually exist? Couldn’t she tell what I was trying to say?) By the end of the year my writing was clearer, better organized and more distinct than it had ever been. I wrote my teacher a thank-you letter.

Ms. McMindes would take pride in knowing that my first book, “Farewell, Aleppo: My Father, My People, and Their Long Journey Home,” is coming out in October. The book is about my father’s childhood growing up in an orthodox Jewish community in Aleppo, Syria, and his several years in Shanghai under Japanese occupation before coming to America. It’s been a long time coming and the result of many different writing techniques and God knows how many soups and casseroles.

I’ll be giving a reading at Collected Works Bookstore, 3 p.m. October 5. Please come!

And I hope you’ll peruse and use the methods for teaching writing that our Wordweavers describe in this issue, and share your results and suggestions.

It started, as many life-changing experiences do, deceptively simply.

My father and I were walking down San Francisco Street towards the Plaza, almost 20 years ago, on one of my parents’ visits to Santa Fe. Friends had been asking him about his life, Dad said, about growing up in Syria and living in China before coming to America. Would I help him put his story on paper?

Honored and curious, I agreed. By that point I knew only disconnected bits and pieces about my dad’s life, in the years before he became my dad. I knew he grew up in an orthodox Jewish community in Aleppo, Syria; we had Syrian meals at my grandparents’ house almost every Sunday afternoon and holidays. I knew he had lived in China during World War II; he taught my siblings and me to use chopsticks when we were kids. I knew he had lived in Turkey; he gave me the Turkish answer to a clue in a particularly difficult New York Times crossword puzzle. But these memories were like colorful glass beads, and I couldn’t yet see the threads that would string them together.

So on our next trip to Maryland to visit my parents, I took a little cassette recorder and a list of questions, and sat down with Dad at the big desk in his office in the basement of their home.

“This is the life story of me — Mike Sutton!” he said when I pushed the record button. This business of being interviewed was clearly new to him. I felt awkward, too. I’d done plenty of interviews in my journalistic life, but I’d never brought that professional role to conversations with my dad.

It wasn’t long before I felt I’d stumbled upon the door to a vault. “Dad?!” I blurted out, more as daughter than journalist. “Do you realize how interesting this is? This is our family treasure!”

“Really?” he asked, genuinely surprised. “Is it interesting?”

Oh, it was. He described the house in Aleppo where he grew up, on the line between the city’s Jewish and Muslim neighborhoods, across the street from a mosque and walking distance to a synagogue. His explained that his father moved the family to Turkey for his textile business for a couple of years when Dad was just a little boy, but then moved them back to Aleppo, and its large Jewish community, so the children could be raised with a Jewish education. He related that Syria was under French occupation throughout his childhood; school was taught in French and Arabic, and the city bubbled with European and Oriental influences. His father sent him and his brother to Shanghai in 1941, when he was 19 and his brother was 17, to work in their uncle’s exporting business, with hopes of finding a way to get to the United States to escape rising anti-Semitism in Syria. His brother came down with tuberculosis and returned to Aleppo, where he died a few years later. The Japanese occupied Shanghai just a day after bombing Pearl Harbor, leaving Dad alone in China, across the world from his family, fending for himself in a city at war.

My father had told us little of these experiences, apparently not seeing much story in just doing what life required at the time. Since most of our family left Syria under traumatic circumstances, they had no residual sentimentality for the old “homeland.” But their detachment from the country they fled under duress masked the fascinating history of the Jewish community that had thrived in Aleppo for millennia. That community is now gone, disbursed in just a few decades of the twentieth century to cities around the world.

So the project grew and grew, as I conducted more and more interviews and mountains of research. As the narrative emerged, I began to sense that this was more than just “Dad’s story.” With its themes of individuality and community, displacement and relocation, I found it resonated even with readers with no common bloodlines. A simple request became a 20-year project.

I finally finished the manuscript a year ago. By the graces of the publishing pixies, it found its way to the bedazzling hands of Marty Gerber and Scott Gerber, the father-and-son team of Terra Nova Books. Farewell, Aleppo: My Father, My People, and their Long Journey Home will be published later this summer. You can preorder it on Amazon, and read more on my blog: www.claudettesutton.com.

Maybe it was the journalistic pixies that led other people to come forth with articles for this issue about writing and sharing stories. Judith Fein, author of The Spoon From Minkowitz: A Bittersweet Roots Journey to Ancestral Lands, pursued the few facts she knew about her grandmother’s history all the way across the world — and back to herself. Gloria Fournier Valdez, a lovely writer and grandmother, shares memories with her granddaughter in subtle and delicate ways — and already sees the little girl telling family stories to her baby brother. Fiction writer Janie Chodosh, author of the new book Death Spiral: A Faith Flores Mystery, shares tips about writing for the Young Adult market. (We’ll continue this theme in our fall issue with articles about teaching children to write, academically or creatively; please contact me with your article ideas.) 

I invite you to explore your family stories, and to share memories with your children. I can’t foresee what treasures you’ll find in your vault of family stories, but I can assure sure you that there are jewels there. Whether you find tales of honorable accomplishments, or tragedy, or shameful acts your relatives had hoped to bury, you’ll discover pieces of who you are and of who your children will become. I suppose this is the most powerful thing I discovered, the profound sense of possibility and security that emerges from the realization that identity is more than just an act of our own creation. 

Genealogy is a growing industry, with websites and elite membership organizations and DNA tests — but the only truly essential tool you need is curiosity. And the good thing about being a Tumbleweeds reader is: You’ve got a place to share what you find.