Last year, Overland Park writer Kristin Marciniak got inspired.

Young athletes have a team to hone their skills with. But young writers, she said, have to hone their skills in their own rooms, with not much support.

“It’s lonely to be a kid who wants to write,” Marciniak said. “There aren’t really any opportunities for kids who aren’t athletic — and who aren’t interested in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) — for after-school programs. If you’re a kid who likes to tell stories, and you’re an indoor kid, there aren’t a lot of places for you to go after school.”

To change that, Marciniak is opening the Word Shop this summer — a writing school for middle school and high school students.

The Word Shop will operate in southern Overland Park

• Marciniak will operate the Word Shop out of her home near 127th Street and Antioch Road.
• The school will open May 31 and offer classes for students from fifth through 12th grades.
• Classes will start with summer book clubs and will expand this fall to writing groups with focuses like poetry, fiction novels and journalism.
• Classes are four weeks long, while in-depth writing seminars are eight weeks long — and both cost $25 per hour.
• Marciniak said the school isn’t just for students who already love to write, but also for those who struggle with it.
• “When you’re writing a five-paragraph essay, it’s a game between a teacher and a student, and you have to know the right language to play the game,” she said. “Parents have a super hard time explaining it because they don’t write five-paragraph essays in their daily lives, but I do.”

Marciniak is a long-time writer herself

• Marciniak started writing fiction in elementary school, debuting her writing career in first grade with a Mother’s Day book titled “My Mommy is Special” and another book in third grade about a girl following a rainbow.
• She picked it up again during her time in a writer’s group at the University of Missouri, where she graduated in 2003 with a bachelor’s degree in journalism.
• Today, she has a career in educational publishing and is working on a young adult fiction novel.
• Marciniak also leads a writing club at her son’s school, Oxford Middle, and plans to lead book clubs and writing groups with kids in Kansas City, Missouri’s Rainbow School summer programs in the coming months.

Marciniak wants to build a community for young writers

• As a young writer, Marciniak said she formed connections with other writers in college that still help her grow as a writer to this day.
• “Kids who are interested in something like writing — that’s a skill they’re going to take with them their whole entire life, but they’re expected to get better on their own, in their bedrooms by themselves,” she said. “I want to build a community where kids can come and have that safe place, and have other people their own age that they can share their writing with.”
• Through the Word Shop’s classes, she said she hopes to help secondary students form those same connections to have alongside their own writing careers.
• “I want them to be 30 years old and still have someone from that writing group that they can always send their work to,” Marciniak said. “I want them to have those kinds of people in their lives that they can always trust with their writing, no matter where they live.”

Go deeper: Visit the Word Shop website here.