Lydie Raschka is a writer in New York City. She came to writing circuitously after a career as a Montessori elementary teacher and, later, a teacher trainer. While her experience as a teacher has led her to write about education and New York City’s public schools, she has also written about homeless transgender youth, the problem with poetry books for kids, and what it’s like to get hate mail.
Her essays and op-ed pieces have appeared in Salon, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Education Week, The Horn Book and The Writer. She writes for insideschools.org, a website for families navigating the labyrinthine New York City public school system. She lives on the Upper West Side with her husband, Chris Raschka, the artist whose habits are explored here, and tries to visit her son, Ingo, an animator and CalArts student, as often as possible.
She says, “The hardest thing about writing is keeping at it, the everyday work of it, finding the steady forward motion in the midst of rejection, praise, silence, self-criticism, doubt, malaise, despair, you-fill-in-the-rest. The solution can be found in a single day, which can be a work of art in itself.”