with Christine Pakkala
This writing workshop is targeted for intermediate or experienced adult writers of picture books, early and middle grade and young adult fiction. If you have taken courses designed to develop your skills as a writer of stories for children and want to deepen your craft, this is the right course for you. Our goal will be to support each writer’s efforts to develop and hone new projects as well as works-in-progress. We’ll refer to books for children that are currently being published and study these mentor texts for clues to revising our own work.
The weekly sessions will employ positive, non-threatening feedback in a small group environment. Workshop members are invited to bring up to five double-spaced, 12-point-font pages of writing to the first session. Please note: email your pages to the instructor as well as the entire group. Please keep your word count to a maximum of 1250 words.
Optional: Want an extra hour of one-on-one attention?
Christine will provide written feedback on either part of a manuscript OR a query letter for a total of an extra hour of consultation time. Please choose this option in the drop-down menu when purchasing this workshop. This extra time will be scheduled directly with the instructor.
______________________WHERE:
Online via ZOOM (link will be sent the week of the first class)
DATES:7 Thursdays
Sept. 12, 19, 26, off, Oct. 10, 17, 24, 31
TIME
12:30-3pm EST
______________________
LIMITED TO 7 STUDENTSPlease Note: WWW reserves the right to reduce the class time by 1/2 hour if enrollment is less than 5 students.
About the Instructor...
Christine Pakkala is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop MFA (Poetry) and the Vermont College of Fine Arts (MFA, Writing Books for Children and Young Adults). She was a Fulbright Scholar (1994) in Helsinki, Finland, where she translated modern Finnish poetry. She taught 7th and 9th grade English at Horace Mann and has published essays in Salon, BrainChild and Serendipity and is the 2013 winner of the Ladies Home Journal essay contest. She’s the author of Last-But-Not-Least Lola Going Green, which was the winner of the Santa Monica Public Library's Green Prize, and a novel for teens, Jasmine and Maddie, which was a VOYA (Voice of Youth Advocate) Top Shelf pick and a Bank Street Best Book.