At the mid-Atlantic SCBWI conference last month, keynoter Han Nolan said, “When a story scares me so much that I…
This past Saturday while speaking on a panel at the James River Writers Conference, I choked up and found myself…
The smoky odor from a too-hot furnace…a hint of honeysuckle…the racket of bullfrogs—these were the details that brought last week’s…
While I was drafting this post, my son peered over my shoulder, and said, “Mom, TL:DR: too long; didn’t read.”…
Last month a young woman told me she was pursuing a PhD in children’s literature instead of an MFA because…
Last week I popped Katherine Applegate‘s middle-grade novel in verse, Home of the Brave, into my car’s CD player, and…
For a few years, I’ve had the privilege of serving as a primary-level reader/judge for James River Writers’ Best Unpublished…
In mid-March, as I staffed the James River Writers (JRW) table at the Virginia Festival of the Book in Charlottesville,…
Voice. Sympathetic characters. Narrative pace. Dialogue tags. Emotional arcs. These are the sorts of topics we tackled at Vermont College…