Faculty Voices with Ron Koertge: Make Every Word Count

As some of you know, Chris Heppermann and I wrote a trilogy for young readers. Basically aimed at pre-teen girls featuring -- wait for it -- three pre-teen girls. Oh, and a witch. Backyard Witch, as a matter of fact. But don’t leave your seats while the blog is in motion. Afterwards, you may rush to Amazon.

Writing with Chris was fun; writing for younger kids was fun. I’d never done anything like that, but Chris knows the kid-business and is great at structure. I like to just sit around in my smarty pants and emit evenly-spaced bars of irony and jest. (And that’s me emitting, okay. Not my pants.)

Now she wants to work on something even shorter. For even younger readers. Sure, I’m game.

So we think of some characters and some problem-to-solve. Wendell as a bored, over- sheltered little bear and Goldy as the fearless daughter of avant-garde artists.

Chris told me what to do -- Punchy. Short sentences. Not much description since an illustrator will do that. Here’s my opening:

*    *     *

“Wendell, are you all right?”

Wendell looked into his empty bowl. “Almost finished, Ma.”

“But you’re all right.”

“I’m just on the patio.”

He made his spoon clink against the blue bowl so he could stay outdoors a little longer. So his mother would think he was occupied. And safe.

Not even twenty yards away, stood the woods. Tall trees making the usual dark canopy. A familiar path leading toward the sun-dappled clearing, then circling back toward his house. A path he walked every day with his parents while the porridge cooled. Every day. Day after day.

He could see other paths, dimmer ones. Where did they go? And who made them?

With a sigh, he carried his bowl indoors and put it on the sink.

“Such a good little bear,” said his mother patting him on the head. “Time for a nap now?”

“Mom, I just ate breakfast.”

*  *  *

And here’s Chris’s:

On the wall of Wendell’s bedroom was a map that showed all of the places he could never go:

Up north to the bridge. “You might fall off,” said Mama.

Down south to the lake. “You might fall in,” said Papa.

Out west to the cave. “Full of scorpions,” said Mama. 

Out east to the meadow. “Who knows what’s over there,” said Papa.

“I’ll be careful,” said Wendell.

“It’s time for breakfast,” said Mama.

“How am I supposed to be an explorer when I grow up if you never let me explore?” said Wendell on the way downstairs.

*    *    *

I looked at hers and thought, Oh, yeah. So that’s what you meant. Harder than it looks, but aren’t most new things? I’m not giving up. I’ll think haiku. Make every word count.

Stay tuned.


*Ron Koertge is a faculty member at Hamline's MFAC program. He writes poetry for everyone, fiction for young adults, and recently co-authored a young reader series. You can discover Ron's literary work by visiting his author's website or visit his faculty page to learn about him as a professor at Hamline University.

Publication Interview with Ron Koertge and Christine Heppermann

It's not everyday that two Hamline authors team up, but when they do you know it's going to be a great book!  Read on as co-authors Ron Koertge* (MFAC professor) and Christine Heppermann** (MFAC 2010 alum) talk with us about their newest book, Backyard Witch.

Tell us about your new book.

Christine: It’s the first installment in a series about three nine-year-old friends—Sadie, Jess, and Maya—and their comical adventures with a witch named Ms. M, who turns up one day out of the blue in Sadie’s old backyard playhouse. 

Ron: The title tells it all – an amiable witch with questionable magic powers turns up in Sadie’s back yard  just as she needs a friend.
Christine: So far we have three books under contract, each told from the perspective of one of the girls. The next two books are scheduled for publication in 2016 and 2017, and all will include illustrations by the amazing Deborah Marcero.


Do you have a favorite part of the book or a favorite character?

Christine: My favorite part is the overall tone of the series. My daughter Audrey describes it as “smart-stupid”—and she means that as a compliment! The stories aren’t frivolous; they have a lot to say about friendship and parent-kid relationships and different ways of looking at the world. But the humor is goofy. Anytime a scene seems to be veering dangerously toward “heartwarming,” Ms. M will say or do something silly and, crisis averted. 

Ron: I like the beginnings of things:  the first few minutes of a movie, the post parade at the races, and the opening scenes with Sadie abandoned by her friends.


What was it like writing a book with a former student/faculty mentor?  

Christine: Honestly, those labels, for me, went away a long time ago. For years now, we’ve simply been friends. 

Ron: Chris was always such a good writer that I never thought of her as anything but a peer.


Did you ever workshop this story at Hamline?

Christine: I workshopped the first few chapters or so at an alumni weekend. People said encouraging things and gave us good advice, as usually happens during workshop.

When did you first begin work on it? When did you finish?


Ron: Ummm, a couple of years ago now and we worked on Book #1 for 6-9 months.

Christine: We started work on the first book in the summer of 2012. I remember because that was a rough time for me: my husband had just been laid off from his job, and I was in limbo with the manuscript that would become Poisoned Apples, waiting to hear from an editor who seemed enthusiastic, but couldn’t quite commit. (Eventually I got an agent, Tina Wexler, who found the perfect home, at Greenwillow, for it.)

I wanted to work on something fun and distracting. Ron and I had talked semi-seriously about doing a picture book or an early reader together. At some point I floated the idea of a girl with something living in her playhouse—a rhino or a dragon or a witch. Ron said, “I like witch.” And we were off, as they say, to the races.

As the work progressed from inception to copy-edited version, what were the major changes? How did those changes come about?


Christine: Can’t remember what the specific changes were, but I know they involved fleshing out the story and the characters. Ron and I are both minimalists. 

Ron: Chris and I would be away from the ms. for awhile, then come back and sense these holes that needed to be filled in.  And our keen-eyed editor, Martha at Greenwillow, had suggestions.

Christine: Under [Martha's] direction, we kept going back to the story, adding layers. Sometimes it was just a line or an additional paragraph; sometimes it was whole new chapters.


What research did you do before and while writing the book?

Ron: Chris did bird-watching stuff.  I interviewed witches.  

Christine: Ms. M is a birder, and she turns Sadie into one—not magically, but by showing her how amazing it can be to sit and observe the natural world. I already knew a little about birding, but I still checked out a lot of birding books from the library. Also, I lived in Chicago at the time and spent some wonderful sunny afternoons hanging out behind the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum in Lincoln Park, watching birds at feeders.

Where did you do most of your writing for this book? 
Christine: I like to write in coffee shops. Ron writes in his study. 

Ron: We live on opposite sides of the country, so we talked on the phone and sent each other works-in-progress.  Once a year we got together face to face.




Any final thoughts on the book you'd like to share?

Christine: It makes me very happy for lots of reasons. One is that it’s about friendship, and I was lucky enough to be able to write it with my friend.

Ron: Who knew I’d write for very young readers?   I wrote Stoner & Spaz and the dark fairy tales in Lies, Knives, and Girls in Red Dresses.  Most writing is enjoyable, but this book was flat out fun. 


Thanks to both Christine and Ron for taking the time to answer our questions and discuss a little bit about their creative process.  Congratulations again on Backyard Witch!  We can't wait to read the next two.

*Ron Koertge is a faculty member at Hamline's MFAC program, and author of over a dozen books, mostly for young adults (Backyard Witch being a notable exception).  You can learn more about his work by visiting his website or visit his faculty page to learn about him as a professor at Hamline University.

**Christine Heppermann is a January 2010 graduate of the Hamline MFAC program. Her book, Poisoned Apples, received five starred reviews and was chosen as a Best Book for Young Adults 2014 by Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, The Boston Globe, and The Chicago Public Library.. Christine lives in New York's Hudson Valley region. To learn more about her and her writing, please visit her website. 

Faculty Voices with Jackie Briggs Martin: Side by Side

Betty Comden and Adolph Green
New York Times photo/SuzanneDeChillo

Every working day for more than sixty years, Betty Comden and Adolph Green sat down together to write song lyrics-- for composers such as Leonard Bernstein (once their accompanist) and André Previn. We all know their songs—“Make Someone Happy,” “Just in Time,” “The Party’s Over,” “New York, New York.” 

Audiences loved them.  In 1958 Brooks Atkinson, theater critic for the New York Times,  called them “good enough for just about any civilized corner of the world.”  According Comden’s obituary in the Times,  (November 24, 2006), “They met daily, most often in Ms. Comden’s living room, either to work on a show, to trade ideas or even just talk about the weather.” Theirs was a life-long collaboration.

And that’s really what I want to consider: collaboration. Comden and Green wrote song lyrics. We write stories, books. It’s all words.  How does it go when we work with words with others?  Ms. Comden said of their collaboration: “We don’t divide the work up. We develop a mental radar, bounce lines off each other.” (New York Times; October 25, 2002).

I expect each instance of collaboration is different. But perhaps they all involve some kind of “mental radar,” and the joy of sharing ideas, "bouncing lines."

 

Ron Koertge and Christine Heppermann have been collaborating on a series of early chapter books—Backyard Witch (Greenwillow; July, 2015). Ron says of their work, “It always strikes me in collaboration that somebody has to drive the car and somebody has to/wants to ride shotgun.  Chris drove our car.  She’s much more focused in general than I am, so I could just  — I’m going to wring everything out of this car-metaphor that I can  — look out at the cornfield.”

But, in spite of the useful car metaphor, the writing gets passed back and forth. And there's some shared understanding of what the final story should look like—mental radar.  

Christine said, "[Ron] is probably right that I had the more definite vision, at least in the beginning, for who the characters were and where I wanted the story to go. But as we got deeper into the process, I think we became equally invested, to the point where now, when I go back to the finished text, I can't always remember who wrote what. We're both pretty meticulous about word choice--Poets!--so each sentence has a little of each of us in it, I'd bet. I love the two-minds-as-one aspect of collaboration." 

As a picture book writer I’ve always felt that a picture book is a collaboration of many minds—writer, artist, editor, book designer. And I’ve thought my books were better for the multiple perspectives. But it wasn’t until my daughter moved to California and gave birth to our first grandchild that I wanted to collaborate on the actual text. 

Here was this grandchild in California. Here was I in Iowa.  Insert powerful need to see grandchild.  Insert missing a daughter.  And the result is a story about a granny who walks to California to see her grandbaby, a story that Sarah and I worked on together.  She had the new infant so maybe I was the one who drove the car. I’d write a draft and she’d fix it—whenever she had time.  We both agreed on what we wanted the story to be.  The work was fun and we did it for each other.  Of course we wanted to publish, but we also wrote to amuse each other. Whoever else might see it was a little further from my mind than when I work alone. (And, we are now in the middle of another tale.)

I’ve  recently been working on a non-fiction piece with Phyllis Root and Liza Ketchum. In this instance there were three distinct parts of the story. And we divided the responsibility for the research.  We each wrote up what we had learned. Then we got our hands into the clay, combined the three parts and worked together to smooth out the seams.  Again, though we all believed the story was important and wanted it to get out to the wider world, we wrote to please each other.  And we had a wonderful time, so much fun that we are looking around for another project.

Think about writing a piece with someone else, someone who shares your passion for a story, someone you love to work with.  You don’t have to be like Betty Comden and Adolph Green, who only worked together. “Alone, nothing,” Mr. Green once said. “Together a household word…”  Working with someone can be just part of your writing portfolio. My daughter is a poet who is continuing to publish books and chapbooks. Phyllis, Liza, and I have individual writing projects. Both Christine and Ron are continuing to publish their own work, as they collaborate.  Working with someone can be just one of your writing projects—a treat for you and a writer friend.

Faculty Voices with Ron Koertge

Ron Koertge

For about 9 months now, I’ve been writing something I may not be very good at. Perhaps majoring -- as my wife advises her counseling students not to do – in my weakness. Perhaps.

           
About a year ago, I decided to get into the head of a school shooter. A high school shooter. Like Columbine and the others. When I see it laid out like that in black & white I wonder what in the world I was thinking.

But I could say the same thing about the graphic novel script now languishing on some editor’s desk and probably ringed with coffee stains. I liked writing that script. I didn’t know how to do it, so I tried. I don’t draw, but Gene [Luen Yang] said that wasn’t a deal breaker. I enjoyed myself. Like Magellan and Marco Polo, I was in unexplored territory. If I got lost, well, then I got lost.

           
Now I’m lost again. My water supply is running low and there are ominous sounds from the underbrush. This school shooting story makes me feel stupid. It’s been one predictable scene after another. I showed an early version to Chris H. and she threw up. I’m having trouble looking at it as not a failure but just an adventure in limitations.

           
The limitations, since you asked, are probably these: I’m a smarty pants and this thing doesn’t play to my strengths. Coaltown Jesus was funny even though the hero is a very troubled boy. Some of the poems in Lies, Knives and Girls in Red Dresses are witty and askew. The school shooting story is serious. My muse shows up in a simple black dress with no pearls. She sits in the corner dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief.

           
Or maybe I have the tenses wrong and it’s she showed up and sat. The last draft was a little sharper. I have a new angle on the whole enterprise: a question-and-answer format. A FBI criminalist and the shooter’s best friend. No wall-to-wall prose. No setting but an interview room. It’s essentially nothing but probing and sometimes evasive dialogue.

Anton

           
Chekov said, “My job is to be able to distinguish between important phenomena and unimportant and to be able to illuminate characters and speak with their tongues.”

           
Don’t you just love that?  “. . . illuminate characters and speak with their tongues.”

           
All right, Anton: stick with me. I’m not giving up yet.

Meet the Grad: Randall Bonser

On January 18, 2015, on the final day of the upcoming residency, the MFAC program will have a Graduate Recognition ceremony, honoring the men and women who have just completed their studies and will receive an MFA from Hamline University. Between now and residency we'll be posting interviews with many of the grads. Randall Bonser is today's grad; he lives in in the metro Atlanta, GA area. To learn more about his writing, please visit his website or follow him on Twitter: @rbwritenow

Randall with one of his ghost projects.

What do you do when you’re not working on packets?

I taxi young teenagers (mine, not others’) to school activities and sports. I wash the uniforms of said young teenagers. I play in a men’s soccer league. I defy house rules and buy more children’s books.

How did you hear about the Hamline MFAC Program?

I was stalking Ron Koertge, whose books I love, and was trying to find out if he taught anywhere. Lo and behold he taught at this college in St. Paul. The low residency nature sounded good, and I’d get to rub shoulders with Ron, so I investigated. I went to an investigative meeting in Chicago and met Christine Heppermann, who is my new literary hero (sorry, Ron).

What was your writing experience prior to entering the program?

I have made my living as a writer for many years in advertising, marketing, business-to-business, and ghost writing. I also wrote poetry and stories for fun, but now I’m trying to make those fun projects my serious projects.

What do especially remember about your first residency?

Everyone had the flu. And the workshop was awesome, I learned a ton. And I met Claire Rudolf Murphy, who got me excited about the semester’s work. Oh, and I met this group of people who called themselves the Hamsters, my class, and enjoyed getting to know them. Evenings at the hotel were great bonding times, and lots of fun.

Have you focused on any one form (PB, novel, nonfiction; graphic novel) or age group in your writing? Tried a form you never thought you’d try?

I don’t know if it’s a good idea, but I tried a little of everything – nonfiction, YA, poetry, picture books, graphic novel. I’ve had a blast, and learned a ton. I’m hoping that the broad range will help me, but I’m a little nervous that I didn’t concentrate on one form. I love them all and want to write them all, but I’m not sure that’s realistic.

Tell us about your Creative Thesis.

I completed a first draft of a graphic novel called “Rocket Captain.” It’s about a boy and girl in 7^th grade who struggle to find success in a culture that defines them before they get a chance to define themselves. The girl is Vietnamese American, the boy is African American. The two are called upon to help build a rocket in science class. They start as friends, have a misunderstanding and start working against each other, then try to find a way to reconcile at the end. Working with Gene Yang was great because he is very smart about STORY. When my story was not holding up, or I took a short cut, or was not supporting a plot twist, he let me know. I enjoy the graphic novel medium and hope to keep working in it.

What changes have you seen in your writing during your studies?

I am much more aware of story elements. I used to think that good stories were organic, that they didn’t follow a formula. But when I looked at the stories I liked, they had elements in common. They weren’t artificial, but they were carefully planned and fine-tuned. I hope that awareness of story is more present in my work than it used to be.

With packet deadlines removed as an incentive, do you anticipate it will be harder to keep writing? Any plans for your post-Hamline writing life?

I have been trying to establish a schedule that will work for me once the deadlines are no longer there. Phyllis Root helped me when I worked with her to establish daily routines that start the night before so that you have a sense of accomplishment, even when you only write a little bit. I plan to pursue some of the projects I’ve started here at Hamline and see if I can work toward publication, no matter what I am doing “for a living.”

Any thoughts for entering students or for people considering the program?

This is a very enjoyable program and you get to dabble in things you wouldn’t normally get to work in. The feedback is fantastic. For serious writers, you’re going to get to the point when you say, “I love my critique group, but how can I get some professional feedback on what I’m writing?” You can hire an editor or coach, or you can enroll in a program like Hamline. I’ve had the time of my life.

*

The public is welcome to attend the graduate recognition ceremony on Sunday, January 18, 3:30pm, (Anne Simley Theatre, Drew Fine Arts Building). Linda Sue Park is the speaker.

Alumni Voices with Christine Heppermann

Somewhere I read about a study linking exercise and intelligence in mice. The researchers set up three cages. In the first cage, the décor was minimal—a food dish, a water bottle, bedding. Your basic rodent padded cell. In the second cage, the researchers added toys (A tiny jack-in-the-box? Itty-bitty Barbies?) for the mice to play with. In the third cage, they substituted a running wheel for toys. Guess which group of mice, when later tested, figured out how to navigate their way through a maze the fastest? Apparently the wheel not only shaped the mice’s quads and readied them for swimsuit season, it also stimulated their brain activity.

Last week on the Inkpot, alum Georgia Beaverson reminded us of the important yet not always acknowledged truth that to be a writer, one must write, and she reiterated Jane Yolen’s BIC—butt-in-chair—method for getting the job done. I agree that perseverance is the only way to accumulate pages, but for me, getting the butt to stay put is easy. Hey, I’m lazy, I can sit all day! Especially if you keep me supplied with lattes, crackers and cheese, and, at cocktail hour, a nice hoppy ale. I have a different “B” conundrum; I can’t keep my brain in the chair.

Remember the Philosophy 101 “brain in a vat” thought experiment? That’s my brain—technically stuck in one place yet wandering everywhere. I’ve always been “scattered,” as teachers consistently scolded on my report cards, and when a project is hard my thoughts are simultaneously sighted in Greenland, Chile, and Quatar. In other words, focus is a problem.

So when the chair proves counterproductive, I get up. Sometimes I take a walk on the rail trail near my house. Sometimes I walk only as far as the bathroom or—since I write in coffee shops—to the counter to buy a raisin bagel. I’ve found that even a brief spurt of motion can be enough to persuade any random ideas circling the airfield to come in for a landing.  

My current work-in-progress is very personal, hence my brain will do anything to avoid it. You could tie me to my chair with my laptop (and no Internet) in an empty room, and my brain would spend the hours happily counting paintbrush marks on the wall or recapping episodes of “How I Met Your Mother.” Attempts to stay in my seat until I’ve finished one page, one paragraph, one sentence too often leave me in despair. At the moment my brain is telling me that I really should keep adding on to this blog post and get back to my WIP tomorrow morning, when I’m fresh! Well, sorry, brain, and no disrespect to you, Inkpot readers, but I have to close my laptop now and get out of my chair. I have work to do.

*

Christine Heppermann is a January 2010 graduate of the Hamline MFAC program. She lives in New York's Hudson Valley region. To learn more about her and her writing, please visit her website. 

Publication Interview with Christine Heppermann: Poisoned Apples

the author

Please describe the book. Poisoned Apples is a YA poetry collection that combines elements of fairy tales and contemporary teen life. “Feminist poetry” is what the book’s often called, and I don’t disagree, though it’s funny, I didn’t have that label in mind the when I started writing the poems. I was just trying to write authentically about things I’d experienced, things my older daughter and her friends had experienced. I used the framework of fairy tales because I saw so many connections between what the heroines in those stories go through and the inner and outer battles women and girls face today. 

As the story progressed from inception to copy-edited version, what were the major changes? How did those changes come about?

Greenwillow/
HarperCollins
 Sept. 23, 2014

I worked very slowly and deliberately writing the poems, making lots of changes along the way, so when the collection finally came together it was, on the whole, pretty solid. My editor, Martha Mihalick, and I went back and forth about how to arrange the poems. And they were short to begin with, but in revisions most of them became even shorter!

 When did you first begin work on it? When did you finish? I wrote the first poem in 2009, during my third semester at Hamline. I wrote that last one in 2013.

What research was involved before and while writing the book? Hmmm, does reading beauty magazines count as research? Oh, I also Wikipediaed the plot of “Human Centipede Two.” I don’t recommend doing that.

City Chickens, your first book, was published in  2012. What have you learned about the business of writing since then? I’ve learned that it’s so important to have an editor and a publisher who fully support your work. You’d think having that would be a given, but it’s not.

Where do you do most of your writing? At coffee shops. I’m at one right now!

Do you remember the first book you loved? My godmother gave me a book every year for my birthday, and my all-time favorite was a wonderfully surreal picture book, translated from the German, called The Enchanted Drum by Walter Grieder. As I remember, it’s about a lazy boy who hadn’t practiced his drum routine for a festival parade, so he dreams that all these grotesquely costumed parade characters surround him and start berating him. Hey, I was raised Catholic—guilt is in my blood.

*

Christine Heppermann is a January 2010 graduate of the Hamline MFAC program. She lives in New York's Hudson Valley region. To learn more about her and her writing, please visit her website. 

Meet the Grad: Miriam Busch

On January 19, 2014, the final day of the upcoming residency, the MFAC program will have a Graduate Recognition ceremony, honoring the 11 men and women who have just completed their studies and will receive an MFA from Hamline University. Between now and residency, on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays, we'll be posting interviews with each student. Miriam Busch is today's grad; she lives in Illinois.

What do you do when you’re not working on packets? I work on packets when I’m not working on packets. Also: I write other stuff. Also also: I proofread/ edit for a publishing house and color storyboards for advertising campaigns. And I eat chocolate and fret about packets.

How did you hear about the Hamline MFAC Program? I was attending a Highlights Whole Novel Workshop. Anne Ursu and Laura Ruby ran it, and (MFAC grad) Christine Heppermannassisted. They talked about Hamline, about this community of writers striving for excellence. I told myself I had no interest, but somehow I found myself chatting with (program director) Mary Rockcastle.

What was your writing experience prior to entering the program? I had been writing stories for kids in secret for a while. I had published an article related to my old life in a scientific journal, and wrote an early reader for National Geographic Kids.

What do especially remember about your first residency? Each residency strikes me with how spectacularly devoted and generous and supportive the faculty, administrators, staff, and students are. Everyone shares this deep love of/compulsion for writing for children. It’s wonderfully satisfying to live among fellow travelers/creatures from the home planet, if only for eleven days every six months.

Have you focused on any one form (PB, novel, nonfiction; graphic novel) or age group in your writing? Tried a form you never thought you’d try? I tried everything except non-fiction here at Hamline. When I entered the program, I was mostly drawn to middle grade fantasy and picture books, but in addition to working in these genres, I tried a YA verse novel and a graphic novel. The latter two are forms I never imagined I would try.

Tell us about your Creative Thesis. Mighty Cave Chickens is a middle grade graphic novel. The premise is silly (our three chicken heroes embark on a quest to save their rogue clan and themselves), but my advisor (Gene Yang) encouraged me to forge beyond simple silliness, to explore the deep longing at the protagonists’ cores. Starting something new for the Creative Thesis is not recommended, but Gene liked this idea more than a different novel I was considering converting. Graphic novels require detailed visual description for the illustrator—huge challenge for me, as I was accustomed to the picture book format, where illustrator’s notes are frowned upon and generally unnecessary. But here’s what I learn (repeatedly): no matter the format, any story must satisfy the foundational basics covered in each residency.

What changes have you seen in your writing during your studies? I entered the program entirely unschooled, and now I have language and tools (and fellow writers!) that allow me to assess how (or if) pieces work. Before, I might have been able to sense something was missing in a manuscript, but now I can figure out what. Also, instead of my pre-program sole method of meandering-on-the-page-until-something-sticks, I now can make a deliberate choice between several modes of working.

Any thoughts for entering students or for people considering the program?
Most of us don’t have the perfect office or steady, uninterrupted writing time. Many of us have stretches where we have only 15 minutes here and there. Just write. Never give up. Write between the cracks of needy children and ill parents (or needy parents and ill children). Keep in touch with your classmates. Write. If you are thinking about entering but aren’t sure you can commit, do the mini-immersion. (Fair warning: it’s a street-dealer trick. 1. They give you a taste. 2. You’re a goner.)

***

 The public is welcome to attend the graduate recognition ceremony on Sunday, January 19, 3:30pm, (Anne Simley Theatre, Drew Fine Arts Building). Jane Yolen is the speaker.