Writing Childhood and Adolescence with Joanne Hayden

Course Summary

Why are some child characters so powerfully alive on the page? How can we write our young selves in ways that feel compelling and real? This six-week course, suitable for writers across all forms, will investigate the particular complexities of writing children and teenagers, drawing on a wide range of poetry, fiction and memoir to examine childhood and adolescence through different lenses.

The workshops will be highly interactive and generative with a strong emphasis on play. Each session will include sensory and practical writing exercises intended to catalyse curiosity and experimentation, giving participants the chance to nurture, and be surprised by, their own creative process.

Course Outline

Week 1 – Child-speak

Voice and dialogue; innocence and precocity; avoiding cutesiness.

Week 2 – Child Logic

Character and worldview; dramatic irony; gaps.

Week 3 – Change

Liminality or in-betweenness; turbulence, metamorphosis, loss.

Week 4 – Acting Out

Motivation and causality; child versus world.

Week 5 – Breaking Free

Structure and dissolution; adventure, discovery, choice.

Week 6 – Looking Back

Embracing memory’s instability; the coexistence of the present and past.

There will be plenty of opportunities for participants to share work produced during the course in a supportive and encouraging environment – this will be entirely voluntary.

Course Outcomes

Participants will closely read and discuss texts by writers such as Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison, Roddy Doyle, J.D. Salinger, M.J. Hyland and Jeanette Winterson, and will come to a deeper understanding of how to write nuanced, absorbing child and teenage characters and narrators. Most importantly, they will produce several pieces of new work, celebrate their creativity and approach their writing with renewed energy and belief.

Joanne Hayden’s work has been published in literary journals such as the Dublin Review, Banshee, the Cormorant and the Storms and has been broadcast on RTÉ Radio. She was shortlisted for the RTÉ Short Story Award twice. Joanne has worked extensively as a literary critic and arts journalist and has facilitated creative writing workshops for adults, teenagers and children. She is a longtime volunteer mentor with Fighting Words. In 2023/2024, she was an Emerging Writer in Residence for Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown.

Booked out? To be added to the waiting list for this course, please email bookings@irishwriterscentre.ie.