Jackie is the best kind of writing coach: nurturing, honest, and insightful.
She knows how to critique the work while encouraging the writer.
—Christina M.
Jackie’s guidance and feedback helped me take my writing to places
I didn't think it could go. —Beth P.
I have been teaching and coaching creative writers and screenwriters since 2016. What began as a humble dream to host creative writing workshops in my backyard in Highland Park, Los Angeles, has become my life’s most fulfilling work.
Throughout my life, I have picked up skills and experiences that have made me uniquely qualified for this work as an editor and writing coach. In eight grade, when I first read The Elements of Style by Strunk & White cover to cover, the entire universe suddenly made sense to me. The slim guide was my key for understanding how to write clearly and effectively and how to craft sentences that were as dazzling as they were powerful. My love for craft was born. I submersed myself into the rules and the details that supported the art. Later, to put my knowledge and passion for grammar to use, I became a professional copy editor at Scholastic, Inc. This experience prepared me to provide you with any micro- and line-editing you seek.
I was raised in a summer stock theatre in Pennsylvania. I spent my summer days sitting in a dark theatre, mesmerized, watching a production for the fourth, eighth, fifteenth time. Drama and dialogue seeped into my bloodstream. At college, I studied theatre and was awarded the Agnes Nixon Award for Playwriting. I then returned to the theatre of my childhood as its resident playwright, writing two original productions a year. This experience taught me story, good dialogue, and how to complete scripts on deadlines.
A decade ago, I earned my MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University, here in Los Angeles, attending on a merit scholarship. At Antioch, I focused on creative nonfiction, how and why to tell one’s own personal story. What was the meaning beneath the story? What was I really trying to say? I published the work I created at Antioch, and after I graduated, I hung up my shingle and started teaching writing workshops in my backyard. My schooling taught me how to write. My teaching taught me how to listen and share my knowledge with others.
At the same time I started conducting personal writing workshops, I was hired to write up several TV movie ideas for an independent production company. I have been writing for this company ever since. That experience led to an opportunity to teach in UCLA Extension’s screenwriting program, where I still teach today. More than any of my other experiences, teaching screenwriting has taught me how to write. Story structure lives in my bones. It is the framework to support every writer’s creative instinct.
Today, I bring all my experiences here to working with you. As a copy editor, creative writer, screenwriter, and teacher, I can meet you exactly where you are and provide for you what you need to become the writer you want to be. I’m here to fully invest in you and your work. I want to make your writing dreams come true.
My writing has been published in The Tishman Review, Hippocampus, Watershed Review, Sliver of Stone, and other literary journals. Working with Jarrett Creative, I have developed content and written scripts for Oxygen and Lifetime. I live in Los Angeles with my husband, production designer Kyle Kinsella, our teen-age son, a young Renaissance man in the making, and our nutty, needy rescue dog.