When this blog post is uploaded, Ooligan Press will have taught its first ever workshop aimed at high school students. Our course “A Publishing Crash Course for Teens” was on February 22, 2025, from 2 to 4 p.m. at Forest Grove Library in Washington County. Washington County is about a half-hour drive from Portland, and before this workshop, the librarians had never heard of Ooligan Press. So, how did we get here?
To answer that question we need to rewind almost a year to the 2024 Oregon Library Association Annual Conference: All Together Now! in Salem. Since I was (and still am) interested in community outreach, I was asked if I would be interested in manning the booth with two other Oolies and Pamela Statz, author of Thorn City. I love manning booths, so I said yes. At the conference, I met a librarian from North Plains Public Library. To her, I pitched my idea. I wanted to teach a workshop to students about publishing. She seemed interested, so I got her email. Then I did something I don’t usually do. I emailed her.
My email, reading it back, sounds ridiculously formal and honestly a little brusque. Still, she responded. Not only did she respond, but she brought other people as well. You see, her library catered towards tweens, so it wasn’t the best fit, but she suggested we go to another library in the county and brought in the other librarians from across the Washington County Cooperative Library Services to discuss the workshop. Then started the longest email thread I’ve ever been a part of (thirty-two emails in total). Eventually, we decided to meet in July over Zoom, then in person in the fall. With us in the July meeting was none other than a librarian from Forest Grove Library, who just happened to have the perfect place for our class (provided the toilets were finished being renovated). That was how we got our venue.
During this time, I had gained a partner, Rin Kane. Together, we went through the basic structure of the class and started working together to fit our goals for the class. We would have two exercises, a physical book analysis (idea courtesy of Robyn Crummer, Lead Publisher at Ooligan Press), and a query letter writing exercise, with a slideshow in between. The majority of the class would be spent on the query letter exercise, with it broken down into even more sections so that it wouldn’t feel so overwhelming. We also brought in two more people to help teach with us and be resources for writing the query letters.
I’m currently making social media content for it. There’s a group folder where Ooligan students and the librarians share collateral for the project, so I’m able to see what the library has done and make our content to match. It’s been fun working with them and seeing how this project has changed and grown. I literally couldn’t have done it without them, and I’m even more proud because of it. People saw what I wanted to achieve and decided that it was worth taking on for them too. It’s a hell of a rush.
Written by AJ Adler.
Image courtesy of Lily Hawley.