Meet the Instructor: Meg Eden

Meg Eden is one of the most beloved and prolific writers in the DC area, and brings a special flare to the literary community. She is known for her online workshops, and can make an online experience feel more personalized than many can in the classroom! We caught up with Meg to talk about her new book, Post High School Reality Quest.

TWC: What was the inspiration behind your book? Do you have a personal connection to the subject matter?

Meg: I think it started with me playing with friendship dynamics in my life, and what it looks like when we transition from high school to college. I struggle with change, and I think writing this book allowed me to process my struggles and cope with them in a healthy way.



TWC: Your book is pretty popular with gamers. If this was intentional, what was it like writing for a niche audience?

Meg: I'm a pretty niche-y person with unusual tastes, and often struggle relating with mainstream media.  I often struggle to find protagonists whose perspective and experiences I can relate to, so I tried to write a book that and experiences I can relate to, so I tried to write a book that I would want to read. I didn’t want to worry about audience while writing, and as I edited, I definitely did think about the gamer audience. For me, writing for a niche audience is freeing because it allows me to be myself and not really worry if the “mainstream” will like it or not. It creates a space for me to just be me.




TWC: What was the most fun part of writing? Inevitable next question: What were the less-than-fun moments?

Meg: The most fun part was when I was doing final editing, knowing the characters and knowing the plot, and writing a few new scenes to accommodate changes. I knew what I was playing with which let it be more fun than some of the earlier stages, where I was still figuring so much out. Everything that involved playing with writing the perspective of a video game was fun too. The harder part was going back and editing, especially when my editor wanted me to cut a character. I’m a very character driven writer so this was like asking me to cut my arm off! 

TWC: How is Post High School Reality Quest unique among your writings?

Meg: I’ve written quite a few novels, but PHSRQ is the first one to get published. It’s the only one I've written in second person, and the only one using the text adventure form. If I tried writing anything like it again, I think it would come off as gimmicky.

TWC: What do you hope the reader is left with after finishing the book?

Meg: In whatever I write, I hope that it makes my readers think about the world around them, and interrogate their own worldviews and assumptions. I know every time I write, I’m constantly interrogating myself. I hope that readers will walk away with the message of redemption—that even though Buffy made choices she later regretted, there were opportunities for her to make
a new path and do things differently. Even if we can’t re-spawn at save points in our everyday life, there are always opportunities to start over, change and grow.


TWC: Any advice for aspiring novel writers out there?

Meg: The best advice I can give is to read, write, and submit! I have done thousands of submissions to get my relatively few acceptances. Keep reading, keep writing, keep sending, keep editing. Go to local readings and conferences. Learn about literary magazines and presses. Don’t be afraid of mistakes, and don’t be afraid to declare what you have done. Also: Publish smaller work before sending out a full novel. In high school, I sent out my poems and short stories to literary magazines.

Then when I queried an agent, I was able to mention places I had already been published.

I think this helps a query letter stand out.  It says that you’ve already been vetted as a writer, that what they’re about to read is probably pretty good, and can get them excited about reading your work.

Announcing our 2017 Undiscovered Voices Fellow: Julia Tagliere!

by: B. Rae Perryman

The Writer's Center is pleased to announce our
Undiscovered Voices Fellowship
winner for 2017:

Julia Tagliere

Each year, The Writer's Center awards a Washington, DC area writer earning less than $25,000 per year with this exclusive fellowship. We believe that writers of all backgrounds and experiences should have an opportunity to devote the time and energy toward their craft. Of the many qualified applicants, this year's winner was Julia Tagliere, who submitted a short story that wow-ed our judges.

Ms. Tagliere is a freelance writer and editor whose work has appeared in The Writer, The Bookends Review, Potomac Review, and Hay & Forage Grower (yes, that’s a thing), as well as in several anthologies, including Here in the Middle: Stories of Love, Loss, and Connection from the Ones Sandwiched in between; Candlesticks and Daggers—An Anthology of Mixed Genre Mysteries; the juried photography and prose collection Love + Lust; and The Way to My Heart: An Anthology of Food-Related Romance. Her short story, “Te Absolvo,” was named Best Short Story in the 2015 William Faulkner Literary Competition. Julia currently resides in Maryland with her family, where she recently completed her M.A. in Fiction Writing at Johns Hopkins University. To learn more, visit her at justscribbling.com.  

Our Development & Community Outreach manager, Bethany Perryman, caught up with Ms. Tagliere. 

Read her exclusive interview below:

Bethany: First of all, congratulations on winning our Undiscovered Voices prize for 2017! We are so excited for you to be a part of our prestigious cadre of writers and literature lovers. Your short story was selected by judges as the best of many qualified candidates. How does it feel?

Julia: I'm incredibly honored and excited to see what the year ahead will bring. 

BP: You've also won other prizes for your short stories. Can you tell us what you think makes a great short story? 

JT: As a writer, there's no way to answer that without sounding like far more of an expert than I consider myself to be at this point in my writing--I mean, if there is a formula, I'd certainly love to learn it. As a reader, however, I find that the stories I most appreciate, first and foremost, move me in a way that lingers long after I've finished reading. It could be a really well-developed character, an unexpected twist in the narrative, lush imagery or rich, vivid language; in the best stories, all of those elements are present.  

BP: I'm personally curious: What's your process when you begin a new story? Do they come to you in a flash or inspiration, or...?

JT: Flash implies a much speedier process than what I normally experience. Sometimes the inspiration comes from an image or a feeling, a face I see, maybe something I see on the news. That thing, whatever it is, gets stuck in my mind like a grain of sand in an oyster, and I find myself coming back to it over and over again, worrying at it. It either drives me crazy, or it starts to grow and take shape into what I think might be a workable piece--usually both, if I'm being totally honest. 

BP: What are your plans for your next year at The Writer's Center? Any books or stories in the works?

JT: I have a novel in progress I've been twiddling away at for a while now, and I'm planning to use this next year with TWC to finally complete it. 

BP: What's the biggest setback you've encountered in your writing career? How do you deal with it?

JT: My biggest setback was probably being rejected repeatedly by a particular M.A. program some years back. It really stung for a while, to keep applying and keep being rejected. But I understand now that I wasn't prepared at that time--I had a lot of growing I needed to do as a writer to be ready for a program of that nature. I dealt with it by spending the next several years after my third and final rejection doing a lot of reading, independent studying, and connecting with other writers to try to reach a point where I felt comfortable applying again. 

BP: What's your favorite type of writing to do, and why? Tell us a little more about what turns your gears.

JT: I used to think I preferred writing novels, but since I've been working more in shorter forms lately (short stories, flash), I must confess, I enjoy the greater frequency of those moments of gratification that come from actually completing a story. Those moments take so long to arrive when writing a novel; it's easy to become discouraged. 

BP: Any last words of advice for students at the Center and other aspiring or emerging authors? What about for writers who are hoping to enter contests and fellowships? What's your secret, besides great work?!

JT: Writing can be a very lonely business, if you let it be. Step away from your keyboard for a while and engage with other writers. Take classes, attend conferences, engage with folks online via social media, form a writing group of your own, support local writers in their endeavors. Those connections not only can sustain you when you get down in the dumps about a given work-in-progress--and you will--but they can also help you learn about opportunities that will contribute to your growth as a writer. That's what it's all about, isn't it? 

For more information about the Undiscovered Voices Fellowship, please contact Bethany at b@writer.org.

The Novel Year: Info Session July 29

By Henry Shuldiner

 

Novel Year Info Session

Sat, 29 Jul, 2017 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM

Join us for a free information session on our third annual Novel Year Program. Starting September 12, serious novelists who have completed a draft of their manuscript will have the opportunity to workshop their entire novel over the course of a year. This year's instructor is Susan Coll, who is the author of five novels. Learn all about the structure of the workshop, and get to know Susan! Please RSVP to laura.spencer@writer.org

One of the most exciting workshops we offer is The Novel Year Program, a year-long intensive that gives novelists the opportunity to finish, polish, and prepare to publish their novels. The small group of 10 meets bi-weekly and is similar in structure and rigor to an M.F.A. program but lacks the expense and time commitment that such programs require. Also, unlike M.F.A. programs, authors will workshop their entire manuscripts with feedback from other members of the group and the workshop leader, Susan Coll.

Susan Coll

Coll is a five-time published novelist who has taught courses at The Writer’s Center for more than 12 years. At the start of her career, she worked as a journalist and submitted short stories to publishers, but only accumulated rejection letters for the latter. Coll eventually sold a short story to the BBC, which encouraged her to tackle her first novel. “It was still a long road from there to getting published,” Coll said. “But I was always a glass half-full kind of person, and the small successes along the way kept me going.”

The Novel Year Program is best suited for writers who have either finished a manuscript or have at least 75 pages of a novel in progress. During the course, students will have the chance to workshop over 300 pages of their book. Participants also have the opportunity to hear from guest speakers, including published authors and an agent. The course is broken down into two segments, fall and spring. The fall segment includes occasional exercises in craft, and the spring is more focused on the “nuts and bolts of publishing” according to Coll.

Spreading the class out over a year gives writers the “chance to revise and take the long view of what they are working on,” Coll said. Due to the length of the class, it’s important for her to maintain a supportive environment in the classroom, which can be difficult at times. “It’s hard to be on the other end of a critique, and I’ve emphasized to my students that they are there to help one another construct the best possible versions of whatever they are working on,” she said.

The critiquing aspect, while difficult at times, is essential to the editing process. It helps writers build trust in the individuals editing the stories and bolster their relationships as critics. One of the most rewarding parts of the class was “the way the group bonded” said Coll. “We had a lot of fun [last year], and people seemed genuinely disappointed when we took a break for the holidays; I think some good friendships and possibly some ongoing writing groups have formed.”

The only change Coll plans to make to this year’s course is to extend  meetings through June and meet every other week rather than every week. “This will give students more breathing room to read manuscripts and to work on their own books,” Coll said. Individual consultations will be offered in July after the classroom portion of the class ends. The schedule of the class will be as follows:

Fall: Every other Tuesday, from September 12 - December 12

Winter/Spring: Every other Tuesday from January 16 – June 26

Summer: Individual check-ins with instructor in July

Interested students are required to submit a cover letter and 25 sample pages of their work. Admission to the course will be on a rolling basis, and the number of participants will be limited to 10, so participants are encouraged to submit early. If you are interested in this class, please send your submission to laura.spencer@writer.org.

Women Writers on the Publishing Journey

Join us this Saturday, June 10, at 2 p.m. for a free panel discussion with six successful writers who met in our classrooms and have continued to support each other in life and work over the last 15 years.

By Kathy Ramsperger

In 2002, I was an aspiring novelist, taking a workshop at The Writer’s Center. Today, I’m the published author of The Shores of Our Souls, which then had another title, characters with no names, and a few chapters that didn’t know where they were leading. A love story with a social justice slant, my soon-to-be-published novel (August 2017, Touchpoint Press) is my answer to the discord and frequent tragedy of a world in conflict. 

I couldn’t have done it alone.

Formed by several women I met in classrooms at The Writer’s Center, my critique group has lasted more than a decade. 

“We met every Thursday for about four years, submitting articles and book chapters for critique, forming enduring friendships. We encouraged each other to keep writing and trying to publish,” says Anne McNulty. “With group encouragement, I wrote a book and then began to write for local magazines, where I found my niche. Without my first critique group, I never would have found the courage to begin my writing career. Thanks to these wonderful women, I can now say ‘I'm a writer.’”

At the beginning, all group members were in transition. Donna Anderson was a former flight attendant. Tami Lewis Brown and Alice Covington were attorneys. Cynthia Campbell was starting her own educational and editing business. Anne was teaching. I was writing and marketing for the International Red Cross and Red Crescent. All of us were straddling the divide of home, work, and creativity. Together, we forged a bridge, then a path to diverse, successful lives full of words.

The Writer’s Center resources offered us much more than support. “I took a creative writing class with Howard Norman (National Book Award nominee) at the University of Maryland,” Donna remembers. “My novel-in-progress Residuum got his attention. I asked for advice, and he told me that his class and others at UM were not sufficient for my level of writing. He suggested I go to The Writer's Center. That was quite the compliment for our old stomping grounds.”

Today, we are far flung, but we still meet to celebrate success in life and writing. Tami, with an M.F.A. from Vermont College, is an award winning children's author with a new contract with Disney. Cynthia went on to edit an award-winning nonfiction book that sparked the interest of three publishers, earned her PhD. and now has a career in adult literacy. When I want inspiration, I think of Donna. She was the adhesive in our group—she's a born storyteller, I know Residuum will someday be on my book shelf. 

Anne is a regional magazine journalist. Alice received her M.F.A and publishes her stories nationally and internationally. Her most recent story was published in The Louisville Review.

Me? I’m a creativity coach, publish nonfiction, and am revising my second novel. 

The Writer’s Center workshops, readings, and critique groups led me and my fiction to where we are today. This special critique group stands out for me; I’ve never found that kind of synergy again.

Cynthia sums it up, “Being part of this writing group contributed greatly to my writing and my confidence. I learned a lot from a great group of writers and friends. They are all my heroes.”

If you’d like to hear more about our journey, we’ll be panelists on June 10 at The Writer’s Center. Come with your questions; we’re thrilled to answer them and to support you.

  

Meet the Instructor: Tyrese Coleman

Meet the Instructor offers insight into the teaching styles and personalities of our instructors. This time around, we spoke with Tyrese Coleman, who will lead Developing Your Flash Fiction, an intermediate/advanced class that runs from October 22 through December 3.

The Writer’s Center: What brought you to the Writer’s Center?

Tyrese Coleman: I am a The Writer's Center alum.  I began my writing career taking courses at the Writer's Center. It was through those courses that I realized I wanted to study creative writing more in depth. I was encouraged by my then instructor to apply to Johns Hopkins, and I haven't stopped writing since. I always wanted to return to the Center to hopefully be for others what my instructor was for me: the encouragement I needed to pursue my dream.  

TWC: How would you describe your teaching style?

TC: I believe the cornerstone of good critique is a mix of encouragement, knowledge, and honesty. My style is one that revolves around those principles, with an added touch of humor and diversity. We are adults who want to create something meaningful to share with the world.  My teaching style keeps that goal in mind as a concrete point of achievement.  

TWC: What are you reading right now?

TC: There are way too many books lingering on my bedside table. I'm currently on 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl by Mona Awad, and will then move to Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album by Joan Didion, and Slumberland by Paul Beatty.

TWC: What are you writing right now?

TC: Right now I am working on two projects, one is a short story collection and the other is a hybrid collection of stories and essays. For those collections, I am writing flash fiction and memoir, plus longer pieces for publication in journals.  

TWC: What does your writing space look like?

TC: My living room, LOL! I have an office, but I never work in it.  In a corner of my living room is a cushy mustard-colored, mid-century styled club chair with a matching lamp above it and a small table right next to it. My laptop rests on a pillow on my lap; any papers or books go on the side table along with a glass of wine. Once my kids are in bed, the only sound you can hear in my living room is the tapping of computer keys and maybe my dog snoring.  

TWC: What is the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever been given and by whom?

TC: Ever? Oh, that's hard to answer because I've received such good advice, and my memory is really bad. So, I will go with the best advice I received recently. I conducted an interview for The Rumpus with another The Writer's Center instructor, Leslie Pietrzyk, who said, "Think about the stories you have inside that scare you. That's what you should be writing." This advice is so crucial for us storytellers who really want to get at the heart of the matter, the brutal truth of life. I hope to challenge my students to write those stories and put them out into the world.

Tyrese L. Coleman is the fiction editor for District Lit, an online journal of writing and art, and a graduate of the Writing Program at Johns Hopkins University. A 2016 Kimbilio Fiction Fellow and Virginia Quarterly Review Nonfiction Scholar, her work has appeared in numerous publications such as PANK, Washingtonian Magazine, The Rumpus, and listed in Wigleaf's Top 50 (very) short fictions.

Wednesday Instructor: Rose Solari on Writing a Novel

Our guest blogger today is Rose Solari. Rose is the author of two full-length collections of poetry, Orpheus in the Park, and Difficult Weather, and two chapbooks. Her poems have appeared in many journals here and in the U.K., including Parnassus, Gargoyle, Poet Lore, The Mississippi Review, The Potomac Review, and Nth Position, and her poetry and prose have appeared in several anthologies, including American Poetry: The Next Generation; Enhanced Gravity: More Fiction by Washington Area Women; and Women: Images and Realities, A Multicultural Reader. Her other honors and awards include the Randall Jarrell Poetry Prize (selected by Philip Levine) and, in 2007, her third Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist’s Grant. She has taught at The Writer's Center for fifteen years, and joined the board of directors there in 2006. She's leading three workshops at the Center this winter. Learn more here.

Her Web site is here.

And now Rose is here...

Though I’ve been a devoted lover of novels since I was ten years old, when Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre awakened me to states of mind and heart I didn’t know I knew, I was as surprised as my poet friends were when I decided to try to write a novel myself. After all, I’d been writing poetry since I could hold a pencil, but save for one “experimental” (read, unfinished) piece published in my undergraduate years, had never even produced a complete short story.

But while doing research some years ago for a magazine article on the changes that feminists in the Christian churches were working toward, I kept finding more and more material about their medieval predecessors, and about the great flowering of women’s mysticism and learning that rocked Christianity in 12th century Europe. In particular, I got hooked on tales of radical nuns, hundreds of years ahead of their time, who made their abbeys incubators for female intellect, creativity, and reform.


A research trip to England followed, conducted on a shoestring, with my then-boyfriend, now-husband as an eager compatriot. (Romantics, take heed: this is how to woo a writer.) We spent hours in the beautiful high-domed halls of the Bodleian, Oxford’s medieval library; we made pilgrimage to Glastonbury, to see the ruins of the great abbey that burned in 1184 and the pagan relics that surround it; we walked the high cliff ruins of Tintagel, on the Cornish coast, a medieval castle where King Arthur is said to have been conceived. I returned with a pile of notebooks and the bones of an idea: a story about a medieval nun with mystical powers and radical ideas, and of the contemporary woman who comes into possession of fragments of her story and goes on a journey of her own to recover the rest.

But if research is the courtship phase, giddy and full of surprises, then settling down to write the novel is the hard work of commitment. And though writing is writing, I found many differences between my relationship with this new love, the novel, and my work in poetry.

The biggest difference is time and how I use it, or rather how the writing uses it. Never the best multi-tasker, I find it hard to work on fiction and poetry in the same day — each one requires a complete absorption, a giving over to its own unique demands. I’ve always loved what the late John Gardner had to say about a successful work of fiction having the quality of “a vivid and continuous dream,” and believe that good poetry has just that same elusive but undeniable quality. When in the making process, I find that one dream a day is just about all I can handle.

Then there’s question of quantity. I can accomplish a lot in an hour of concentrated work on a poem; an hour into working on the novel, I’m just getting my bearings in that other, fictional but oh, so real world. This is why, in part, I decided not to teach this fall. Even during my busiest teaching sessions, I can find chunks of time to devote to poetry. But the novel takes more. To write fiction, I spend longer and longer hours away from what we call “everyday life” — and yet a work of fiction, much more than poetry, seeks to portray everyday life.

In order to see my heroine as she traverses London’s Bloomsbury Square, I must resolutely not see my street, my neighborhood, my own daily life. Paradoxically, it is when I am most removed from real-world concerns and obligations that I can best bring to life the real worlds of my characters.

Still, some things are true for both kinds of writing. Talking too much or too specifically about a work in progress ruins it for me, whether it’s a poem or a chapter of the book. I’ve learned that the hard way. When the writing is going well, in whatever form, I am blessed by the particular and sacred happiness of doing something I feel I was born to do. And when it’s not going well — as in last week, when I rewrote a single, very important scene five times before discovering what the characters actually wanted to say — writing is still the most rewarding act that I can imagine. It teaches me new things every day. It requires stamina, discipline, courage, and skill, and like the best teachers, it keeps upping the ante: as soon as you achieve one level of competence, it asks you to reach higher.

Perhaps this is where my fascination with the religious life, and with one nun in particular, came from. Like her, I have a vocation. Like her, I have to follow it wherever it takes me. And oh, what a ride it is — one that I wouldn’t miss for the world.