Finding My Voice

by: Carol Westreich Solomon

The Writer's Center's

2016 Undiscovered Voices Fellow

Seven years ago, on the first day of my retirement from teaching, I sat on my patio with
a glass of wine and began to write creatively after a 40-year hiatus. What I started that day
evolved into a self-indulgent teaching memoir revisiting my professional life. Though valuable
as a spiritual transition to my new life, my teaching memoir had an audience of one—me. I
wanted to write for a wider audience, but my creative skills had rusted, and the writing world
around me had changed.

I first ventured into creative writing instruction at the DCJCC Writing Retreat under the
direction of Michelle Brafman and Faye Moskowitz, both of whom provided tremendous
encouragement and pointed, constructive suggestions. Later I joined the DCJCC Writing
Workshop, in which participants critiqued each other’s work in three-hour sessions, but soon
the limitations of 900-1000 words read aloud chafed. I could craft three or four pages that
worked, but what about the structural issues of a full story or even a novel? Three of us in the
workshop created our own separate writers group focusing on longer works, and I thrived with
the critical commentary of my colleagues, producing a couple short stories that were published
in print and online.

However, after years of working with the same writing group, I needed a fresh critical
audience to identify different areas of concern in my work. A friend suggested The
Writer's Center, and I enrolled in Aaron Hamburger’s novel writing class. His detailed criticism
of a large chunk of my YA novel provided valuable feedback, as did the commentary of
classmates. As a result of substantial edits, my self-published YA novel Imagining Katherine earned a 2016 Notable Book Award by the Association of Jewish Libraries.

In Fall 2016, when I learned The Writer's Center, had named me an Undiscovered Voices Fellow, I was thrilled! With unlimited financial support to enroll in workshops, I knew my writing could continue to grow rapidly. I decided to focus on short fiction, taking John Morris’ workshop “Writing Short Stories,” Julie Wakeman-Linn’s “Write Off the Map,” and her extended workshop “Fiction II.” I also did literary cross-training with the dramatic format in Richard Washer’s single-session playwriting classes. John and Julie’s comprehensive written feedback, offered with encouragement and tact, led me to question assumptions about my writing and modify techniques.

One year later I have finished Echoes of Love, a compilation of short stories, many
written or substantially edited during the past year. But just as important, my teachers at The Writer's Center, as well as Michelle Brafman and Faye Moskowitz, have taught me
how to marry passion with technique. Now I’m ready to find a wider audience for my work.
Thanks, Julie, John, Richard, and the fabulous Writer's Center!

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.

Sonic Memories

A collection of life essays by Cija Jefferson

By Mairin Rivett

Cija Jefferson, Baltimore resident and author, recently self-published her first book, Sonic Memories/and Other Essays. The inspiration for Cija’s collection of personal essays came from an assignment at the University of Baltimore's Creative Writing & Publishing Arts MFA program in which graduates were required to design and write a book. Although the collection began as a class project, Cija says that “the process of pulling essays and putting them together was very organic.” On the main floor of The Creative Arts Alliance for Cija’s book launch party, where I met Cija, chairs are set up facing a screen that has a slideshow of pictures from her life—her as a baby, she and her sister wearing matching dresses, her with a group of friends from college. It’s a surreal experience to see the characters from Cija’s essays suddenly come to life.

Cija initially planned to focus this collection on her post-college years when she lived in California. Her original working title for the book was, “Which Way Home.” However, guided by her mentors in the MFA program, Cija decided not settle on a fixed theme. Instead, she let her writing take her along for the ride. The result was a coming-of-age story told through a wide range of essays that span from her early years as a trouble-loving child, to her young-adult years when she struggled to find her place in the world, and ultimately, to the place she is today— where she says she’s beginning to let go of the negative voices in her head and pursue her true purpose in life: writing.

It’s hard to reconcile the outgoing, infectious, and confident Cija, who is standing across the room from me, with the timid girl in her essay, “The Whisper from Within.” In this piece she admits to purposefully waiting to tell her friends and family about a reading she was performing until the last minute—hoping, successfully, that if she told everyone at the last minute, no one would be able to show up. Although the reading in this essay occurred long before she completed Sonic Memories/and Other Essays, Cija admits that the nerves she felt that day are still very much present: “I still get butterflies when I step to the mic and share any of my work,” she says. “I've definitely gotten better about not allowing my nerves to take over, which is easier said than done—depending on the subject matter. Stories like ‘The Whisper From Within’ are tough to read aloud because the content strips away any artifice and reveals my fears and insecurities; it makes me feel exposed.”

As she reads excerpts of her essays at the book launch, Cija’s voice is loud and projects confidently. Wearing a chic white dress with her hair pulled back—an open and friendly smile on her face—Cija begins the reading by talking a little bit about the process of writing her book. Like many writers, the idea of publishing a full book initially seemed like a far-off, far-fetched dream. “I always thought of writing a book as some sort of lofty goal not made for mere mortals,” she says. “Honestly I don’t know that I would have ever attempted to self-publish a book, had it not been a program requirement.”

The process of self-publishing was long, and she admits there were many late nights and bouts of tears (mostly over the publishing software InDesign). In the end, however, Cija claims self-publishing proved to be infinitely worth the work. “This process taught me that I can self-publish without having to rely on templates…it’s like when people say driving a stick-shift gives you more control over [the car] than an automatic; self-publishing and designing your own work gives you more control over how the final product looks, and I’m really happy with what I’ve created.”

At 105 pages, Cija’s book is an emotional roller coaster. Separating humorous anecdotes from gut-wrenching pain by little more than a page or two, Cija’s book is a raw exploration of growing up, and on how the choices we make in an instant—looking back at a hospital bed or stealing a piece of candy from a local store, for example, have lasting impacts on us even years after the they are made.

Jim Mathews on the Importance of a Clear 'Inciting Incident'

Have you ever started reading a short story (or started writing one) where the prose is flawless and the characters believable but halfway through you realize…you’re just reading flawless prose with believable characters? I mean, don’t we already have that in real life (give or take a flaw)? And isn’t that why people turn to fiction? To get something they can’t get from life? Or from a well-written newspaper article?

Chances are what’s probably missing is a clear “inciting incident,” the precise moment where your protagonist’s routine is interrupted, setting him or her on an upward path of tension and complication, toward that all important climax and, one hopes, a fully satisfying denouement. In other words, a plot.

If you consider the Aristotelian plot model – or “bell curve on acid” as a workshop instructor once termed it – the inciting incident should occur early, at the starting edge of the curve, at a point where the story’s tension separates from the linear and spikes upward on a jagged ascent to the climax. It is the break from the routine, the ordinary. More important, it signals to your readers that they are not going to be reading a character study or even a flawless character study, but a story. They are going to read about a character whose life or immediate circumstances have dramatically changed. Everything that happened before the inciting incident is the “ordinary world” (the world we all share and know and read about in newspapers) while everything that happens after the inciting incident is the fiction we crave to escape from the ordinary world.

One prime benefit of a crystal clear inciting incident is that when you do begin to apply flesh and add background to your characters, even their routine (whether in flashbacks or exposition) takes on added heft for the reader.

In my workshop, through reading assignments and critiques, we spend time learning to spot the inciting incident and then ask, is it in the right place? Has the writer waited too long to introduce it? Has the writer given readers a clear picture of what’s different about the protagonist’s today (the extraordinary) compared to his or her yesterday (the ordinary)?

Being the clumsy writer that I am, I usually stumble upon my inciting incident halfway through a story draft – which explains a Rubbermaid container in my den filled with, er, story drafts! Try not to make this mistake. In a short story, the absolute best place for the inciting incident is, in my opinion, the very first sentence or at least the first paragraph; for a novel, your readers should at least get a whiff of it in the first paragraph or by the end of the first chapter.

Here’s a great example of an inciting incident from the T. Coraghessan Boyle’s short story, “King Bee”:

"In the mail that morning there were two solicitations for life insurance, a coupon from the local car wash promising “100% Brushless Wash,” four bills, three advertising flyers, and a death threat from his ex-son, Anthony."

What you’ve just read is the story’s first sentence, complete with a clear and compelling (if disturbing) inciting incident. Boyle could have spent several paragraphs describing a day in the life of Ken -- Anthony’s father and our intrepid protagonist -- perhaps by showing him shuffle down the driveway in bathrobe and slippers, grumbling about his neighbor’s shabby lawn, casting a wave at his wife who is hunched over a patch of petunias in the front garden. We would have read it, of course, because Boyle’s such an exquisite craftsman. But that would have been time and energy wasted on the ordinary world and Boyle understands we’ve come to him to escape all that. So he immediately delivers the moment where Ken’s ordinary world has ended and his new normal begins.

But what about a much longer work? Here’s another Boyle opening (full disclosure--I’ve been a rabid Boyle fan ever since I figured out how to pronounce his middle name!) from his novel The Tortilla Curtain:

"Afterward, he tried to reduce it to abstract terms, an accident in a world of accidents, the collision of opposing forces – the bumper of his car and the frail scrambling hunched-over form of a dark little man with a wild look in his eye – but he wasn’t very successful. This wasn’t a statistic in an actuarial table tucked away in a drawer somewhere, this wasn’t random and impersonal. It had happened to him, Delaney Mossbacher, of 32 Pinon Drive, Arroyo Blanco Estates, a liberal humanist with an unblemished driving record and a freshly waxed Japanese car with personalized plates, and it shook him to the core. Everywhere he turned he saw those red-flecked eyes, the rictus of the mouth, the rotten teeth and the incongruous shock of gray in the heavy black brush of a mustache – they infested his dreams, cut through his waking hours like a window on another reality. He saw his victim in a book of stamps at the post office, reflected in the blameless glass panels of the gently closing twin doors at Jordan’s elementary school, staring up at him from his omelette aux fines herbes at Emilio’s in the shank of the evening.

The whole thing had happened so quickly…"

Again, Boyle could have spent more time showing us Delaney’s life, perhaps introduce his wife in a scene or his spoiled kids or insufferably nosey neighbors, but that’s Delaney’s ordinary world and, no matter how well-written, what fun would that be?

Not every inciting incident has to be as intense as a death threat or hit-and- run (unless you’re Boyle, of course!). And there are always exceptions to every rule – especially in fiction. But a clear inciting incident is usually key to a good read – and the start of an extraordinary relationship with your reader.

James Mathews is the workshop leader for Building a Page Turner, which will take place Wednesdays from 7-9:30 p.m. at TWC from 10/19 to 12/7. You can sign up for his workshop here.

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James Mathews is a graduate of The Johns Hopkins University Master of Arts in Writing program. He is the author of Last Known Position, a short story collection and winner of the 2008 Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction. His fiction has appeared in many literary journals. He is also the recipient of a number of fiction awards, including three Maryland State Arts Council grants (1999, 2006, and 2010). His Web site is www.jamesmathewsonline.com.