Writopia Speaks

As a new staff member at Writopia, I was thrilled to spend two weeks at WriCampia teaching, thinking, and exploring alongside the world’s most literary campers last August–what a dream! And more, I had the opportunity to fully embrace the eerie atmosphere of our home-away-from-home in the misty Poconos and lead a new horror elective, creating a space where WriCampians could feel safe and supported as they explored their darker, more sinister story ideas.

Now, as Halloween approaches, I’m excited to dig back into horror with my young writers for Frightopia, Writopia’s Halloween inspired writing program!  

So why create a space for darkness? Each day at WriCampia, as we drew the blinds in our workshop space and cued up our eerie music, we asked ourselves just this. What exactly is horror? What makes fear an important emotion for writers to explore? We began each horror writing session sitting in a tight circle on the floor discussing personal fears such as spiders or dark water. As a community of curious, respectful horror writers, we posed questions, found common ground, and drew conclusions about what our fears told us about our ourselves, our lives, and our world. 

In an interview with The Paris Review, the feminist horror writer Carmen Maria Machado explains: “when you enter into horror, you’re entering into your own mind, your own anxiety, your own fear, your own darkest spaces.” At WriCampia, our horror writers challenged themselves to do just that. They wrote towards what they feared, shining light on the unsettling, cobwebby corners of their imaginations. Their stories filled with murders, sinister doubles, unexplained disappearances, and strangers creeping in. They allowed their writing to become a window into their subconsciousness, using blood, gore, and nightmare logic to ask big questions and dig into big anxieties.  

And what fantastic, horrific writing they produced! In the horror stories composed at camp, knives grow into swords, lakes continue down into icy eternity, and camp counselors aren’t quite who they seem. The work challenges readers by questioning what comes after death–Is it a cafe? A shopping mall?–and chill readers through tales of friends and relatives swapped out for something more malicious. In these unsettling tales, these brave WriCampians asked: What is the world made of? Who are we? What and who can we trust? 

In WriCampia’s horror elective, we discovered that writing about fear was just another way to write about ourselves. We shone the light on the things that scared us and found community and support in the dark. During this month’s Frightopia programming, I hope to bring these discoveries and more to young writers all the way across the country in Los Angeles. Who knows what we’ll unearth this time around; when playing with horror, you can never predict what might be lurking around the next corner. 

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Jacquelyn Stolos can barely contain her excitement about joining the Writopia team in Los Angeles this spring! Jacquelyn began her writing career as an elementary schooler filling up spiral-bound notebooks while perched on a mossy rock in the woods behind her childhood home. Her habits have barely changed since. She studied English and French literature at Georgetown University, where she completed an honors thesis of short stories and won the Annabelle Bonner Medal for short fiction. For her masters, Jacquelyn was awarded the Writers in the Public Schools fellowship to study fiction in New York University’s MFA program. She has also workshopped at the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop, and the New York Summer Writers Institute. Her short fiction has appeared in The Atticus Review, Conte Online, and The Oddville Press. Jacquelyn is an ardent believer in the power of story and is always looking for ways to spread the love through education. She previously worked as a teaching artist at Teachers and Writers Collaborative, leading creative writing workshops in elementary and middle school classrooms, as well as an adjunct professor at New York University. Jacquelyn’s first novel, Edendale, will be released by Creature Publishing, a feminist horror press, in the spring of 2020.

My bus ride to work, down Columbus Avenue in the Upper West Side of Manhattan, is frequently crowded with parents and young children en route to school. I love when I end up on the same bus as one particular mom and her two elementary-school-aged daughters. As the bus bumps along in its morning daze, the mom reads aloud in a quiet voice to the girls, who sit on either side of her and lean in close to listen. The first time I saw this family, the mom was reading A Wrinkle In Time — my childhood favorite, one that has endured into my adulthood — her voice intoning L’Engle’s wise and fabulous words as her daughters listened with bright, albeit slightly sleepy, eyes. My own eyes glistened a little as I was touched with memories of my own encounters with the book. I felt bereft when they closed the book and jumped off the bus; it’s hard to return to the mundane realities of our world when the enticements of another world await.

This morning, the family was reading the third book in the series, A Swiftly Tilting Planet. They were a few pages in, and when I sat down next to them, I overheard a quiet conversation. One of the girls asked what would happen if the book’s antagonist, a cruel dictator, started a nuclear war as he threatened to do. The mom responded that a nuclear war would destroy the entire world; that if one country attacked, another would attack in turn, and we would all be completely ruined. But the mom was quick to reassure them: this wouldn’t happen to us today. There are good people who will stop nuclear wars from happening.

They returned to reading; they returned to a world where nuclear war was a construction of fiction and where peace has a fighting chance of prevailing. But of course, the mom knew — as I do, as every adult knows, as increasingly more children know — that nuclear destruction is altogether too real a possibility. L’Engle wrote the book in 1978, when Cold War anxieties abounded and seeped into the collective cultural consciousness. Its relevance, one would hope, would have decreased by now, forty years later. But the storyline has only warped and developed and shifted into new, horrendous realities. We’ve had many valiant peacemakers, but the antagonists still overwhelm us. Continue reading “The Safety of Stories in an Unsafe World by Madeline L. Taylor, Registration Coordinator”

“Because we fail to listen to people’s stories, we are becoming a fragmented human race.”
— Madeleine L’Engle, Sold into Egypt: Journeys Into Being Human

Listening is a creative act: it takes great imagination to be able to step into someone else’s world, into their truth. We not only need stories to survive, we need witnesses. Listening to someone else’s story is a form of intimacy, of generosity, of connecting, of piecing our own fragments back together.

November brings not only Thanksgiving, but Gran’s birthday. She would have been 99 this November 29th,  so at this time of the year I look to her words and her legacy for inspiration. Continue reading “Madeleine L’Engle’s Granddaughter Lena Roy on Listening as a Creative Act”

The Sojourn Domestic Abuse Shelter’s second-home, where mothers and their children flee and hide from violent households, sits on a cul-de-sac without signage. When I’d started leading Writopia workshops here, nobody gave me an address. A woman on the phone directed me through stop signs and traffic lights. I’ve taught workshops here for a few months now, and still I don’t know the address, only how to get here. I buzz in and unhook the front gate’s latch. Some days, kids chase each other on tricycles across the lawn. Today’s quiet, and I sign in at the office, seeing only the receptionist. The rest of the home looks like a home: a kitchen; a living room, at which a baby often sits in his high chair, watching television; bedrooms and bathrooms. You wouldn’t know this home was different from the others in the neighborhood but for this office. Continue reading “Personal Reflections on a Safe Space to Heal and to Write by Lyndsay Hall”