To celebrate our 20th Anniversary in 2023, we’re highlighting 20 stories that have helped shape StoryStudio over the years. Each month of 2023, we’ll be featuring one or two members of our community as they share their story. Whether they came from the very first class that Jill started in 2003 when StoryStudio was just a few folding chairs and a dream, or they’re from the most recent cohort of Novel in a Year students, on their way to publishing a book; these members make StoryStudio what it is.
Below is Zac’s story.
If I had never found StoryStudio…
…two floors up on Ravenswood, that comfy-couch creative hub, where Steve Trumpeter told us not to quit our day jobs, making us laugh, share words, and plant seeds in each other’s notebooks, seeds that would grow into ivy, covering everything I could see –– then I never would have taken Rebecca Makkai’s Novel-in-a-Year course, where chapters accumulated like snow; but if Mo could fly in from Seattle each month, I could bundle up and hold my breath as they talked about my pages—don’t speak, just listen—eating cheese and crackers while I mulled over the notes we wrote each other, nerves melting by spring as we melded into a team, following Doro on a tour of the Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection, to cap off a year that was also a beginning…
…because if I had never taken that course, the one that gave me the confidence to apply to MFA programs and enroll in The New School, I never would have returned the following summer to teach the StoryStudio Youth Summer Camps, which were born out of brainstorming with Jessica Keller – phone calls, emails, checking in, fluid ideas taking shape, reaching out to Martha Keller, former NIAY classmate, who helped me develop techniques for teaching poetry that are still in place five years later.
Standing in the studio as the kids convened in their summer outfits and backpacks filled with notebooks, pens, and snacks, I discovered the joy of teaching creative writing, of giving these kids a space to be their brilliant, zany selves…
On that first day, standing in the air-conditioned studio with Jessica as the kids convened in their summer outfits and backpacks filled with notebooks, pens, and snacks, ready to commune with kindred spirits their own age, I discovered the joy of teaching creative writing, of giving these kids a space to be their brilliant, zany selves; and if we never would have made the camps virtual during the pandemic, we wouldn’t have welcomed students from California, New York, Mexico, and India, kids Zooming in from afar, year after year, youth programs expanding under the guidance of Sahar Mustafah and Sara Cutaia and everyone who makes it possible behind the scenes…
… and if I never found StoryStudio, two floors up on Ravenswood, that comfy-couch creative hub, I’d be living in another reality, a lesser one, without all of these incredible people who dared to dedicate themselves to a community of writing.