Writing Certificates > The Writer's Spotlight > Spring 2025
Spring Writer's Spotlight
In this Issue:
- Ask a Writer
- Recent Writing News: Students
- Recent Writing News: Instructors
- Feature Essays: Jacquie Walters and Samina Ali
- Spring Class Photo
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Ask a Writer
Instead of starting this issue with the usual "Ask a Writer," in which we print a student's letter asking for writing advice, I decided to launch with a different letter, written by a student in my Creative Habit class, explaining why she hadn't been able to participate as much as she'd hoped in the first few weeks. I found it to be a moving, beautifully written piece about dealing with the uncertainty that flares up when awaiting a diagnosis. I also thought it provided compelling proof that even when life gets in the way of our intention to write, we are still storing observations and emotions to bring to the page later on. The proof: she told me that this piece poured out of her, once she finally had the time and space to sit and reflect upon what she'd just been through.
I hope you enjoy reading this issue of The Writer's Spotlight, and that your writing is going well. There are some great new writing courses coming this summer.
– Malena Watrous
Writing Certificate Lead & Creative Writing Coordinator
Why I Haven’t Been As Active in Class As I Hoped I Would Be
By Eleni H.
I signed up for this course to get back to me. To find a sliver of time and doing that wasn’t for my kids, for my work, for the dog that is currently, anxiously, trying to climb into my lap.
And then, the Saturday before our class was set to start, I noticed a weird lump in the back of my 4-year-old daughter’s leg. She was playing with her older sister, and a shadow caught my eye that wasn’t quite right.
Six years ago, my mother was diagnosed with a soft tissue sarcoma. She is now healthy and well. But those three words were the last I expected to hear as a possibility when I took my daughter to urgent care for an ear infection and said “Oh by the way, the back of her knee is a bit swollen.”
From urgent care, we were told to follow up with our primary care physician. In her gentle way, our doctor said she wasn’t terribly concerned, but we needed an ultrasound sooner than later. A few days later, my daughter laid in the same hospital bed where they had scanned her in my womb at 39 weeks, when she wouldn’t stop flipping breech and back - a foretelling personality trait. She watched Bluey as I watched the face of the ultrasound tech who was desperately trying to conceal the look of concern permeating her expression.
She left the room to “talk to the doctor” and returned 20 minutes later with him in tow to complete the exam. Never a good sign. With more of the forced calm that was increasingly grating, he told us that he could not be sure what he was seeing and could not rule out the worst case scenario.
He said we needed an MRI as soon as possible and the fastest way to do that was to head to the Emergency Department to fast-track the process. We waited there from 3 to 10:30 pm, just to be told no one from radiology could do the test overnight and we’d need to come back the next day.
There’s this part of motherhood that I don’t know if I love or hate. It's pretending to be the best version of yourself for your kid. There’s a power in faking it until you make it and there is the most extraordinary energy drain in holding it together for a tiny human who uses you as their bellwether for the entire universe.
So home we went, where I tucked in next to her, wondering if it was the last night I’d fall asleep without the knowledge that my kid had cancer.
Back to the ED we trekked the next morning, armed with more snacks, stuffies and downloaded shows than the day before. Minutes and hours dragged. More X-rays. Blood work. Mild sedation. Her begging me to tell them that we were just going to go home and me wanting so desperately to do just that, but knowing we could not.
We got the MRI at 3 pm and she did so well. The bravery of this sweet, fierce kid cannot be overstated. At 5 pm the ED doctor came in to tell us it was taking so long because so many people had to look at the report. I now believe I know what my own heart tastes like, it rose so high in my throat. At my pleading questions, she clarified that the first person, the radiologist, hadn’t looked at the images at all yet. We weren’t waiting on a team of experts to determine our next steps, we were waiting for one to even start the process.
An hour later she came back, her face ablaze with hope. The MRI conclusively showed that it was nothing more than a complex Baker’s cyst—something that you either get as an adult with knee problems or as a 4 to 7 year old. Conclusively not cancer. That path I’d spent too much time looking down was now darkened and not our road.
I collapsed into her and wept. My poor husband who’d been getting coffee approached our glass-paned door and I tried to throw fervent thumbs up through my tears and I watched it take him just two seconds too long to move his eyes from my face to my hand so I could see the relief wash over him.
From the bed, my sweet daughter clocked the new vibe which she took to mean, “Oh thank goodness, we can lose our shit now? Great, I’m in!” She immediately started sobbing too and kicked everyone out of the room but me. We held each other for 15 minutes, both crying, letting all the pain and stress and terror of the days roar out into the world.
The waves of emotion are still rolling through—relief, guilt, fear, numbness, hope. She’s still having nightmares. So am I. Why were we spared what so many aren’t? We’re having nightmares but so many other families are living them. Am I even allowed to feel this level of elation knowing how many mothers receive different news each day?
But my baby is safe. She is whole. And for the time being, I do not have to ask her to be brave again. If that isn’t something to celebrate, then I don’t know what is.
So I’m back at class. Trying to show up for me. This new person that I don’t quite know, who is so different from the person who used to do creative writing before them and before so much life. And that feels like something to celebrate too.
I signed up for this course to get back to me. To find a sliver of time and doing that wasn’t for my kids, for my work, for the dog that is currently, anxiously, trying to climb into my lap.
And then, the Saturday before our class was set to start, I noticed a weird lump in the back of my 4-year-old daughter’s leg. She was playing with her older sister, and a shadow caught my eye that wasn’t quite right.
Six years ago, my mother was diagnosed with a soft tissue sarcoma. She is now healthy and well. But those three words were the last I expected to hear as a possibility when I took my daughter to urgent care for an ear infection and said “Oh by the way, the back of her knee is a bit swollen.”
From urgent care, we were told to follow up with our primary care physician. In her gentle way, our doctor said she wasn’t terribly concerned, but we needed an ultrasound sooner than later. A few days later, my daughter laid in the same hospital bed where they had scanned her in my womb at 39 weeks, when she wouldn’t stop flipping breech and back - a foretelling personality trait. She watched Bluey as I watched the face of the ultrasound tech who was desperately trying to conceal the look of concern permeating her expression.
She left the room to “talk to the doctor” and returned 20 minutes later with him in tow to complete the exam. Never a good sign. With more of the forced calm that was increasingly grating, he told us that he could not be sure what he was seeing and could not rule out the worst case scenario.
He said we needed an MRI as soon as possible and the fastest way to do that was to head to the Emergency Department to fast-track the process. We waited there from 3 to 10:30 pm, just to be told no one from radiology could do the test overnight and we’d need to come back the next day.
There’s this part of motherhood that I don’t know if I love or hate. It's pretending to be the best version of yourself for your kid. There’s a power in faking it until you make it and there is the most extraordinary energy drain in holding it together for a tiny human who uses you as their bellwether for the entire universe.
So home we went, where I tucked in next to her, wondering if it was the last night I’d fall asleep without the knowledge that my kid had cancer.
Back to the ED we trekked the next morning, armed with more snacks, stuffies and downloaded shows than the day before. Minutes and hours dragged. More X-rays. Blood work. Mild sedation. Her begging me to tell them that we were just going to go home and me wanting so desperately to do just that, but knowing we could not.
We got the MRI at 3 pm and she did so well. The bravery of this sweet, fierce kid cannot be overstated. At 5 pm the ED doctor came in to tell us it was taking so long because so many people had to look at the report. I now believe I know what my own heart tastes like, it rose so high in my throat. At my pleading questions, she clarified that the first person, the radiologist, hadn’t looked at the images at all yet. We weren’t waiting on a team of experts to determine our next steps, we were waiting for one to even start the process.
An hour later she came back, her face ablaze with hope. The MRI conclusively showed that it was nothing more than a complex Baker’s cyst—something that you either get as an adult with knee problems or as a 4 to 7 year old. Conclusively not cancer. That path I’d spent too much time looking down was now darkened and not our road.
I collapsed into her and wept. My poor husband who’d been getting coffee approached our glass-paned door and I tried to throw fervent thumbs up through my tears and I watched it take him just two seconds too long to move his eyes from my face to my hand so I could see the relief wash over him.
From the bed, my sweet daughter clocked the new vibe which she took to mean, “Oh thank goodness, we can lose our shit now? Great, I’m in!” She immediately started sobbing too and kicked everyone out of the room but me. We held each other for 15 minutes, both crying, letting all the pain and stress and terror of the days roar out into the world.
The waves of emotion are still rolling through—relief, guilt, fear, numbness, hope. She’s still having nightmares. So am I. Why were we spared what so many aren’t? We’re having nightmares but so many other families are living them. Am I even allowed to feel this level of elation knowing how many mothers receive different news each day?
But my baby is safe. She is whole. And for the time being, I do not have to ask her to be brave again. If that isn’t something to celebrate, then I don’t know what is.
So I’m back at class. Trying to show up for me. This new person that I don’t quite know, who is so different from the person who used to do creative writing before them and before so much life. And that feels like something to celebrate too.
Do you have questions for our writing instructors? If so, feel free to submit them to continuingstudies@stanford.edu for possible inclusion in our next quarterly Spotlight.
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Student Writing News
We are thrilled to celebrate new publications, awards, and other writing-related news from our student community.
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Deborah Johnson recently learned that her new novel, Washington and Leigh, was accepted for publication.
Liza Monroy has a nonfiction piece in a new book called Surfer Stories.
Angela Pneuman has a new story in the Spring 2025 issue of the Chicago Quarterly Review.
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I’ve worked as a television writer for ten years, and since becoming an author, I’ve learned that most prose writers end up needing to cut down their initial drafts. It’s not unusual for them to overwrite by twenty- to thirty-thousand words and then spend countless hours surgically sacrificing scenes to the “junkyard” folder. So I definitely thought something was wrong with me when my drafts were turning up short. But in talking to fellow TV writers slash authors, I have discovered many of us are finding ourselves needing to beef up those first drafts. And that’s probably because we are so used to being overly economical in our writing.
In a script, I head the scene with “INT. Kitchen” and let the art director figure out the rest. Stage directions? Only if necessary to plot. Otherwise, they take up precious space on the page. Leave them to the director! Appearance? That’s for casting. Clothing? I’ll call the costume designer.
You get the idea.
But when writing a novel, wearing all those hats becomes necessary. So, yes, I often find myself going in after that initial draft and clarifying where we are in space, what someone looks like, or even what time of day it is.
But I’ve also realized that economical and efficient writing for the screen can inform prose writing in interesting ways. Especially for those of us writing thriller, mystery, suspense, horror—anything that depends on pace. I think of my books in three acts, like I would with a screenplay or episode of television, and this helps me organize the shape of the story. I consider chapters like episodes, each one requiring some version of a cliffhanger. And dialogue is where I’m most comfortable, naturally, since that’s my bread and butter in a screenplay.
Many readers of Dearest have said it’d make a great movie—or even that the experience of reading it felt like watching a movie. And there’s no denying that’s because I come from a visual medium. But also: Dearest first existed in my mind as a film. I outlined it that way and wrote half the script before getting too busy with tv work. When the Guild went on strike in 2024, and I was not allowed to work on anything for the screen, I took that time to write Dearest as a novel instead. She feels like a movie because she was born as one.
Writing a book is hard. Like—so, so hard. In screenwriting, the literal world-building comes later—a collaboration between a team of people on a set. Whereas novel writers sit at their desks, alone, wearing all the hats at once, screenwriters can go one step at a time.
Maybe there is some advantage, then, to under-writing. Maybe this has been my way of staying sane. I don’t try to wear every hat as I draft from page one. At first, I only wear the hat of the writer. I only try to tell the story, keep the momentum, hit the beats—and then later, once all that is there, I throw on the remaining hats. Send in the costume designer, set decorator, props manager, and others to work out the details.
The last class I took at the Buddhist center was just weeks before I became pregnant. It was an intense session. Students were crying. The entire world seemed to be in mourning. Al-Qaeda operatives had simultaneously denotated two trucks loaded down with more than one thousand pounds of explosives at the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. In addition to approximately one hundred U.S. government workers, hundreds more neighbors and pedestrians had been killed. In response, President Clinton ordered airstrikes against sites linked to Osama bin Laden in Sudan and Afghanistan. None of it made sense. Why had the bodies of innocent men and women and children exploded while they were going about their days? How could their lives have vanished just like that, without any warning? Now bombs were falling from the sky, taking more lives. It was all people could talk about, on the news, with one another. Round and round the conversations went as a way to process the grief.
It was in class that week that I was introduced to the Tibetan concept of bardo, the transitional state between death and rebirth. After death, the consciousness is no longer connected to the physical body. In Tibetan, the word for body is lu and means what’s left behind. After our consciousness leaves behind the body, it continues to subsist in the in-between state of bardo, floating about, darting at great speed, even catching glimpses of the next incarnation. Although I couldn’t have known it back when I was taking the class, I was on a direct path to this transitional state, to leaving my body and becoming nothing more than a point of consciousness floating about in an expansive darkness. Depending on the negative karma you’ve accumulated in your last life, after forty-nine days, you are reborn as a human or an animal or a hungry ghost.
But bardo doesn’t merely refer to the physical end of life, our instructor explained that day, trying to help us understand both our immediate reactions to the embassy tragedies as well as a larger, recurring pattern in our lives. Bardo refers to those transitional stages even within our lifetimes. Anytime we feel the rug being pulled out from under us, that feeling of ungroundedness is bardo. Losing a job, losing a baby, losing our money, a marriage coming to an end, a diagnosis of an illness—the very nature of being alive meant we were experiencing successive births and successive deaths. No one is immune. From the moment we are born, every one of us is in a perpetual dance with death—and rebirth. We don’t just get one shot at a second chance at life; we get multiple opportunities to do things over and over again, to remake ourselves into what we hope to be.
During class, when students were asked to reflect quietly on the moments of bardo we’d experienced, I made a long list: when my family first immigrated from our home in Hyderabad to Minneapolis, when I left my childhood home to start an MFA program – to start over – in the Pacific Northwest, when I divorced my first husband, when my dad forsook me for marrying Scott. If I’d enrolled in that class just one year later, I would have added: when I got pregnant and knew right away that something wasn’t right, when my life flashed before my eyes on the elevator ride up to labor and delivery on the fifteenth floor, and, lastly, when I woke up—not when I emerged from the coma in the neuro-ICU, but when I finally overcame my amnesia. On each occasion, I experienced a kind of death.
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- Diane Byington’s novel, Vincent and Louise, got a wonderful write-up in The Colorado Sun.
- Brian Christopher Giddens was ecstatic to learn that a “Tiny Love Story,” submitted to The New York Times in October of 2023, was accepted in March of 2025. They shared this good news and asked for a photo, because they planned to run it the very next day! As Brian said—it gives hope for other pieces sent out long ago, for which he’s awaiting feedback. His newly published story is fabulous, and you can read it here.
- Kevin Loughlin had a new poem, “Ode to the Oreo”—initially drafted in a course he took through Stanford Continuing Ed—published in The RavensPerch Journal.
- John W. Maly won an Indies Today award for Best Science Fiction Novel of 2024 for his novel, Juris Ex Machina.
- Miranda McCoy decided to apply to MFA programs in poetry after taking Shann Ray’s class. She shared the great news that the acceptances are rolling in, and she’s choosing between a few places, at least one offer coming with full scholarship and teaching assistantship.
- Lydia Dianne Reid’s piece, “Mesmerized,” was published in The New York Times Metropolitan Diary.
- Bob Rehm’s short story, “Last Plate,” was published in The Hamilton Stone Review. He wrote in to share this news and also said: “In the last two years I have taken five Stanford Continuing Studies creative writing courses, including two with Evgeniya Dame. In addition to her contributions to this story, I benefited greatly by workshopping with classmates both during the course and also months afterward.”
- Jessie Weaver’s second YA novel, Lie Until It’s True, was selected as a YA Favorite by the Children’s Book Council. Jessie shares, “I’m very honored that the Children’s Book Council selected Lie Until It's True as a YA Favorite for 2025, especially since teens, teachers, and librarians voted nationwide.”
- Rebecca Zwick had a story anthologized in Best Short Stories from The Saturday Evening Post Great American Fiction Contest 2025.
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Instructor Writing News
Deborah Johnson recently learned that her new novel, Washington and Leigh, was accepted for publication.Liza Monroy has a nonfiction piece in a new book called Surfer Stories.Angela Pneuman has a new story in the Spring 2025 issue of the Chicago Quarterly Review.^Back to top
Feature Essays: Jacquie Walters and Samina Ali
This spring, we have two feature articles to share with you. The first is an essay by Jacquie Walters, who was a successful screenwriter prior to publishing her first novel, Dearest. Jacquie obliged me by writing on a notable difference between writing fiction and for the screen, how she bridged the distance between the two, and how her training ended up benefiting her in an unexpected way as a novelist. The second is an excerpt from Samina Ali’s new memoir, Pieces You’ll Never Get Back. Both Jacquie and Samina will be featured guests in our summer course, From Writer to Author: Navigating the Twisty Path to Publication, talking about the process of creating their new books and getting them into print. If you like what you read here, come and hear more from them and their editors!
Jacquie Walters: The Advantage of “Under-writing”
I’ve worked as a television writer for ten years, and since becoming an author, I’ve learned that most prose writers end up needing to cut down their initial drafts. It’s not unusual for them to overwrite by twenty- to thirty-thousand words and then spend countless hours surgically sacrificing scenes to the “junkyard” folder. So I definitely thought something was wrong with me when my drafts were turning up short. But in talking to fellow TV writers slash authors, I have discovered many of us are finding ourselves needing to beef up those first drafts. And that’s probably because we are so used to being overly economical in our writing.In a script, I head the scene with “INT. Kitchen” and let the art director figure out the rest. Stage directions? Only if necessary to plot. Otherwise, they take up precious space on the page. Leave them to the director! Appearance? That’s for casting. Clothing? I’ll call the costume designer.
You get the idea.
But when writing a novel, wearing all those hats becomes necessary. So, yes, I often find myself going in after that initial draft and clarifying where we are in space, what someone looks like, or even what time of day it is.
But I’ve also realized that economical and efficient writing for the screen can inform prose writing in interesting ways. Especially for those of us writing thriller, mystery, suspense, horror—anything that depends on pace. I think of my books in three acts, like I would with a screenplay or episode of television, and this helps me organize the shape of the story. I consider chapters like episodes, each one requiring some version of a cliffhanger. And dialogue is where I’m most comfortable, naturally, since that’s my bread and butter in a screenplay.
Many readers of Dearest have said it’d make a great movie—or even that the experience of reading it felt like watching a movie. And there’s no denying that’s because I come from a visual medium. But also: Dearest first existed in my mind as a film. I outlined it that way and wrote half the script before getting too busy with tv work. When the Guild went on strike in 2024, and I was not allowed to work on anything for the screen, I took that time to write Dearest as a novel instead. She feels like a movie because she was born as one.
Writing a book is hard. Like—so, so hard. In screenwriting, the literal world-building comes later—a collaboration between a team of people on a set. Whereas novel writers sit at their desks, alone, wearing all the hats at once, screenwriters can go one step at a time.
Maybe there is some advantage, then, to under-writing. Maybe this has been my way of staying sane. I don’t try to wear every hat as I draft from page one. At first, I only wear the hat of the writer. I only try to tell the story, keep the momentum, hit the beats—and then later, once all that is there, I throw on the remaining hats. Send in the costume designer, set decorator, props manager, and others to work out the details.
Samina Ali
An excerpt from Samina's recent memoir, Pieces You'll Never Get Back.
The last class I took at the Buddhist center was just weeks before I became pregnant. It was an intense session. Students were crying. The entire world seemed to be in mourning. Al-Qaeda operatives had simultaneously denotated two trucks loaded down with more than one thousand pounds of explosives at the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. In addition to approximately one hundred U.S. government workers, hundreds more neighbors and pedestrians had been killed. In response, President Clinton ordered airstrikes against sites linked to Osama bin Laden in Sudan and Afghanistan. None of it made sense. Why had the bodies of innocent men and women and children exploded while they were going about their days? How could their lives have vanished just like that, without any warning? Now bombs were falling from the sky, taking more lives. It was all people could talk about, on the news, with one another. Round and round the conversations went as a way to process the grief.It was in class that week that I was introduced to the Tibetan concept of bardo, the transitional state between death and rebirth. After death, the consciousness is no longer connected to the physical body. In Tibetan, the word for body is lu and means what’s left behind. After our consciousness leaves behind the body, it continues to subsist in the in-between state of bardo, floating about, darting at great speed, even catching glimpses of the next incarnation. Although I couldn’t have known it back when I was taking the class, I was on a direct path to this transitional state, to leaving my body and becoming nothing more than a point of consciousness floating about in an expansive darkness. Depending on the negative karma you’ve accumulated in your last life, after forty-nine days, you are reborn as a human or an animal or a hungry ghost.
But bardo doesn’t merely refer to the physical end of life, our instructor explained that day, trying to help us understand both our immediate reactions to the embassy tragedies as well as a larger, recurring pattern in our lives. Bardo refers to those transitional stages even within our lifetimes. Anytime we feel the rug being pulled out from under us, that feeling of ungroundedness is bardo. Losing a job, losing a baby, losing our money, a marriage coming to an end, a diagnosis of an illness—the very nature of being alive meant we were experiencing successive births and successive deaths. No one is immune. From the moment we are born, every one of us is in a perpetual dance with death—and rebirth. We don’t just get one shot at a second chance at life; we get multiple opportunities to do things over and over again, to remake ourselves into what we hope to be.
During class, when students were asked to reflect quietly on the moments of bardo we’d experienced, I made a long list: when my family first immigrated from our home in Hyderabad to Minneapolis, when I left my childhood home to start an MFA program – to start over – in the Pacific Northwest, when I divorced my first husband, when my dad forsook me for marrying Scott. If I’d enrolled in that class just one year later, I would have added: when I got pregnant and knew right away that something wasn’t right, when my life flashed before my eyes on the elevator ride up to labor and delivery on the fifteenth floor, and, lastly, when I woke up—not when I emerged from the coma in the neuro-ICU, but when I finally overcame my amnesia. On each occasion, I experienced a kind of death.
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Spring Class Photo
Last but not least, I wanted to share this photo, taken after the final night of instructor Angela Pneuman’s on-campus course, when the whole group decided to go out to dinner together. While the majority of our courses are offered online and we absolutely love being able to reach students across the globe and its time zones, there’s also something undeniably magical when people can physically get together and form community around a shared love of writing and reading. Shared with the group’s permission, here’s the proof that our writing students know how to have a good time:
