Writing Certificate

Annie Fox recently finished our two-year Memoir Writing Certificate. She is still working on her memoir, but her first chapter was accepted for publication in Spillwords.

Renée Ozburn’s first book, Unwanted Significance, was published this August by Black Rose Writing. “In 1995, when Tyler Carson and Alana Adler meet, their chemistry is instant. He’s a psychology professor. She’s a linguist and musician. Both are 38. He is White. She is Black. Neither has made much time for serious relationships, until a train trip changes their trajectory. But their growing passion, played out in atmospheric settings from Cape Cod to San Francisco and Montana to New York, is no match for the intergenerational forces working to tear them apart. In addition to Tyler’s doting, manipulative mother and his long-lost father who reappears with a new identity, deeply buried secrets in Alana’s family begin to emerge. Ultimately, the unwanted significance of race, ethnicity, and a past they had nothing to do with test the limits of their love, creating unexpected futures for both.”

We are also thrilled to spotlight the news that Jaime Levy Pessin’s debut fiction will be published by Random House in fall of 2027. While Jaime recently completed our Novel Writing Certificate, her first published book will actually be a children’s story. The picture book that she wrote doesn’t yet have a set title, but it is about a little girl convinced that she has “the worst snack.” 

 

"At Penn" is the first piece of the memoir, a narrative collage, that I wrote in Rachel Howard's creative nonfiction class and revised with Nina Schuyler (each sentence in the finished piece is structured according to her classic models. I don't think I could do that with the entire memoir! It's a short opening piece, but it took long hours to get it right. But attention to those patterns tightened the entire piece—and then led to an ending that was new, unplanned, unexpected, and exactly what I needed to admit and to write.)

Finding Our Way Home: A Journey Through Stanford’s Memoir Certificate Program 

As I swan into my first creative nonfiction class with Rachel Howard in Summer 2022, I have what I know is the perfect liftoff for a memoir. I’ve taught in “all four corners of the US,” as my kids call our gypsy travels—from Mexico to Canada, the Atlantic "shores" to Pacific "beaches," Puget mists to the steamy Gulf. I unfurl what is clearly the cleverest title, My Life in Composition—braiding my writing classes with autobio: no clue about the “life in” part, but there has to be narrative arc, right?

My philosophy’s always been that writing is discovery: Joan Didion's comment, “I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear,” has this girl nailed. When I'm responding to student work, there's no hesitation: I know what to say, how to say it, and I can decide quickly and move on. But my own writing is a mystery to me, and I've taken this course to discover what I have to say—for myself, on my terms, telling my story my own way. Once upon a time I’d deliver a paper and feel a sense of creative play, creative risk. But that enjoyment is gone and my scholarship, well reasoned and “You Say I Say” academic, just seems like “thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season,” as Eliot put it.

So now, and without a warning shot: here’s what I get when I tap the keys:

Learning To Be Mamalam

‘Sometimes you win. Sometimes you learn,’ and both extremes of this mantra, devised by John C. Maxwell, collide for me as I teach myself, minute by minute, tooth and claw, to be the person my son calls ‘mamalam.’

You don’t think motherhood comes naturally to women as part of our DNA or a one-day wonder like the Annunciation we Catholics hear so much about, do you? For one thing, physically, some of us can’t do it: my multiple ectopics attest to that. So first, you learn to sit them out and try again, again, again. …

And I’m hooked: on the attitude, slant, voice, and story of how our family creates itself despite the challenges of adoption—what happens when folks marked "Caucasian" refuse to ink “Caucasian” on an application that requires, “Desired child.”

Without a plan, without a sense of purpose, without a reason I was conscious of, I hear a voice in the writing as I compose it that is ineluctably mine. In all the years of academic and bureaucratic writing I’ve never heard those tones, that edge, on my pages before. And I recognize that woman in those sentences and want to know her better: What does she have to say? How would she say it? And why? I don’t yet know.

The working title of the memoir that unscrolls from those first sentences is On Our Way Home: Adopting Across Racial Lines in America. Writing it, too, is an uncharted route—until I enter Stanford’s Memoir Writing Certificate program. I learn, from Amanda Montei’s introductory course, to trust the process of writing and develop a narrative voice that’s “captivating” and clear. Both Josh Mohr and John Evans affirm my desire to experiment freely with alternative forms; I begin to focus on stories called “mosaic” or “woven” once I really look at how creative nonfiction can be imagined and built. And I realize, as one who (amateurly) makes collages out of visual fragments and likes to see the familiar become intriguing, this format is a natural “way of seeing” for me.

But the tectonic shift in the memoir itself occurs with readings I receive in sessions with Julia Scheeres and Rachel Howard. I know I’ve been scouting two paths in here: my broken childhood and the total collapse of any structure resembling family and parenting—along with the adoption of our kids in the face of the “race matching” that was a big deal at the time, and refusing to go along with it. The tension between these two accounts is caused by my 100% ignorance of what a mom is and how to be one—equaled only by my “stubborn Irish” determination to do it.

And although I’m writing the story of adopting my kids, the memoir’s told through the lens of a traumatized woman—me—who truly and for good reason doesn’t have a clue what a mother is or if I can do it or will be accepted if I dared to try. My failed pregnancies have seemed to prove the point: the "No." But I do it anyway. And that's really the crux of the story I tell: how you can face the Impossible—go for it—and find, if not redemption: resolution, and a chance of as much recovery as is possible.

Imagine my surprise when I discover that the memoir I’ve intended to write—about the adoption of our kids and feeling completely at sea—has become a detailed account of my deeply embedded self-doubt and lack of parents as models. The memoir I’ve wanted is lightyears away from the one I’m writing. And my “beta” readers, Yousuf Aszar and Michael Pollack, also tell me point-blank, “You’ve got two stories.” I’m now planning V1: how I learned to be the person Nick calls “Mamalam”; and V2; the childhood broken home (broken heart).

To achieve this tiered account, I’ve moved, class after class, from thought-pieces to moments still transformative: my son’s eyes opening for the first time and looking straight into mine when I first hold him; the nurse telling me, “She can’t stop staring at you,” as my daughter lay, tiny beautiful girl, in my hands. I don’t discover I truly can, in my own way, explore our story until, with my cohort of dedicated insightful teachers and writers, I do—and find my destination there, nearly in sight.


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Renée Ozburn

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Jaime Pessin

On one of those scrambly school days with everyone rushing to get out the door, my husband chopped up honeydew for my 11-year-old daughter’s midday nosh.

“I always have the worst snack,” she said, despite her propensity to eat half a melon in one sitting. “Except for Ruby, who brings peppers.”

Once she left for the bus, this comment obviously went straight into the group chat with Ruby’s parents and another couple. The response came quickly. “This sounds like your children’s book!” The group—two other couples who became close during the kids’ pre-K year and sustained each other’s sanity during the pandemic—knew I had been working on a novel. They suspected that my sense of humor about parenting might come through in a picture book. I immediately started writing, using their kids’ names for the first three characters.

It takes a lot less time to write 168 words’ worth of rhyming couplets than an 80,000 word novel that takes place in the 1820s. No need for Scrivener; I wrote this on my Notes app. I grew up on a diet of Shel Silverstein, Dr. Seuss, and Broadway musical soundtracks, so rhyming comes naturally to me. And I thought a (slightly) dark twist at the end would make parents laugh along with their kids. Soon I had a draft that, if nothing else, entertained me, my kids, and the group chat. 

I have a close friend in the publishing industry, Kristen Pettit at Electric Postcard Entertainment, who has been a huge cheerleader as I wrote short stories and started my novel (whose first words were written in Deborah Johnson’s historical fiction class). I sent her my draft, and she loved it. She asked me to add art direction before she shared it with an agent with whom she works regularly. This was in the dead of summer, so it took the agent—Jo Volpe, at New Leaf Literary & Media—a couple of months before she responded to say she was interested. Not just in the children’s book, but also my work-in-progress novel, and other ideas I had for both adults’ and kids’ projects. 

We decided to offer Random House an exclusive look at the book, and within two weeks, Lee Wade of Random House Studio acquired it. 

After working on my novel for three years, I am tickled that this children’s book will be my debut as an author. It’s an awful lot of fun to put together a picture book—I just got sketches back from my illustrator, the award-winning Washington Post cartoonist Nick Galifianakis, and they’re hilarious—and a good brain break for when I get lost in the Florida swamps of the 19th century. 

The book (whose title is still not settled) will be published in Fall 2027, and I’m planning to tour schools and bookstores in areas where I have family and friends—I hope I’ll see some of my Novel Writing Certificate colleagues on the road!

Jaime Pessin is a 2026 graduate of the Stanford Continuing Studies Novel Writing Certificate. You can follow her on Instagram at @jlpessinwrites