Writing Certificate

• Wendy Adair has been receiving all sorts of accolades for her novel, The Broken Hallelujah, which received the 2023 IPPY Bronze Medal for wartime fiction from the Independent Publishers Book Awards, and was a finalist for the International Book Award and the Page Turner Award. Her first mystery, Deliver Us From Evil…and the Six O’Clock News, came out in January 2024. Her second mystery, Deadly as a Walk in the Park, will be available in May 2024. This will be a three-part series of Brentwood Women Mysteries with each book featuring one of the three Brentwood women as the main character.
   
• HJ Brennan has just published his debut novel, This Then Is What Counts.
   
• Diane Byington was the recent recipient of a Firebird Award for Historical Fiction for her novel, Louise and Vincent. 
   
• Dana Brewer Harris has a newly published piece of flash fiction, here.
   
• Richard Dennis has a newly published historical novel called Fiume Restoral, available in paperback, hardcover, and ebook formats. 
   
• Spencer Fleury wrote an essay in Peter Fish’s nature writing class that was published here.
   
• Jill Fordyce has published her debut novel, Belonging, out in the world as of January.
   
• Brian Christopher Giddens had a new poem published, on the subject of writer’s block. He also published several new short stories: "Lilt and Kent at Maxwell House," "Peaches," and "Boozer."
   
• Joanne Godley has two new poems published in The Account Magazine. She will also have a chapbook of poetry published by Black Sunflower Press in 2024.
   
• Simi Monheit received a coveted starred review for her upcoming novel, The Goldie Standard, which will be out in May of 2024. Here's what they had to say in their rave review: "A hilarious saga of family renewal and last-chance romance that plucks the heartstrings… Goldie is a spellbinding protagonist, full of dudgeon and crabby insights into all things newfangled. Monheit's sparkling prose poetically and humorously conveys the collision of romantic dreams with crotchety reality."
   
• Liam Taliesin has just published his debut novel, Lithium Fire. 
   
• Marilyn Thomas recently published her debut mystery novel, Murder in Black and White.
   
• Jacquie Walters recently received news that her debut novel Dearest, will be published by Mullholand Books in Fall 2024.
   
• Carol Zapata just learned that her essay, “Argentina, 1990: The Road Not Taken,” won a 2023 Story Sanctum Editors' Choice Award for Best Nonfiction. 

Instructor Writing News

Rachel Howard

Nina Schuyler

Niloufar Talebi was the recipient of an NEA translation award.

Rebecca (Bee) Sacks

Feature: Four Student Essays

Kevin Loughlin

The Scalpel and the Pen

I am a surgeon and I am a writer. They are not mutually exclusive, quite the contrary. Medicine and writing should be a natural merger. The phrase "The Scalpel and the Pen" was first used to describe a seminar given to Australian medical students in 1984. Subsequently, the phrase has been used by noted physician writers Richard Selzer and Jerome Groopman.

Why do I write? I guess, fundamentally, it is because I think that I have something to say. One of my teachers, Dr. Francis Moore, titled his autobiography, A Miracle and a Privilege, and that captures how I feel about my career. The miracle is that I have seen scientific progress that I only could have imagined in medical school. The privilege is that I have been an observer of patients who have experienced the exhilaration of cure and the despair of a fatal diagnosis. Like all physicians, I have had the opportunity to experience the full spectrum of medical practice from its tragedies to its triumphs. I have witnessed the alpha and omega of life, from delivering babies to signing death certificates.

But back to the merger of medicine and writing. As a physician-writer, I come with some baggage. Throughout medical training, by necessity, my sentences were truncated and filled with acronyms, abbreviations, and jargon. At times, it seemed that I had a personal vendetta with punctuation. Although I have published several hundred articles in the medical literature and serve as an editor-in-chief of a medical journal, I am still a writing student.

But again, there is still a commonality of experience between medical and writing training. As a surgical house officer, I did rotations on different specialty services—thoracic, cardiovascular, neurosurgical, and gynecology and others—to provide me with a background to choose a specialty. As a writer, I have taken fourteen writing courses, seven of them at Stanford. Parallel to my experience as a house officer, each writing course has exposed me to a different “specialty” from the short story, to poetry to fiction and nonfiction.

My journey continues. Doctor means teacher and comes from the Latin, docere—to teach. But all teachers are students as well. One of my interns was Atul Gawande. Now, I am the student. I read his books and articles and I learn from them.

Surgery and writing each require humility. Surgeons have complications and writers receive rejection slips. As a surgeon, I found comfort in the old bromide, surgeons who say they have never had a complication, are either fools or liars. As a writer, I recall that F. Scott Fitzgerald received 122 rejection slips before he sold a story. To me, the scalpel and the pen enhance each other, they are inseparable.
 

Next we have an essay by Jill Fordyce, author of the newly published Belonging, reflecting on how she was aided in her journey as an author by the courses she took through Stanford Continuing Studies:


Jill Fordyce

In June 2008, I enrolled in a Stanford online class called “Making a Great Debut.” At the time, my five children were ages 4 to 16, and I wanted to make space in my summer to pursue a lifelong dream of writing a novel. The following spring, after a solid start, I enrolled in “Novel Writing III: A Plan for Success,” with Malena Watrous. Looking back, it is remarkable how much these classes were a catalyst for completing a novel and getting it published. My debut novel Belonging came out on January 30, 2024 (Post Hill Press).
 
I would categorize what I gained from taking the Stanford courses as: commitment, craft, and community.
 
Commitment: One of the reasons I enrolled in a novel writing class was to make a solid commitment of time to writing. I knew that assignments and deadlines would get me into the chair each day, at least for the eight weeks of class. Through this commitment, I experienced the power of a daily writing practice, and left the class with one that I still have today. I always tell people who have an ambition to write but haven’t figured out how to carve out the time, sign up for a class!
 
Craft: The workshop paradigm allowed for thoughtful feedback and revealed my writing to me in a different way. It gave me permission to write the way that felt most natural to me. I remember one particular exercise where we took pages of scene and dialogue and turned it into narrative and vice-versa. Reading it both ways, I could easily see what was most powerful, what was most economical, and what worked best in the flow of the novel. When I had to reduce the word count of my novel before publication, this technique was so helpful.
 
Community: As solitary as the writing experience is, for my novel to enter the world, I needed a community. There is a lot of rejection on the way to publication and having classmates and teachers both model and speak the words “keep going” was very helpful. Blurbs are difficult to ask for and also to receive, and Malena and others I met through the Stanford classes generously provided them. Finally, it feels very “full circle” that a handful of people I met through these classes in 2008 are included in the acknowledgments in the back of my book.”

———

Thanks, Jill, and congratulations! Your book is spectacular.
 

Third, we have an essay by Marilyn Thomas, author of the newly published Murder in Black and White.

Marilyn Thomas

It took two years of trying different approaches before I landed on what I think is the perfect opening for my novel: Murder in Black and White.

“I, Father Andrew Nolan, was hired to investigate the murder of a nun. The killer is free. I’m in jail. I’m not a bad person. I just didn’t see it coming.”

With the blessing of both my instructor and fellow students in the final class of the Novel Writing Certificate, I used it to ‘hook’ an agent, and it worked. A dozen agents requested the first chapter or, in a few cases, the first three chapters. One agent, after requesting three chapters, asked me to send a hard copy of the whole novel, which I did. At the moment (three months later) I’m still waiting to hear from her, but not surprised that I haven’t because she said it would take her more than three months. I decided not to wait, and took the self-publishing route so that I could meet my goal of having a novel I had authored in my hands for my 80th birthday, which has now come and gone. I’m happy. So how did the program help in the overall endeavor?
 
I often questioned the number of times we, the aspiring novelists, were asked to revise our summaries, synopses, outlines, first paragraphs, and first chapters. Now I understand. Get those things right, and one is a long way toward writing the whole thing, or at least having a vision of the whole. Among the other most valuable features of the program are the discipline and the deadlines imposed on us from without. If I know someone is going to read and critique my work, I’m going to work harder and smarter on it than I might otherwise. Then, too, I appreciated the fact that the feedback came not only from the instructor (as valuable as that was) but also from fellow students who are readers of novels as well as writers. I often wished we could hang onto an instructor beyond the quarter framework, but I learned over time that each instructor had his/her own special gift to share in terms of writing technique/purpose.
 
I revised my novel-in-progress one more time after the completion of the program before I dared engage in the publication process because we had all been warned about having high expectations. It might take a hundred queries followed by a hundred rejections before an agent might express interest. I sent 69 queries. Despite all the cautions to keep one’s faith in oneself alive, I found it discouraging until I decided to play it like a game, a game that wasn’t about me. I just kept ‘throwing mud at that wall’ to see how much it might take for some of it to stick. And now, like a motherless child, ‘my baby’s’ out there. She’s on her own. I did my part by giving her all the life I had to give. Pay her a visit @ drmarilynthomas.com. I can only hope that the world will be kind to her.

———

I hope so too, Marilyn! We can all extend some kindness to that baby by ordering a copy of this wonderful new memoir that you worked on so diligently. Love the advice to treat publishing like a game!
 

And finally, we have an essay by HJ Brennan, about the process of writing and revising his debut novel until it was accepted for publication:

HJ Brennan

What a Long, Strange Trip

Four in the morning, bathrobe, slippers and make coffee. Butt in the chair and write until eight. Squeeze into spandex, road shoes and point the road bike into a thirty-mile trajectory. Shower, food and head to the bike shop for the eight-hour shift. Five days a week.

Stanford's Novel Writing Certificate needed attention. They said my commitment would be ten hours a week. It was more. Reading Donna Tartt, Toni Morrison, Edward P. Jones and numerous craft books. Submitting weekly written scenes, critiques and kept total busy with instructors.

First draft of first novel done at eight in the morning, I sat back, took a breath and, “Wow!” Robe, coffee and slippers I went outside and waited for the parade... Nothing. I went out closer to the road in case folks passing couldn’t see that I had just written my first novel. Chest puffed, I leaned on the mailbox, grinning. Moms and their kids in Euro SUVs flashed past. Not a glance at the frumpy guy in his bathrobe.

As an emerging writer, I’d heard, “Be careful what you wish for.” Hah! No way. I yearned. I kneeled at the agents’ and publishers’ doors. I sent prayers and Hershey’s kisses their way and personalized each cover letter. I told them how I was a perfect fit because I, too, was a bull rider, a fireman, a spelunker. It took months, years. The Novel Writing Certificate had a workshop regarding publishing. We students groveled at the words of the facilitator who had been published. Really! How’d that happen? She must have been embarrassed by our fawning.

I was lucky early on with my first novel, “Fathers’ Day,” (workshopped in the Novel Writing Certificate). I had queried Judith Shepard at Permanent Press. She is one of few publishers who still requires printed submissions. I printed the MS, boxed it and sent it off to NY. I got a hand-written note months later. “Like the writing, but a bit too sprawling for me.”

Sprawling? Like, what? Too many Popes? Voltaire? The bike messengers? The tall, lesbian Chinese stripper?

I took her message to heart, reduced, rewrote and self-published “Fathers’ Day.” It picked up a few awards.

Second MS, “This Then Is What Counts” (also workshopped in the Novel Writing Certificate), I sent to Ms. Shepard. Again, a hand-written note. “You had me to page 150. Then I lost the tension.” I believed in her. So I went back to page 150 and reduced, retuned, trimmed and rewrote. I got it to where I thought it might work, then asked an instructor her opinion. She put me back to work.

Anyway, after working through the Novel Writing Certificate, then rendering the fat out of the MS and my fading breath, Running Wild Press sent a contract. “We love it and we want to publish it.” I sat on that news for a few days before telling my wife. It was a lot to process.

This Then Is What Counts by HJ Brennan came out in January, 2024.
hjbrennan.com