Speaking on the Art of the Craft
Featured Guests: Spencer George, Kat Jagai, and Richelle Szypulski
Any writer knows that our craft is a form of magic. A spell of creation, combination, and transformation, that conjures the stories people will treasure for generations. To honor Girls Write Now’s 25th anniversary, we’re proud to introduce On the Art of the Craft: A Guidebook to Collaborative Storytelling, coming out April 23rd from HarperOne Books. In addition to presenting phenomenal stories by young writers, this book is a treasure trove of prompts and quotes to inspire your own writing. In this episode, you’ll hear Committee Chair Spencer George lead a reflection on the unique drafting process for the book with fellow Chair Richelle Szypulski, our former Senior Editorial Manager, and Kat Jagai, an Editorial Advisory Committee member and mentee and mentor alum of Girls Write Now. Plus, our guests will respond in real time to a prompt from the book and give you the time to write along. We hope you enjoy this magical episode, and will celebrate with us this moment of collaborative creation
Prompt: Combine the most important myth you know with what you imagine is the favorite mythology of the first stranger you see.
Get your copy to On the Art of the Craft: A Guidebook to Collaborative Storytelling from HarperOne books on April 23rd!
Music by mentee alum Jaya Rao-Herel
Check Out “Be There” by Jaya Rao-Herel
Thank you to LOLA, a feminine & reproductive care brand, for supporting Girls Write Now.
Richelle Szypulski
Kat Jagai
Spencer George
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Richelle Szypulski
After several years of volunteering as a photographer, Richelle Szypulski is thrilled to share her love of storytelling and strategy in service of the Girls Write Now mission. A journalism graduate of Point Park University and NYU’s Summer Publishing Institute, she has worked in marketing and editorial—most recently as a digital editor at Travel + Leisure. Outside of work, you’ll often find her frequenting yoga, dance and meditation studios around the city, rehearsing for community theater productions or missing her subway stop yet again thanks to a too-enthralling audiobook.
Kat Jagai
K. A. Jagai is a writer, artist, and editor from Brooklyn, New York. They work in IP for Alloy Entertainment, a creative think tank and full-service editorial partner that develops and produces original books, television series, and feature films. Jagai’s own writing has appeared in Frontier Poetry, Electric Literature, Publishers Weekly, and elsewhere. They were awarded Summer Literary Seminars’ 2018 Poetry Fellowship and have taken classes at Cave Canem. They received their B.A. from Bennington College in 2016, where they studied literature, printmaking, and critical race theory. In both art and writing, they are seeking that light within themselves and others that can only be seen when one is forced into the dark.
Spencer George
Spencer George is a Writer and Teaching Artist hailing from the Carolinas. She holds a B.A. in English and Human Rights with a concentration in Creative Writing from Barnard College and is pursuing her M.A. in Folklore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her work focuses on narrative representations of the rural South and has been published in The Bitter Southerner, The Adroit Journal, Longreads, and Medium, and once received a shout-out in the The New York Times. She is the creator and writer of GOOD FOLK, a weekly newsletter and podcast examining the intersection of artistry, empathy, and community in and around rural America and the American South. She spent the last few years working as a Teaching Artist in rural North Carolina schools, and has previously worked with the StoryCorps Mobile Tour, as a barista at a tea house and farm, and as a yoga teacher at a boy's summer camp in Canada. Spencer was the 2019 recipient of the Peter S. Prescott Prize for Prose Writing and is currently at work on a neo-Southern Gothic novel set in a post-climate change Appalachia about a pine tree god who appears only in dreams and the individuals who worship him.
