“A Different Way to Tell Stories”: Mentoring the Next Generation of Writers

Girls Write Now wants every young woman to have a voice, regardless of where they come from. As the first organization of its kind, GWN offers writing mentorship and education for young women and gender-nonconforming youth. Across the core programs, the organization serves more than 600 mentees annually — the bulk of which is a year long intensive where a participant is matched with a mentor.

“Over 90% high-need girls of color, over 70% immigrant, first generation,” Founder and Executive Director Maya Nussbaum said in a phone interview. “We're matching all of these girls with women professional writers as their personal mentors, and they have an intensive relationship throughout the course of the year.”

Embracing Technology #

The organization has worked hard to stay up-to-date in its education and consequently started experimenting with more digital-focused programs in 2009. “The writers in our community were having a bit of a crisis because the publishing and the magazine landscape, it was changing rapidly,” Nussbaum explained. “I felt like we had an obligation to talk about and start teaching the way that writing is going to work in the future at that point…the curriculum is multi-genre, multimedia, multi-platform. The way that writing works today in the real world.”

Those experiments led to partnerships with organizations like the MacArthur Foundation and Parsons The New School for Design in its Design and Technology department, all of which led to a stand alone digital media mentoring program which “culminates in a multimedia anthology at the end of the year and a multimedia presentation.” Now, the 150 mentees that participate in Girls Write Now annually, leave with multimedia skills and portfolio of their work. “There's a lot of videos, design, animation. In the past we've done interactive narrative game design.”

In the 2019 edition of the multimedia anthology, titled “Ctrl+B”, there were 52 published projects from the participants that covered all sorts of mediums. Nora Knoepflmacher, a junior, produced a podcast interview with her brother talking about his experience as a male gymnast, Laila Stevens, a senior, made a personal video essay about her family home and Maisha Nabila created a website for her writing to reflect on her personal possessions and the stories behind them. Each project is unique and personal.

To make the creation of portfolios easier, Girls Write Now has recently started experimenting with Glitch. With a template app that the girls can simply remix and edit as needed, they can have their own site in just a couple of minutes. “In my experience, the girls are the most excited about having a portfolio that's really public facing and so easy for them to share,” Anjali Misra, Community Fellow, said. “That’s really exciting to them if they do go through all the steps and the effort to update their name and their photo and write a description about themselves and then put their pieces on there.”

In the coming year, Girls Write Now is looking forward to bringing the writing and digital media work together. “Every month, the girls are learning about a different platform, a different way to tell their story, and it's through a mixture of analog and digital.”

*To learn more about Girls Write Now check out their website and the most recent edition of *their annual multimedia anthology.