Julianna Baggott Reading (photo credit: Dana Lynch)

     During the week of January 22nd, Penn State welcomed best-selling author Julianna Baggott as the 2024 Fisher Family Writer-in-Residence. Baggott has published over twenty books, some pseudonymously, including “Pure” and “Harriet Wolf’s Seventh Book of Wonders,” both New York Times Notable Books of the Year. She heads the production company Mildred’s Moving Picture Show; her projects are in development at Disney+, Netflix, MGM, Paramount, Universal, and elsewhere. More information about her writing and productions can be found at her website.
     Alongside giving a free public reading to Penn State students, faculty, and local residents, Julianna Baggott met with students in advanced fiction workshops to offer advice and answer questions.
     As a student in the BA/MA program in creative writing, I had the opportunity and pleasure of meeting the author for a one-on-one manuscript review session, as well as in a graduate fiction workshop Q&A session. I knew instantly that I wanted to write about her because of how amazing this experience was. I hope that students and writers alike can find usefulness in her advice. 

Her Writing Journey

Julianna Baggott (photo credit: Esteban Marenco, Daily Collegian)

     During a class visit with the ENGL 515 Graduate Fiction Workshop, Julianna revealed her journey to becoming a writer and her process when writing. She started her story with the past, talking about her interest in playwriting from a young age. She met her husband and business partner, David G.W. Scott, at her MFA program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. While in graduate school, she vowed to adhere to the great short story writer Andre Dubus’ advice. He said: “the short story is the great American form, but they’ll want you to write novels. Don’t cave to the publishers’ pressure.” 
     When approached with the chance to write a novel, however, she ditched the advice and took the chance to diversify her writing. Although she didn’t have a novel ready for the agent, she quickly wrote thirty pages, hoping she could sign a deal and work on short fiction for a collection instead while she took her time with the novel. The agent was excited with the pages, and Baggott moved her entire focus onto writing the novel. This novel became national best-seller “Girl Talk,” which jump-started her career as a novelist at the age of 22.
     While raising four kids, now between the ages of 17 and 37, Julianna had to find time to focus on her craft. Being a mother took up lots of her time, but being able to move back to her hometown helped. While her mother and husband helped, she put aside two hours a day to write. She said it was a learning curve to learn how to balance life and work. She aimed to carve out two hours per day to work on her writing, just the right amount for her. “If you can work for two hours straight, that’s a real feat,” she said.  “Two hours is perfect or it’ll be easy to burn out.” 

Her Writing Process

     Even after managing to carve out two hours a day to write, she realized what was missing was the “muse time.” It’s easy for your job and all other aspects of life to take over your brain if you let it, she warned. It needs to be an intention act to “reclaim muse time.” She emphasized the importance of staying away from your phone and other technology during this time.
     She said her ideas come to her all the time, and advised us to “write without writing.” This process is trying out story ideas and drafting in our heads, a practice she does constantly. She advised us, “[you] have to always be living a double life — a person in the practical world and an artist with a mind running underneath that world.” She said she never writes first drafts – only fifth or sixth drafts.
     During the Q&A, Julianna talked a lot about craft and her ties with screenwriting. As a professor in screenwriting, she often uses the opening from Aaron Sorkin’s movie “The Social Network” and asks students to track repeated words and phrases. She believes that repetition reveals a writer’s obsessiveness about certain topics and ideas. Repetition is a trait writers across genres should pay attention to.
     When beginning class, she says to her students – “Everything is parts.” Parts of a process, parts of a story. Collect these parts then put them together. 

     She was asked a question about horror writing: “What is horror writing now? How can we write horror that’s not schlocky?”
     She answered that she writes a lot of comedy and horror together – flip sides of each other. She noted that in countries with collective trauma (for example, war), the interest in horror goes up afterward. It has to do with power, control, agency, the ability to witness an atrocity and excavate it in a safe way (because the story is “fake”). There is catharsis in horror.
     She used Jordan Peele’s horror movies “Get Out” and “Us” as an example of this, movies which delve into discussions on race, guilt, and appropriation. When we step away from realism, it allows us to comment on society in different and sometimes more effective ways. 

     Her final words of advice to the class was to ask yourself: “What can I steal from my life to make art?” and “What are you spending your precious brain cells on?”
     She recommended, “Tag the world around you.” and “Look for negative space on your calendar and reclaim it, schedule your writing time.” 

Final Thoughts

Audience of Baggott Reading  (photo credit: Julia Kasdorf) 

     Julianna is an extremely friendly and understanding person, with a lot of passion behind her interests. She related student writings with pop culture references and inspirations. After reading my writing, she suggested HBOMax’s Westworld and 2016 British comedy-drama Fleabag.
     For her visit, I read her latest collection of short stories, “I’d Really Prefer Not to Be Here with You, and Other Stories,” and highly enjoyed them (I recommend the audiobook for a quick and fun experience). I also read her short story published in the Cincinnati Review, “Cubby Safe.” I asked her about the inspiration for this story. She said that it was an idea she had for a long time ever since her eldest was in school. As gun violence got worse in America, she wanted to write a necessary commentary but couldn’t find the exact plot she wanted. It wasn’t until news programs started debating giving teachers guns that she found the plot and took off writing. 

     During the Q&A, she emphasized her enjoyment of memory exercises, and recommended finding words and writing about them. She reiterated Oliver Windle Holmes’s quote, “Memory is a net.” Put your net into the ocean to pull up what you can. Your net edits out the boring stuff and leaves the dynamic and resonant material from your childhood.
     As an exercise, the words she gave were: Fire. Boss. Sky. Tree.
     She recommended only one word at a time and to write as much as you can about the word, whether that be a memory or a thought you have about it. 

     For further inpsiration, check out Julianna Baggott’s six-week audio series called Efficient Creativity. In this audio series, she talks about the creative process of writing. This ranges from what to do when you first have an idea, what to do with writer’s block, how to build a world, and more! Her first week is offered free on SoundCloud. 

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Dana Lynch is the current Creative Writing Program Intern and is a first-year BA/MA student concentrating in Creative Nonfiction. She works at the Pattee and Paterno Library to pay for her book addiction. She is an avid writer of both nonfiction and fiction, focusing on her bi-racial Korean identity. She hopes to escape the desk job lifestyle and write for a living.  

Author Matthew Salesses will offer a reading as part of this year’s Mary E. Rolling Reading Series. The reading, which is free and open to the public, will take place at 6:00 p.m. on Thursday, February  22, in Paterno Library’s Foster Auditorium on the University Park campus. 

During his visit, Salesses will also participate in a panel discussion on “The Antiracist Classroom.” This event will be held on Wednesday February 21, 2024, 4:00 p.m, in the Grucci Room, 102 Burrowes Building, and is open to faculty across literature and writing disciplines.  

Matthew Salesses is a novelist, scholar, and Korean adoptee who has written and spoken widely about adoption, race, and parenting. He is the award-winning author of eight books, most recently a novel, “The Sense of Wonder” (2023) and a fiction writing guidebook, “Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping” (2021). Forthcoming is a memoir, “To Grieve Is to Carry Another Time.” In 2015 Buzzfeed named him one of 32 Essential Asian American Writers. Salesses is an Assistant Professor of Writing at Columbia University.    

Salesses’ latest novel, “The Sense of Wonder,” was named on many “best of” lists, including The New Yorker’s Best Books of 2023. Ron Charles of The Washington Post characterizes the novel this way: “What Salesses does here is a remarkable feat of artistic prowess that somehow blends the themes of K-drama with the spectacle of sports drama in a way that resets our frame of reference for the Korean American experience. Indeed, it’s a move that doesn’t seem entirely possible until you see the jump yourself.”  

“The Antiracist Classroom” panel discussion on February 21, sponsored by the English Department’s Antiracism and Equity Committee, along with the Global Asias Initiative, will focus on creating just and equitable classroom environments through syllabus and course design, whether in the creative writing workshop or the literature or rhetoric classroom. The discussion will draw on insights from Salesses’ recent book “Craft in the Real World,” which challenges those teaching creative writing to look at traditional writing workshop practices with a fresh eye and an antiracist lens. As Book Page noted in its review, “The world has changed, and the writing workshop must catch up.”   

In addition to Matthew Salesses, the panel will feature William Germano and Kit Nicholls (coauthors of “Syllabus: The Remarkable, Unremarkable Document That Changes Everything”). William Germano is professor of English at Cooper Union. His books include “Getting It Published” and “From Dissertation to Book.” Kit Nicholls is director of the Center for Writing at Cooper Union, where he teaches writing, literature, and cultural studies. Panelists will be in conversation with each other and with attendees.  

The Mary E. Rolling Reading Series is a program offered by Penn State’s Creative Writing Program in English. The series receives support from the College of the Liberal Arts; the Department of English; the Joseph L. Grucci Poetry Endowment; the Mary E. Rolling Lectureship in Creative Writing; and University Libraries.