Write Girl

A couple of weeks ago I picked up a flyer from a coffee shop. "Mentor a girl in Creative Writing."

It was a sign of all signs, and it was in tune with a lot of the things I want to accomplish here in LA. I procrastinated on turning in the application, but when I finally did they got back to me promptly.

When I received an email that I had to attend a five hour training, I immediately found myself not enthused about committing. Keep in mind I've been slightly shield from anything related to my previous field of work for the past three months, and I figured that I would never have anything to do with mentoring or non profit ever again.

I hate to admit that when I went into Saturday's training slightly hung over, and I knew that this was going to make the training significantly longer and already felt myself dragging. I coordinated my own mentoring trainings in my previous job and I didn't understand why this had to be so freaking long. ARGH why is this thing 5 hours????????

My mopey face turned into a huge smile when I walked into the room and I see at least thirty women. I was so shocked and I felt this sense of excitement that I hadn't felt since I first joined Bindlestiff (My theatre collective). They had accepted women from all writing genres from blog writing, screenwriting, technical writing, non fiction, etc.

I felt like I just walked into the mentoring program that I've wanted to run.

I saw this magnificent team of really great women, who were so committed to this program they volunteer about 30 hours a month. They were not begrudged with the miserable rigmarole of working with at risk youth and even stupider people that reside in non profit.

I signed up for weekly mentoring sessions with my own girl. I have to come up with writing exercises with her, and help her with her homework. I'm also obligated to attend monthly trainings with all the other mentors/mentees. Whenever I would get a new person to be a mentor for my previous job, they would all say the same thing. "I hope my mentee likes me." I find myself saying that now, and I sincerely hope that they don't run away at the first sight of me.

Please check out Write Girl :D