Help Maya Get to VONA

Hello everyone,

If you're reading this, you've probably met me at least in passing. I'm Maya Beck, I write, and I recently got accepted into the VONA Voices Writing Workshop at the University of Pennsylvania! 

In the last week of June, I will hopefully be studying Speculative Fiction Workshop with Tananarive Due , which is basically my childhood dream. (That and writing an autobiographical manga, illustrating Pokemon cards, buying my dad his dream house, enacting Universal Basic Income...)

A bit of what I hope to do with the residency, from my application:

"I grew up an avid reader of library books, homeschooled by black Muslim parents who valued education and yet couldn't afford bookstore visits. Despite the praise I received for my writing as an straight-A alternate education student, I did not major in writing due to the belief that it was not for "people like me." I didn't understand the genre/literary divide until college, and have only began to find likeminded writers who successfully blur the line after graduation. I've written complete novels, but they had remained in my desk drawers without friends, colleagues, or mentors to critique them.

Only over the last few years have I come around to practicing writing as part of a community, thereby growing from an outsider artist to an emerging writer. I have appeared in local readings, where my work received praised from writing teachers, reading curators, magazine editors, and published authors. I have appeared in local literary magazines and currently work with one. I have had the opportunity to participate in the Givens Emerging Writers' Mentor Program, intern with Coffee House Press, and learn and network through Loft classes and events including the VONA Regional Workshop at The Loft which informally welcomed me into the VONA family. My VONA experience so far has been three intense days in a literary center within walking distance of a home I chose for its arts community. I loved that space, and want to return to it, build on it, and carry it with me to share.

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I joke that my goal is to be the black/female Neil Gaiman because of his breadth, flexibility, and ability to write across age ranges. I aim to draw on my nonfiction experience writing about and for nonprofits as a blogger and grantwriter; my undergraduate studies in philosophy and visual art; my dabbles into book arts and graphic novels; and my recent involvement in theatre.

As a young teen, I drafted up many ideas for middle grade fiction that I aim to realize with an adult's sensibility. My writing features robots and dragons as well as investigations into the nature of religious belief. My influences include Diana Wynne Jones, Roald Dahl, Madeleine L'Engle, and a whole lot of manga from Doraemon to Akira. My goal is to write about diversity—mostly weird black girls in multicultural societies—where the differences are crucial but not the focus. I want girls who are normal rather than archetypal, unique rather than tokens, well-rounded rather than Strong. I want diversity within blackness: wallflowers, tomboys, nerds, artists, punks, loners, and daydreamers. I want to create Islamic futurism, if it doesn’t already exist. I want to build an oeuvre of speculative work that all children will read for pleasure and not because a teacher told them it would explain the Other. I want to create possible worlds so vivid and engaging that readers are inspired to build them.

As an adult, I write short stories that use fantastic elements question and investigate concepts like poverty, class differences, social justice, mental illness, and the more serious things I've experienced. My influences here are Kelly Link, George Saunders, Gabriel García Márquez, Franz Kafka, Kurt Vonnegut, Octavia Butler, Toni Morrison, Ben Marcus, and other speculative, experimental, and magical realist writers. I currently work with Paper Darts magazine and would like to use that, and any other platform I have, to welcome more diversity for other writers."

Welp, that's my plan. I can't yet offer scholarships like Beyoncé can or take your horror scripts like Jordan Peele, but that too is part of my big life story.

Please give if you can, or spread the world, and I will (continue to) dedicate my life to paying it forward!
‍♀️‍♀️‍♀️