Silver Lake Blog: Catching up with mentor Lauren McQuade
/May 12, 2016 | Silver Lake Blog
Lauren McQuade & her mentee Samantha.
Through one-on-one mentoring and monthly creative writing workshops, girls are given techniques, insights and hot topics for great writing in all genres from WriteGirl professional women writers. Workshops and mentoring sessions explore poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, songwriting, journalism, screenwriting, playwriting, persuasive writing, journal writing, editing and more.
SLB has had the privilege of catching up with one of the WriteGirl mentors Lauren McQuade. Here is what she had to share…
What attracted you to helping young girls fulfill their creative writing potential with WriteGirl?
I found WriteGirl at a time when my career felt unsure and decided that the shared creative energy would invigorate me somehow. I signed up for weekly mentoring along with the monthly workshops to work one-on-one with a girl because I thought fostering some sort of relationship with my mentee would benefit us both.
Tell us about the process when volunteering with WriteGirl.
The monthly workshops are my favorite part about volunteering with WriteGirl. The locations of the workshops are always great; we’ve written memoir in the Japanese garden at the Huntington Library, poetry in front of modern masterpieces at the MOCA Grand, and on and on. Lisa Loeb was at the songwriting workshop–Who’s better to teach teenaged girls about writing emotional songs about their feelings other than Lisa Loeb?
