Tara Monjazeb always knew she was a writer. Since she was eight years old, Tara felt drawn to the literary, taking to her journals to “gossip” about friends and family and to record what she did and saw throughout the day. Sixteen years later, at the age of twenty-four, Tara’s poetry has been published on The Atlantic’s website, the latest of her many accolades as a writer. Stillhouse Press remembers Tara’s impressive presence as a Flint Hill high school intern in 2018, her talents shining through her editorial work and her own captivating, undeniable passion for the craft.
Likewise, Tara recalls how her work at Stillhouse helped shape her into the writer and person she is today. “By the time I was a senior at Flint Hill, I had taken AP literature and AP Language, but it was AP Lit specifically that made me want to pursue English,” Tara says. “I think a lot of the people who do the Stillhouse internship probably are taking AP Lit with Ms. [Tracy] Peterson, who was like a beacon to me when I was in high school. She’d had a student who a couple years prior had worked with Stillhouse, and I had really wanted to start working in publishing, so I was offered the opportunity to pursue that.” As one of the few literary presses in the country designed to hand students the keys to the publishing house, offering experiential education in the field of publishing to undergraduate and graduate students alike, Stillhouse was an ideal atmosphere for a young writer ready and eager to learn the business.
In 2018, as an intern, Tara worked on Anne Panning’s Dragonfly Notes, a memoir which explores Panning’s experience with the premature death of her mother and the grief that followed. “I loved working on that piece specifically because it's so personal, and it's not a work of fiction and it's also not a work of nonfiction. I consider a memoir to be something in between. You're still telling us some kind of story with a plot and a mode of writing, but you’re talking about your own life. I loved hearing her talk about her process,” says Tara. Along with her editorial tasks, Tara worked for the Fall for the Book festival during her year as an intern. It was around this time that Tara was also presented with the opportunity to move abroad, an ambition she’d harbored since she was a child.
“I'm the eldest daughter of an immigrant family and I always have felt really independent,” says Tara. “I have always felt drawn to the idea of building my life from scratch somewhere, sort of forcing myself to figure out who I am without the influence of anything else. Imagine you go into a blank room, and you sit there for two hours. I feel like you learn so much about yourself and start to notice different things. I wanted that experience for myself in a way, to build my identity outside of the place where I grew up and the things that influenced me.
“Moving to the UK was my end goal, but I went to Mason for one year and I worked with [Stillhouse publisher] Scott Berg and the team for that period, which was really great. I continued working as a reader and learned a lot about publishing and the cover process, every single step,” comments Tara. “It’s interesting because when I interned at Stillhouse, I was not planning to be a writer. I was planning to publish other people's writing, which is still something that I'm passionate about. But I think Stillhouse taught me that being a writer is actually possible. You see all these big writers and you're like, ‘oh, gosh, like, that could never be me’ or like, ‘oh, God, I don't think anybody would care about my, my work,’ but the people I met who were authors were literally just normal people wanting to tell their story.”
Tara adds that her involvement with Stillhouse Press offered her a unique “back-door” view of the publishing industry, demystifying the processes of publication and publicity. “I witnessed people who were sitting in classrooms trying to make sure they could market a story in the way that deserved to be marketed, and that was really inspiring to me. I think there was a subconscious feeling brewing in me when I witnessed how these authors were talking about their writing and how excited they were about it, and how excited they were that Stillhouse was publishing their writing.”
In 2019, Tara made her move to London and began a degree in comparative literature at University College London, where she was exposed to more diverse stories and methods of translation. However, when the COVID-19 pandemic struck, Tara’s relationship with writing became complicated. “During the pandemic, I kind of lost my relationship with writing,” says Tara regarding her move back to Virginia from March 2020 to September 2021. “Towards the end of that period, though, I felt very introspective and started a newsletter called ‘Devotions.’ I did that once a week for about a year. Even when I returned to London, it really fueled my love for writing. I just talked about my life and did that same sort of memoir style writing that drew me into Anne Panning’s work. Through that, I also really found a love for poetry, so I started incorporating that into my writing as well. Seeing how people felt about my writing, being able to be vulnerable and test the levels of which people resonated with my life, what I had to say, and a lot of it was very simple, very human feelings. I ended up writing my dissertation about the impact of poetry during COVID-19.”
Since her move in 2019, Tara has gone on to publish work in Solitary Daughter, the likity split, The Citron Review, The Amazine, and now The Atlantic. “I want my writing to be person to person,” says Tara of her place in the literary community. “Even if one person reads a poem that I posted or reads a newsletter of mine, that’s the way that I want to impact the wider literary community. Through a ripple effect. One person likes it, and they take whatever they learned or whatever their feelings are and pass it on to the next person without credit to me. I don't want to really be like a big name. I'm just letting the universe take my writing and give it to whoever needs it.”
Monjazeb currently lives in London, where she is working on producing her first novel: a story centering on self-discovery, cultural critique, and finding oneself after being forced to start over. “It sparked from my own anxiety about being someone who lives abroad,” Tara says of the inspiration for her novel. “A lot of my friends and myself too were all worried about losing our visas when we moved abroad. It’s something a lot of people deal with, the fear of being uprooted. Something similar happened to me when I had to go home during COVID-19 for about 18 months, and I really wanted to write a story that encapsulated all of that. So, it's about an Iranian American girl—I’m Iranian, so I wanted to incorporate my culture as well—who moves to London for work and gets laid off her job. She ends up having to move back to her suburban hometown in the U. S. and it's essentially a year in her life after that fact and reconciling with the fact that the worst-case scenario isn't actually the worst-case scenario.” Tara plans to complete her novel in August.
This past semester, spring 2024, the relationship between Flint Hill and Stillhouse Press continued with two more interns, Andrew McKee and Kat Nurik, both of whom worked as manuscript readers and selection committee members for the press’s spring 2024 submissions cycle. Says Stillhouse publisher Berg, “We couldn’t be prouder of Tara’s literary path through Stillhouse and beyond,” and he is confident that Stillhouse can continue to assist its current and future Flint Hill interns in taking similar journeys. “It’s one of the great positives of working with a teaching press—we see students grow, creatively and professionally, at an often-astonishing rate. Our world belongs to the students, not the teachers—they’re so plugged into the literary world that we’re really just there to help them along.”
May 20, 2024