The Write Process

Paria Hassouri is a pediatrician, mother of three, and transgender rights activist. She graduated from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine in 1999 and completed her residency training at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation in 2002. Her personal essays have been published in multiple sites, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Huffington Post, and she has presented stories on stage through Expressing Motherhood. A proud Iranian-American, she spent her formative years in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She currently resides and practices in Los Angeles, California. Her memoir, Found in Transition: A Mother’s Evolution during her Child’s Gender Change, was released in September 2020.

In Found in Transition, Hassouri is blindsided when her teenager comes out as transgender. As Hassouri navigates through anger, denial, and grief to eventually arrive at acceptance, her journey forces her to reflect on her own experiences of being an Iranian immigrant growing up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, one of a handful of brown kids in a near all white school district. She examines how the insecurities she is carrying from her past are leading her to parent with fear rather than love. She also questions her identity as both a mother and a pediatrician, given she had no inkling her child is transgender. She examines why her medical training never prepared her for parenting a trans child. As her daughter transitions from male to female, she discovers her own capacity to evolve, what it really means to parent, and how to use her voice to raise awareness about the large percentage of transgender people who don’t present in childhood in the classical way the media portrays. While this is a story that weaves the journeys of a pediatrician mother and her transgender teenager, it illustrates universal themes of parenting, identity, belonging, self-discovery, growth, and unconditional love. It is the story of a modern American family.

(@pariahassouri) and my instagram(@laparia).

Born on and raised outside an Army base in Seoul, South Korea, Christina Strain moved to the US at 18 to attended Louisiana State University, where she received a BFA in Graphic Design. After, she went on to color comics for Marvel comics for 10 years, and during her last few years at Marvel, she started writing her own webcomics. Shortly after attending several UCLA extension classes (for screenwriting) Christina retired from coloring comics to pursue her masters degree in screenwriting at The American Film Institute. Since, she's write and produce on TV shows like THE MAGICIANS and SHADOW AND BONE and written the Netflix film FINDING 'OHANA.

“Finding ‘Ohana” begins with two New York kids, tomboy skateboarder Pili (Pee-Lee) and her dopey big brother Ioane (EE-oh-AHN-nay), traveling with their mom Leilani (Kelly Hu) to visit their grandfather Kimo (Branscombe Richmond) in Hawaii. When Pili, an avid geocacher back in New York, finds a secret journal promising hidden treasure, she sets out on an adventure that takes her deep into the heart of sacred volcanic caves. She’s joined by her new friend Casper (Owen Vaccaro), a white kid who grew up in Hawaii. Ioane is loathe to chase after her, but the prospect becomes intriguing when he’s joined by crush-worthy local Hana (Lindsay Watson).

https://twitter.com/christinastrain

Julie Wong spent more than a decade writing speeches and developing press conferences while serving as Deputy Mayor to Los Angeles Mayor Jim Hahn and leading communications for Senator Barbara Boxer and then-L.A. City Councilmember Eric Garcetti, among others. She also served in multiple executive roles for Walt Disney Parks and Resorts where she was involved with major initiatives including the opening of Shanghai Disneyland and the announcement of Star Wars lands coming to Disneyland and Walt Disney World. Along the way, she realized she had her own stories to tell, too. Julie is currently a Co-Producer on Season 17 of Grey’s Anatomy. She participated in the CAPE New Writers Fellowship and the CBS Writers Mentoring Program, and holds a degree in government from Claremont McKenna College and a Master of Public Policy from Harvard University.

Grey’s Anatomy, Episode 1704: You’ll Never Walk Alone

While hospitalized with Covid, Meredith dreams of seeing her friend George O’Malley, who died during their medical residency. Meanwhile, Owen’s misdiagnosis of a patient challenges more than he imagined, an asymptomatic Koracick begins to go stir-crazy at home, and Maggie gets a not-so-subtle glimpse into Winston’s background.

Elle Johnson is a TV writer. Her credits include Law & Order, CSI: Miami, Ghost Whisperer, and The Fosters. One of Elle’s career highlights came on The Glades where she wrote and produced an episode set in the world of NASCAR that featured nine actual racecars, four champion drivers, and one monkey. She was co-showrunner on Netflix’s Self Made: Inspired by the Life of Madam CJ Walker which won an NAACP Image award for best limited series. Most recently she was an Executive Producer on the Amazon original series Bosch, based on the Michael Connelly detective novels. Originally from Hollis, Queens Elle graduated from Harvard College, studied writing on a Rotary Scholarship at the University of East Anglia in England, and has taken numerous classes at UCLA Extension Writers’ Program. She was a finalist for UCLA’s 2015 Allegra Johnson Prize in Memoir Writing. The Officer’s Daughter is her first book.

SYNOPSIS

When Elle Johnson was 16 years old, her 16 year-old cousin Karen had her face blown off at point blank range in a robbery at a Burger King in the Bronx. Elle comes from a family of black law enforcement officers. Her uncle, Karen's dad, was a homicide detective. Her father was a parole officer. The aftermath of Karen's murder, the cross-country manhunt spearheaded by the NYPD and the FBI to find the killers, and the subsequent trials and media circus, marked the defining end of Elle's childhood innocence.

Thirty years later, living in Los Angeles, writing for various television shows (including several police procedurals), Elle receives an email from Karen's brother notifying her that one of the killers is up for parole. Asked to write a letter encouraging the parole board not to set him free Elle realizes that before she can write a letter condemning a man she's never met, she must also investigate the hard truths of her own past: family who never really spoke of the devastating effect the murder of her young cousin had on any of them, with secrets of their own, and a complicated father she never truly understood. The Officer's Daughter is the story of a family, a terrible tragedy, and the power--and ultimately the freedom--of forgiveness.

Tod Goldberg is the New York Times bestselling author of over a dozen books, including The Low Desert, Gangsterland, a finalist for the Hammett Prize, Gangster Nation, The House of Secrets, which he co-authored with Brad Meltzer, and Living Dead Girl, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He is also the co-host of the wildly popular podcast Literary Disco, named a top literary podcast by the Washington Post. He is a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside where he founded and directs the Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing & Writing for the Performing Arts.

With gimlet-eyed cool and razor-sharp wit, the spare, stylish stories in The Low Desert assemble a world of gangsters and con men, of do-gooders breaking bad and those caught in the crossfire. The uncle of an FBI agent spends his life as sheriff in different cities, living too close to the violent acts of men; a cocktail waitress moves through several desert towns trying to escape the unexplainable loss of an adopted daughter; a drug dealer with a penchant for karaoke meets a talkative lawyer and a silent clown in a Palm Springs bar. Raymond Carver meets Elmore Leonard in this extraordinary collection of contemporary crime writing set in the critically acclaimed Gangsterland universe, a series called "gloriously original" by The New York Times Book Review.

Multiple Emmy nominee Melissa Rosenberg is Series Creator and Showrunner of Marvel’s Jessica Jones. The show garnered tremendous response and critical acclaim, including winning the prestigious Peabody Award for its genre-bending approach. As one of Hollywood’s most versatile, sought-after storytellers, Rosenberg is currently in an overall deal with Warner Bros. TV to develop new projects. Her company, Tall Girls Productions, focuses on developing and producing film and TV series with an emphasis on interesting, complex roles for women in front of and behind the camera. On the film side, Rosenberg’s credits include all five screenplays for the vampire romance phenomenon, The Twilight Saga, which grossed more than $3 billion worldwide. She also wrote the hit dance film Step Up, which launched a multi-film franchise. Additional television credits in Rosenberg’s diverse range include four seasons as both head writer and Executive Producer of the Showtime original series Dexter, which earned multiple nominations and awards, including the Peabody Award.

Brian Shin has been a professional poker player, a journalist covering high school football and writing for Koream, and a participant of the ABC-Disney Writing Program, Sundance Episodic Lab, and CBS Diversity Showcase. Brian is a story editor on the ABC drama The Good Doctor.

Michael Werwie is the screenwriter of the Academy Nicholl Fellowship-winning Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil, and Vile. He is currently developing an original series for television and has written projects for Warner Bros., Legendary, Fox, and Amazon. Michael is from Milwaukee, Wisconsin and is a graduate of USC.

Born and raised in Los Angeles, Cindy Lin is a former journalist with degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University. She’s written and produced many multimedia news features for children, one of which received a Peabody Award. She is the author of The Twelve and its sequel, Treasures of the Twelve.

Aatif Rashid is the author of the literary comedy Portrait of Sebastian Khan, which explores the complicated romantic life of a Muslim American art history student. His writing has appeared in Barrelhouse, Massachusetts Review, LitHub, Los Angeles Review of Books, and the Kenyon Review blog.