A dream is coming true

Penelope Amara ’24 knows there’s magic in storytelling. She feels like she’s on a journey that started in her teen years and is still revealing new worlds with each step forward.

In middle school, she placed in a Connecticut-based writing competition for a comedic one act play about a New Jersey hair salon she dubbed “Hairdos for Yous.”

“Middle school me was convinced that I was destined for SNL,” Amara recalls with a laugh about her early “Saturday Night Live” ambitions. She won a Barnes & Noble gift card for her effort, and the experience made Amara realize how much she loved writing.

As she continued through school, Amara developed and refined her writing; poems and short stories flowed from her fingers as she brought to life new characters, landscapes, and relationships. Her work has been featured in four publications to date, including Blue World Literary Journal. But the submission process has also included a fair share of rejection, something that inspired Amara to create Word Flare, a blog and publication that serves as an accessible launching point for newer writers. Launched in 2023, Word Flare has since flourished into a vibrant writers’ community, featuring pieces from a wide array of genres and forms.

“I think it is a great place for people to start and get the confidence to keep going,” she says. “I feel the most inspired when I am surrounded by artists and creatives, and I wanted that inspiration to benefit others. I hope that these original pieces find the people that they need to find, motivate other writers, and evoke conversation and passion for the art.”

Word Flare is a combination of poems, short stories, plays, and writing tips. It currently features thirteen submissions by ten different authors, three of whom are Clarkies. One can explore everything from a blog post detailing how to write a cover letter for a literary magazine to experimental poetry and everything in between.

Amara graduated in December with her bachelor’s degree in English and a minor in creative writing. She thrived in Clark’s writing workshop atmosphere and credits her advisor, Professor Phil Lemos, and his class Writing the Novel with helping her hone her craft. Amara has been accepted to a prestigious creative writing master’s program at Fairfield University in Connecticut, which she’ll start in the fall. In the meantime, she’s working on writing her first novel, a piece inspired by popular literature and her own dreams.

Amara also channels her creativity through jewelry making and fiber arts. She runs a small business called Lucky Loo Jewelry, which she started at the Clark Collective Pop-up markets as a sophomore.

In summer 2022, Amara, a voracious reader, brought the novel “Circe” by Madeline Miller with her to her job at a market in her coastal Connecticut town. Between customers, she read more and more of the mythic fantasy. She was in awe, never having read something that moved her the way this book did. Something was stirring in her mind, and soon after, a medieval washerwoman came to her in a dream with a story that needed to be told. The next day, Amara started the outline of her novel, which she intends to title “The Woman of the Creek.”

She’s crafting a historical fiction based in medieval Scotland. Its protagonist is a woman who died long ago, but whose spirit lives on as a bean-nighe, a banshee-like creature in Scottish folklore. Mistreated and scorned in life, bean-nighes appear near creeks and rivers in death and are said to wash the clothes of those about to die.

Amara finds much of her inspiration visually, such as a picture of a landscape around which she begins to form a story in her mind. She is drawn to the gothic horror genre and its aesthetics, and her writing process is regularly soundtracked by the Irish indie-rock singer Hozier.

“A lot of my short stories and pieces have come from dreams, believe it or not, so it’s a lot of visualization. With my book specifically, I knew I wanted to write about this main character but was unsure of the format. So, the process has become crafting a narrative from this woman’s story,” Amara said.

The revision process is difficult for Amara, who describes herself as an impatient writer, wanting every piece to be a final draft on the first try.

“Something that took me a while to realize is that writer’s block, whether it’s conscious or subconscious, is motivated by fear. In my case, that fear is that the piece is bad, and it’s not worth my time to continue writing it,” she says. Amara overcomes this fear by facing it head-on.

“It will get better,” she says. “You need to write the awful things so that you can get to the good stuff.”